Project Kaki 05 - Painting

Okay, so its been a lil while since I've posted progress... the painting process has taken longer than expected. The first color was much more neon/mac'n'cheese colored than I expected, so I didn't want to post pictures till I fixed it. :) Here's the back:


And the front:


Detail of the front:


And my hand after the golding process:

I actually acquired injury #2 during this step... when I was rubbing the gold over the back, I somehow embedded some gold paint into the skin on my forefinger. It never bled but its definitely in there. Here's hoping it comes out sometime!!

Here is my video for this step:

Project Kaki 04 - Reattachment

Okay, I actually finished this step a day ago but if you watched the previous video, you know that my adorably persistent puppy insisted I give her attention instead of work on this project. But now step 4 is done - all the little pieces I pulled off before are now reattached. Here is the back:


And the front:


Here is a detail of the side where I rearranged the mechanics:

Here's a detail shot of the new wood arrangement:

Project Kaki 04 Video Thwarted

I'm in the process of completing step 4 - reattaching the pieces of the guitar... but my adorably persistent puppy Norah won't let me make a video. Here's her debut for now:

Project Kaki 03 - Plastering

So far, this part of the process has been much more complicated than I anticipated... When I first got the guitar and examined the back, it appeared to be plastic, so I thought I would score the back with a razor to roughen it up enough to hold the plaster. Here's what it looked like after 30 minutes of hacking:


Obviously by this point I figured out that the back is not made of plastic... its some kind of fiberglass. Thus, the scoring was not working and the fiberglass dust made my hands itch something terrible. SO, I put some plaster over the scratches and over a smooth area to see how the plaster would stick:

At this point I'm really really hoping that I don't have to change my plan, and scrape off the plaster and start over... but thankfully it stuck just fine, so I did the entire back:

And THEN... I ran out of plaster. :(

SO, I'm going to get some more after work tomorrow and I'll finish the plastering process. Then, the really fun part begins... stay tuned!!


Here's video #3:

Project Kaki 02 - Disassembly

So today I tore the guitar up. This includes but is not limited to removing strings, removing tuners, tearing out the frets, prying off the wood inlays, dissecting the controls, unscrewing many screws, and tearing the neck off.

Here is the fret-less neck and stripped front:

Here are all the pieces after I was done:

And here is the neck after I snapped it:

I'm now off to do step 3... plastering. Yay!! Here's a video of step 2:

Project Kaki 01 - Guitar Received

Got my guitar in the mail today!! Super excited.

My puppy Norah had to check it out too. :)

Step 1 of "Project Kaki": Cleaning and de-stringing.

I'm starting on it tonight!! I still need to do some planning but I have some general ideas. Get excited!!

Here's an intro video: