Guitar restoration - Part 10 - The finish

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The neck and the body being prepared for mounting, I decided to first finish them with boiled linseed oil. Applying BLO was easy, and resulted in a beautiful satin finish. Applied two coats with a brush to the guitar top and the headstock, with 24+ hours between the two coats.

I started doing a french polish with a very small rubber on the body, but it didn't really turn out as I expected, so I first sanded with P500, then with P1200 sandpaper, and went on with a third coat of BLO, and then restarted the french polishing (after reading some more and watching some more instructional videos) This time I used some thinner (white spirits, as I didn't have denatured alcohol) to thin the dewaxed shellac, and applied it with a larger rubber. Went over both the body and the headstock in a session of 5 runs, sanding with 500, then 1200 grit sandpaper between the 3rd and the 4th run, as the rubber got a bit sticky and left some marks on the finish, and wanted to even that out.

The headstock didn't come out as good as the top, the top is nice flat, the headstock looks grimy in some places, not as mirror-like as the top. But I think I can live with that.

After ~18 hours made another session, first wet-sanding the surface with P1200, P1500, then P2000 sandpaper, then applied 4 runs of thinned shellac, then after 3 more hours another session of wet-sanding with the same grits as before. The surface looks shiny, mirror-like in some places, but not too glossy.



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