So I decided to try out a water-based finish on the Marauder. I know a lot of the purists out there see putting anything other then nitrocellulose lacquer on a guitar as akin to throwing a blanket on it tone-wise, but personally I don’t buy it. Most production guitars today are finished in some kind of poly or plastic based finish. I’m not saying that there might not be a difference, but if there is I doubt most people could hear it. Nitro is toxic, highly flammable and is getting harder to find. As more markets make the switch to poly finishes and stricter environmental laws make it more costly to manufacture, nitro will continue to become a smaller and smaller niche product with, I suspect, guitars being it’s last stand.
With that said, nitro is also a much more forgiving finish to apply. It’s best feature is it’s ability to “burn in” to itself. This means that each layer you spray on partially dissolves the previously applied coats, bonding together as one unified layer. There is also no time limit on this ability. It will work on a 40 year old guitar if it was finished with nitro. This makes doing spot repairs much easier. Most water based finishes cannot do this or have a short “window” of time where you can re-coat and still get “burn in”.
The water based finished I decided to try for my Marauder was Target coatings EM6000 Production Lacquer. I had seen multiple references of people using it with great success on guitars so it seemed like the right one to try. It also advertised 100% burn in, just like nitro. This claim however is a bit misleading, as company representatives, on their own forums recommend sanding a previous coating if it’s been more then 12 hours since you last sprayed. In fact, this products sometime inability to burn in to itself is the biggest issue people have with it.
So you may be wondering what’s the big deal if it doesn’t burn in? Whatever clearcoat you put on a guitar will not be smooth. A texture called “orange-peel” builds up on the surface as each individual drop of paint dries before it completely flattens out. This is usually even more of a problem when using spray-paint as it doesn’t atomize as finally as a well adjusted spray gun and compressor setup, where you have a lot more control over things. This texture has to be sanded off. You start with a relatively course grit of about 800, a little more or less depending on how bad the orange-peel is, and then you keep sanding the whole surface with finer grits up till 1500 or 2000. You then remove the fine scratches with polishing compounds like you would use on a cars finish. It’s during this sanding process that you will start to see the effect of layers that didn’t burn in to each other. You will start seeing hazy, squiggly lines running through the finish where you sand through one layer into another. They look like blisters that will just get bigger the more you sand. They’re called “witness lines”.
I was pretty pissed when they showed up on the Marauder. I had successfully sanded out the back and sides with no issues and they looked great. Then while sanding the front, this spot appears, then another, and another… So I stepped away from it for a few days to consider my options. I decided that before stripping it completely and starting over, I would just try shooting more clear. So I thoroughly sanded the whole body with 400 grit, and then right before shooting the new clear, wiped it down with denatured alcohol. The alcohol softens the finish and makes the new coats bond better. Another detail I believe to be important with these finishes, is to always apply very wet, heavy coats. It may take a little practice to know how heavy you can put it on without getting runs. But the heavy coat takes longer to dry, and so has more time to soften and bond with the underlying layer. It also has more time to flow out so that you get virtually no orange peel.
So this time it worked perfectly, and I got a beautiful glass-like finish, finally! Stay tuned for the next and final installment where I do my first fret dressing, wire it up and put it all together.
