Before Pics:

First I'll start of with some pics of what the guitar looked like when in came into the shop. The guitar already had the finish removed, pickups swapped, and new knobs.

The originals: tuners, wrap-around bridge, switch, output jack, nut and frets.

The customer dropped off new tuners that were black and I intended to keep the originals on there because they still felt like they were working.

Close up of the body. You can see the pickups aren't really fixed in the cavities correctly. 

YIKES! Strings all over! The crack from the high E tuner is still visible and I wanted to try to hide it better. You can't quite tell from this picture but the nut is off center.

Other fixes not visible: The binding around the fretboard and the mess inside the electronics cavity.

Finish:

So after the main part of the video, I sanded the entire body and neck. I couldn't get ALL of the dents and scratches out but it cleaned up really well.

As you might already know, I HATE paint on guitars so I use dyes and stains. Click HERE to see how I used Rubio Monocoat pre-color to get the solid black color.

FINAL PRODUCT

You might notice the neck pickup isn't a "neck" pickup. There wasn't enough slack on the wires to swap them but it's not that big of a deal to have two bridge pickups, they still work and it's what the customer wanted right now.

So clean! The "sheen" comes from two coats of nitro. In the video I talked about making it more flat but the customer wanted a shine if possible. Just keep layering the nitro until it's shiny.

Cleaned up the crack from the high E tuner and centered the nut. The nut was actually well setup. I only had to lower a couple string slots.

In the end, I chose to swap the original tuners for the black tuners knowing the customer and just how well the tuners completed the transformation. The screw holes lined up perfectly and the customer still has the originals if he wants to swap them back or sell in the future. Notice the smooth transition from black to red in the finish as well.

Call out to the binding and fretboard. If you go back to the video you can see the fretboard was really dirty and gunked up. Scraping and cleaning the fretboard, shining up the frets, and new white binding!

DONE!