So I picked up Sleepkid's Mory Jazzmaster find - when he got it it had a thick white refinish and a Fresher neck with broken trussrod.
After some stripping adventures and misadventures, and switching the neck for a very nice Tokai neck with a perplexing Jaguar letraset on it, it came to me in this state:
and after some diligent razor scraping I've got most of the original sunburst visible:
Problem is, there are gouges into the original burst, the back is a train wreck, and the wood itself is quite ugly under the burst.
I can imagine the chorus of "that looks amazing, don't touch a thing" but it photographs better than the reality, which is like smeared paint stripper residue, sander marks and scraper gouges. The burst itself looks like a cheap Chinese Strat knockoff, colour wise, and the pickguard is brown, which looks all kinds of wrong as a combination. So it's clear I will need to refinish it, which I plan to do by surface filling on the original finish (leaving it there) and giving it a coat of primer. Originally I had thought yeah, white, like it had been, and that's not a bad choice. But Sleepkid and I were talking it over and he suggested gold, which is a very fine idea I think.
Just to finish, a couple of shots of the incredible pickguard, originally made by a soapdish company apparently, and which can only be described as "mocha sparkle swirl". I reckon an aged gold would set this off nicely, in fact the yellow paint in the pickup cavity gives an idea of the possibility. I've been leaning toward a gold guitar in the last few years and I think this is the one!
