Guitar Finish Touch-Up Using Preval Sprayer

You know sometimes when you're getting close to finishing a project and you're thinking "yes! this is going to be done soon!"?  Well I was there a couple of days ago.

I was actually finish sanding the spot on the top of the Guild that I had touched up.  Only thing is, I had touched it up with a brush.  So it was not level, and I had to keep sanding...and I sanded through to the bare spruce.  And, the goalpost got moved a bit.

So I needed to spray the touch-up instead.  Aside from the fact that it put me another week behind (not like there's a deadline...), it actually gave me a chance to try out something for the first time.

I masked the guitar, except for the spot that needs to be touched up and also the binding on the side of the fingerboard.  That too, was uneven where I touched it up, so I sanded it flat and will spray it as well.

In the picture above, the Guild emulates Boris Karloff in The Mummy!

Here's the new thing I want to try.  This is the Preval sprayer.  You may have read about them on the interwebs, seen them in a store, or used one.

It's a clever idea.  The Preval is a sprayer unit like a 'rattle can' of spray paint.  Except that you can put whatever liquid you would like in a jar which attaches to the bottom of the sprayer.  In my case, this would be my yellow nitro lacquer binding paint. 

The top part, which Preval calls a "Power Unit," is replaceable when it runs out.  You can see that it probably runs out a lot, since it's not that big.

I've wanted to try this for some time, as I have some guitars and radio cabinets to finish.  So this is a good test run.

Here we spray the Preval.  The spray pattern is a small circle - smaller than your average rattle can.  But it's pretty controllable, and good for small jobs like this.  Especially where you have mixed a custom color paint.

However.  I wouldn't recommend painting a whole guitar with it.  It's just too small.  That much I learned from my trial.  It was perfect for the painting the binding, and the small area on the guitar top though.


You can see the card stock 'mask' on the right I made to touch up the spot on the guitar.  It's working well.  Now I just need to hit the guitar with a few passes of lacquer and I should be ok.