My Adventures in Guitar Restoration

Recently I have restored an old guitar that I trashed in my youth. Apparently during the summer, I become ambitiously bored, and have to do something to make me feel good about myself. Or some such nonsense. Anyways, this guitar was in terrible condition. Like, beyond terrible condition. I have no logical explanation for how it came to be in such an atrocious state. It was covered in a thick layer of blue paint that was somehow still wet under a semi-hard shell, much like that chocolate stuff you put on ice cream that hardens when it gets cold. This is what I imagined happened:

Judging my how thick the paint was, I would assume this went on for at least 3 hours.

This made me let out a string of wicked swears (forgive me mother), and it eventually got to the point that I was so irritated that I began combined swears into nonsensical words (ie. shammit, son of a bamn, shass, dastard sitch face, etc). It was hard. No, that's an understatement. It was insanity on steroids. It made me think of dumb things in a philosophical way, such as, "if octopus' shake tentacles as a greeting like humans do with their hands, do they have a specific tentacle they do it with? If they use the wrong tentacle does the octopus get offended and beat the other one to death with deep sea debris? Do they do different tentacle shakes in other regions of the sea?". So basically it made me insane. Well, more insane than I already was. 
I started work with the fret board/ neck of the guitar since it seemed the least intimidating. That's right. There was paint on the stupid shass fret board. The first thing I had to do was scrape of the thicker patches of paint. Sooooo...pretty much the whole thing. Luckily I was able to watch Veronica Mars during this part, and didn't notice how tired my arms were from scraping until I tried to go to sleep. That was fun. After about 1.5 seasons of Veronica Mars, I got enough paint off that I could sand off the rest. The thing about fret boards though, is they have a lot of angles that you can't get with an electric sander. This sucked big time, because that meant I had to hand sand the rest. This took approximately 6 episodes of Veronica Mars (I measure time based on how many episodes/movies/songs I can fit into the said amount of time). 
After I got it all sanded, I needed to draw up some plans of the design. Once I had some sketches and such I began to carve my design into the guitar. Now, to carve it out I used a Dremel. A Dremel is basically a fine tipped drill that, well, cuts stuff. Whatever. Just look it up. Anyways here is what happened after several hours:

Keep in mind that all carvings were smoothed out, so they didn't look like a pile of broken toothpicks around the edges.

At that point, I was ready to do the front of the headstock. My design for the front was a bit more complicated. Unfortunately, I was an idiot and did not save a picture of the front before it was painted. But you get what you get folks. I do however have a picture of it before it was completely done paint wise. Is that humble enough for you? Yeah? Okay.

It gets better looking later on. Like Neville from Harry Potter.

I then had to move on to the beast of this project. The body. I was like a blue glob of sadness. Sort of like Gooey Gus from Ghostwriter, but sad rather than...whatever Gooey Gus is.

I don't even know.

Luckily I could use an electric sander for this, which probably saved me the length of time that all three Lord of the Rings are. Extended version. Extended. I also had to wear a respirator mask since I'm pretty sure that that paint was made out of the spinal fluid of extinct animals. This, combined with my glasses, made me look really attractive.

Told you.

I started with the front of the guitar and made my way around to the back. I sketched up some designs, and went back to carving. After what would probably equal 3 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (what did I tell you about my time measurement?), the front was carved. 

Much better than spinal fluid blue paint, no?

I was also stupid in that I did not save a picture of the back of the guitar before it was painted. Hopefully you can live with this:

Once it was all carved, I began painting and detailing. After many episodes of the TV show of your choice, the paint job was done.

See above for reference to the back. Sorry chums.

Told you it would look better.

Now I needed to put on the finish. This is probably the most boring part of the entire process. I really couldn't have done anything very fun anyways, since the dozens of hours I spent carving had bruised my hand and made my elbow swell. Good times. So to apply the finish you have to put on a coat, and then wait for it to dry, which takes about as long as a Walking Dead hiatus (you monsters!). During that dull process I had to order replacement parts, as some of the original parts were missing/trashed to Oblivion. Finally the finish was on, and I could put it back together. After it was all put together, I put the strings on and was rudely slapped in the face by the E string snapping in half. Son of a bamn! 

Notice the missing E string. Oh wait no, don't. Don't notice!

But anyways. I have replaced the string (hooray for me!) and it is all finished. Finally. Of course when I put on the new string, it pricked my finger. That hurt like no other, and the pain from it makes the size of the prick mark unsatisfactory. It should at least be a noticeably painful looking puncture wound. But no. It's a speck. But anyways, the guitar is all finished, and I have peacefully returned to doing nothing.

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