I've been polishing my explorer today and now it's getting closer to completion, it's covered in a rash of white dots, and it's really depressing!
As far as I can see there's still the
tiniest of
tiniest of
tiny open craters in the finish (I hate nitro), so I can understand that these could have become filled with the polishing compound.... but they don't go away with naptha or water. They got worse (as in increased in numbers) the more I polished. My process:
- Dry orbital sand 400 / 500
- Wet sand 1000 / 1200 / 1500 / 2000 / 2500
- 3 buffing compounds, with the last one done by direct drive sander on lowest speed with added water (borrowed a mates sponge mop and while it polished well, it left some horrible swirlies!)
- I know there's some scratch marks in there, I don't consider this finished yet : )
Aside from re-finishing it, does anyone have experience of this and overcoming it? If I can't turn this around 100% I'll be going to PU for future finishes.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
ps it's already starting to check in places. Not sure how I feel about this yet ha!
![Image: https://i.imgur.com/8CBMLma.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8CBMLma.jpg)
Comments
I didn't grain fill & seal*, on my last guitar I used a mix&fill grain fill and the nitro didn't like that so for this one I was happy to building the coats up with the knowledge it would take many coats.
* I did do a couple of coats of well thinned nitro ahead of a colour coat to seal it, but I didn't used "sealer" for this. Certainly with PU this works fine doing this method. I thinned all the lacquer to around 30%. I was spraying with my cup gun.
I've heard black wax can help so I might try that..... can't face respraying it at the moment!
Nitro isn't forgiving enough IMO to be sanding too much between coats as it clogs paper so quickly, but I guess that's missing the point to an extent as if the wood is open grain then it needs to be filled as otherwise it'll fill with buffing compound later! Not a prob if it's a white guitar haha!