Now We're Neck-kid...aka In The Buff

After the Tru-Oil has cured for a week or so, it can be rubbed out. Now, this is my first go-round with trying to get a gloss on this kind of finish, so it's an experiment of sorts.

I've read a bunch of stuff online - and am going to try a combination of stuff. Mainly I'm going to try what one would do on a lacquer finish.

I will admit that I tried rubbing out with pumice and rottenstone first and it was just Not Working For Me. So I put a few more coats of Tru-Oil on and went to Plan B.

Plan B in this case means starting with a light wet sanding using 1500 grit paper. See the wet paper in the pixture? You get the idea. On lacquer, you probably wouldn't start with quite that fine of a grit, but this finish is Real Thin, so I wanted to be sure I just did a light sanding to make it smooth.

After the sanding, we move on to buffing. Here we have a towel to put under the neck so's it won't shift around, and we have our trusty orbital buffer machine and Griot's Garage Machine Polish #3. This polish is actually for cars, but it's mild and I think (hope?) it will be hokay for our geetar neck.

If you know what I mean.

The neck has a fair amount of gloss already; I'd really like to get a highly polished lacquer-like gloss...we shall see what happens.

You may be saying, "why don'tcha just spray lacquer onnit?" Well, I did that on the Surfcaster, it came out good, but I want to try this one time. Plus, right now I am Too Darn Lazy to mask off the back of the neck and go outside and shoot lacquer.

The buffer-ing-er maching is pretty heavy (try doing a whole car with it and find that out...) so it was difficult to get a pixture of the thing spinning away, what with the buffer in one hand and my trusty vintage digital camera in the other.

Visions of the neck shooting across the floor ensued.

Anyway, you get the general gist. Put some compound on the buffer pad, turn the thing on and away you go.

One lesson learned earlier is that you must not put a lot of compound on the pad. I buffed out a bakelite RCA radio (I think it's a 46-11X for those keeping score) a while back. The buffing went fine, the radio came out great, but afterwards I discovered little splatters of compound on all of the test equipment and tools on my workbench. So I learned to be more careful with the amount of compound on the bufferer.


This is not the best pixture, but this is how the neck came out. It's fairly glossy. It's not as glossy as lacquer, but I suspect if I did more level and scuff sanding every few coats of Tru-Oil, it might wind up glossier.

I like the feel of just the Tru-Oil on the back of the neck at this point. It's really fast and not sticky at all, which is what you get with a lacquer or (dare I even write it) a poly finish.