Mex Strat refin/mods

scalino65

Hello
I was taken by the urge to refin and generally muck about with my black mex strat. It was a really nice player and sounded pretty good but I just wanted to take apart and rebuild a guitar (a) as I hadnt doen it before and (b) to get a feel for set ups: rolling fretboard edges and fret levelling,etc
So, starting with this perfectly good strat i set about bggering about with it

scalino65

Next up (and pictures will inprove in quality) I started stripping back the poly finish until I was past the point of no return:


I'm sure this has all been covered a million times before but...

I used a heat gun and a putty knife to get the poly finish off the body. That stuff is so thick! First off I tried some absolutely evil paint stripper but it didn’t even touch the poly finish! This stuff usually strips paint immediately so it just falls off. Not so with this poly stuff..I wiped the paint stripper off and if I'd polished teh poly it wouldnt have even left a mark.

Anyway, the heat gun method lifts it right off after it pops like popcorn! The paint alone must weigh a ton! If there’s any truth to the poly killing tone then I can understand why..Its like a thick plastic coating. Close to 2mm thick! I wish I'd weighed it all.

scalino65

I didn’t feel that the Mex Strat had quite the same elegant curves as the older pre-CBS style gtrs so I spent quite a lot of time trying to sand the contours to be more like a 1954 strat.
One of the things I really wanted to do with this project was to roll the edges of the strat’s fretboard and I was pretty pleased by the result. I carefully rolled over the fret edges and sanded in a radius at the fretboard edge to match. Its now much more comfortable (to pretend..) to play. I think I just followed @wez instructions on here for that.

The body was done using Manchester Guitar Tech's paints and the instructions on their website. @SteveRobinson ; nitros  to go on really well and have good coverage. I sealed, primered and stuck on about 4 coats of black before then flatting back with 600/800/1000 as I was doing what I would do if i was painting a car in celly. Turns out this was a total waste of time and you can keep going with the clear coat and just flat that back at the end of the process. But I guess I just like to know I'm on track as I go along!

So where I am now is that I've put about 15 coats (sealer (1) +primer(2) + colour(4) + clear (8)) on the guitar (minus the flatting) and have been letting it cure for about a week before going for the final flatting and buffing...

This pic is supposed to show the more contoured tummy cutaway and narrower top that I sanded to shape but apologies as my photograph is rubbish, however, it does show that theres a good amount of depth in the unflatted and unpolished paint given the releftion of my hand in the body. I would hop eit shoudl come up like glass with flatting and polishing




I decided to go for a matching headstock and an aged look to the neck (great decals can be had from Rothko and Frost). Pretty please how this turned out




I was pleased how the neck turned out although I should probably extend the "ageing" up past the 12th fret a bit further towards the heel and reduce the dark areas on the back of the neck between the 12th and 15th frets.



So thats where I am, the gtr has an orange drop cap and some cts pot to go in when (if...) it goes back together. I'm quite please with it as I've never really done anything like this before

But...I currently have quite a nice but daft decision to make.... when I started this gtr I really wanted to do a lake placid blue strat and I ordered the paint in for that..I then ended up buying a LPB strat as something really nice popped up at a great price and I now didnt want two LPBs.

 So I thought I'd do it Burgandy Mist but couldnt face paying the postage on one can (such a tightarse!), so I thought I'd do it black as I had a can of Steve's nitro black and I'd always fancied a black strat. I also fancied doing a little light relic work (nothing over the top but definitely including some "chuck it in the freezer when the mrs isnt looking" type lacquer checking) but...I've now gone and bought an MIJ black strat off ebay, so same problem...so I'm now thinking, despite the many weeks its taken me to get this far, I may now strip it all off and do it sonic blue or burgandy mist..or surf green.......or shell pink....OR  keep it black and refinish the MIJ strat! If anyone is still reading this and can be bothered, please feel free to post some pics of gtrs in those colours to help me decide!

Sorry, if this has all been done to death before on here but I've enjoyed doing this immensely and wanted to share!
Many thanks to others for the shed load of tips for this sort of thing that are in this section of the forum esp @WezV and @SteveRobinson
cheers
Will

SteveRobinson

Don't strip it, just spray another colour over the top. It'd be a shame to waste all that work in getting it flat.

You may need to strip the headstock face though as you'll see the black when you scrape back the edge.

scalino65

Hi Steve, if I went for something light, say sonic blue, would I not need to spray a white primer or something over the black to stop the black leeching through? Would be cool to then do some wear and have a sonic over black  relic style!

SteveRobinson

No it would not leach through the blue. The black component is a pigment and it tends to be dyes that leach (usually red!)

The lacquer should be opaque enough to not need a primer, even over black so long as you spray enough coats.