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Finishing a guitar is pretty tricky. I suppose if you just want to paint it, then that would be a lot easier, but I wanted to stain mine, then lacquer over the top. This is how I did that. Firstly, I had to construct some sort of holder for the guitar. I did this with an old broken wood plane I had lying around, which fitted the neck joint nicely. I then made a wooden handle for it and drilled a big hole down it so that I could mount it on a spindle. Badly as this photo turned out, you can see the stand holding the guitar up. It is sitting on a spindle poking out of the top of a big block of wood, held down by a vise. The theory was that I could freely rotate the guitar body this way, and even lift it off the spindle and hold it by the handle. The first thing I did was to add some water soluble stain. This is just wiped on with a cloth and immediately adds a lot of character to the wood. Here it is after a layer or two of the stain. You can add as many layers as you want. Each one will...

The neck on this Hofner Colorama was originally quite badly back bowed, as shown here: In an effort to rectify this, we’ve tried three different approaches, as follows: 1. While re-radiusing the fretboard, more pressure was applied towards the middle of the neck in order to remove more fretboard material in that area. This would not straighten the neck, per se, but it would reshape the top of the fretboard in such a way that its top would end up being flatter. 2. When refretting, the fret slots were widened. When frets are forced into narrower slots, this has a tendency to force the neck to back bow, so we wanted to avoid this at all costs. The slots are still narrow enough to grip the new frets, but are certainly not overly-tight. 3. Obviously the truss rod nut was slackened as much as possible. In fact, even with the nut removed, the neck still maintained a back-bowed shape. It was noticed that the washer under the nut was wedged into place, and it was suspected that it might be pre...