Filling Screw Holes on Guitar Headstock, Take Four

Made some inroads on the screw holes fill job on the Fender flame.  I gave the CA overnight to dry since I put in on in a big glump.

Then I took a razor blade and wrapped a couple layers of tape around it, leaving a bit of it exposed in the middle.  I can use that as a scraper to level the CA.

It works pretty well, but you have to watch for the blade cutting through the tape and scratching the finish (ahem).

With the fills levelled, I went over the whole thing lightly with 400, then 600, 800 and 1000 grit paper.  The idea is to match the gloss across the whole headstock. 

I also have a 'sampler' set of Micro-mesh sandpaper.  This is double-sided, foam backed paper that goes from 1500 up to 12000 (!) grit.  This will take out the small scratches. 

Then I used a medium grade machine polish with the hand polisher to get an idea of where things were at.

There was a screwdriver gash that was there and I'd like to get that out - and it also gives me an idea of how deep I can go with sanding the finish.

I suspect I will still have some scratches from the razor blade - the worst ones will show up after the mild polish.

Not too bad, but there are some irregularities between the area that was 'squashed' by the tuners, the dowels, and some scratches.  About half of each fill will be covered by the tuning machines, so that helps.

I'm going to hit those areas with lacquer as a fill.  So it will be a couple days before I sand it again.

The fills will be visible, but I'm trying to level them as best I can, and have the same gloss on the finish across the whole headstock so they're not so obvious.  It's time consuming because everything has to dry in between applications - and I'm impatient by nature!