Howdy All,

Should anyone happen to read this, you're in for a treat. Note the sarcasm. What I'm doing is taking the first "real" guitar that I owned, a 1988 Peavey Tracer, and refinishing it. Granted, this isn't the first time, but this is the first time I'm doing it with a modicum of forethought and patience. The first time I stripped it was in college, and I was sitting around my apartment playing, and thought, "I wonder what this sucker looks like underneath?" So instead of doing a small, innocent patch out of sight, I grabbed some sandpaper and stripped it. The inevitable next question was, "Now what?" To which I had no answer. So it has mostly remained, in its bare naked woodness, as other guitars have come and pushed it to the back of the line. No more!

To start, I'm pretty much a stratocaster guy through and through. I have a les paul, a tele and a hollowbody, and I really like them all, but 99 out of 100 times I pick up the guitar, it's the strat. There's just something about it, the way it plays, sounds and feels that's really to my liking. The Peavey is and was a good guitar. The Kahler tremolo was the first "floating bridge" that I had, and it was the apple in my youthful eye. The times called for guitar playing with plenty of whammy bar wanking, and the locking Kahler did the trick. Problem is, I don't use the tremolo bar anymore, and have come to strongly dislike Kahler and Floyd Rose trems. Give me a vintage strat trem or, better yet, a stop tailpiece with no tremolo at all. The deal with the Tracer is that is has a 2-ish piece body, I'm not entirely sure what kind of wood it is, but it almost looks like green poplar of all things. Might be alder, might be basswood. If you can tell, let me know. The rest of it consists of a 2 piece maple neck, rosewood fingerboard, single volume and tone with a humbucker/single/single config and a mini toggle switch for splitting the humbucker into a single. I can live with the humbucker/single/single config, but don't really need the toggle, so it's going to be "lost" in the refinish. The big question is the Kahler. Do I leave it and deal with it, or fill the body and go with an alternative? Tough call, really. Ultimately, I've decided to leave it as is, for a few reasons. The main one is that, while making blocks to fill in the cavities isn't difficult, there are properties of wood that make it seem less than smart. Let's look at a photo of the top first-


Ok, you can see the depression in the body on the far left where the bridge would go. Now, if I put a piece of wood there, it's going to expand and contract across the grain depending on the season, relative humidity, etc. I'm worried that during times of expansion or contraction, the fill piece will pull away from the body, exposing the seams and potentially damaging the finish, especially since there's going to be a quilted maple laminate on top of the body, expanding and contracting at a different rate than the body. Anyway, the bridge stays. Let's look at the back, and you can see the original color.


Yup, banana yellow. Very 80's. The funny part is, when I originally sanded the body, the paint actually smelled like bananas. I'm not kidding. The electronics cavity and the spot under the neck plate are all that's left. I'm probably going to leave a quarter-sized piece under the neck plate the original color, but the rest goes.

So what's the plan? The back and sides will be finished with black, and the top will have a bookmatched veneer of quilted maple finished in a translucent blue dye. The whole thing will be finished in nitrocellulose lacquer. The paints are coming from www.reranch.com, very cool place that duplicates many of the early Fender colors. They are basically guiding me through this. The maple veneer is from www.joewoodworker.com, another very cool place with awesome veneers.

In case you're wondering, I do have some woodworking skills. I've converted our 2-car garage into a shop, and am always working on something or another. So I think having the shop tools will give me a bit of an edge on this project.

The sanding of the body took place yesterday, smoothing the edges and getting everything down to 320 grit. I decided today that it would look nice with something other than cheap black plastic covering the tremolo and electronics routs on the back, so I decided to make some out of some wood scraps laying around. The tremolo rout will use Australian Lacewood, and the electronics plate will be made of quartersawn white oak. I like the contrasting woods, and I think the use of highly figured wood will look good on the black back. So after about 30 minutes in the shop tonight, I now have this:


If I've done my job right, you won't notice the seam running down the middle of the plate, as I had to glue up two scraps to make the plate. I realized how easy this was to make, and that I should be doing this on the side, over the internet, making money on custom plates :) I just made a template out of 1/8" birch plywood, then used a flush-trim laminate bit on the router table to cut the lacewood to shape. (There's probably about one person out there reading this who understood that. Actually, there's probably only one person out there reading this, period). The white oak cover for the electronics also requires a glue-up, and that is going to dry overnight. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to cut that one out. Meanwhile, I'm waiting on both paints from reranch and the veneer, and the lacewood panel has a couple of coats of tung oil drying on it. I'll check back in tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and hope you stay tuned. Email or post comments as you see fit-

You can wake up now, it's over, at least for today. Check back tomorrow for more insomnia-curing writing.
-Jeff