*bunged a neck on a body after painting & reassembling it
also released in other markets with the alternative titles:
I've Never Owned A Mustang, Whaaa???
Classic Vibe 'Sonic Blue' Sucks!
Should We Fully Test This Clear Coat On Something Else First?
Once upon a time I realised I didn't have a Mustang guitar (just amps strangely).
Thought I'd do something about that, and while at it, go with the typical vibrato & 3-way slide switch configuration, but Fender didn't have any in a colour I was too interested in. I figured I could do a refinish in something really cool I mightn't otherwise be able to get. Since I don't have anywhere at home to do that, an opportunity to use an uninhabited room during part of the summer came up and was something I just had to jump at. So I put together a makeshift setup there for spraying & hanging and set about to start with something that wouldn't matter too much if I messed it up. May as well use a still loaded body and just go with stock pickups, wiring & hardware for a firststang. Maybe change the pickguard if necessary.Picked up a Squier CV Mustang body. The colour is officially 'sonic blue', but you really need to put it next to something white to know that it is actually NOT white. I would describe it as the colour your blue toothpaste goes after long minutes of brushing - should you ever do that. (Nearly white.) At the same time I bought a Fender American Performer neck. CITES hadn't quite removed the rosewood restriction yet so I had to wait a bit before it was sent on. I didn't have spare time to spray until December anyway (November is the new December it seems).
Here we see the original finish (and compared with a sheet of paper) and how wonderful Squier workmanship can be - complete with cracks, chips and split off pieces. I don't consider myself a connoisseur of 'good tort' but I thought the pickguard looked pretty decent to me (although not a great angle here for that, and the plastic is still on too):
Step 2 was to pull it apart and prep it for spraying. I don't know what is usually between the switches and the pickguard nor what these are called, but they were there:
There was no configuration I could find that didn't have at least one setting that looked like a mistake.
So the bonus hidden step was to use paint markers to make one side entirely white, and the other entirely black - giving me options for how to use them later. I masked off the body with the tape that lasts weeks yet comes off without issue, and leaves no residue - unlike what I did on a previous drum project 
.
Forget stripping the existing finish since I'm an electric-guitar-tonewood/paint-thickness-skeptic, just get some good plastic primer on there and step 3 spray several coats of that top shelf colour SHERWOOD GREEN METALLIC
thanks to Duplicolor touch-up spray cans:
(here it is dried and ready for step 4)
Now for the tricky part, clear coat. Have had mixed results with 2k spray cans, this time I went with wipe-on polyurethane. A whole bunch of coats on each side, then sand flat & polish. Except, I didn't realise the slow viscosity of the product: I had a mishap with rubbery-plastic long hanging drips of clear from the underside edges. I thought I could sand them out but ended up going through the green of course. Personal meltdown time, as this was now not going to be done by Christmas, everyone was out of stock of sherwood, and I didn't have time to wait for more. I also had some snare drums to get done.
Sigh, sand it all off, pick a different colour and go again step 3 & 4. I grabbed a colour I thought might be interesting: "classic duck egg" - a pale greyish bluish green. Dulux product was actually designed for getting a chalky relic'd appearance by sanding it partly away but I just wanted it for the colour. Did a bunch of coats, then stacks of careful thin clear coats on one side at a time, making sure there could be no running over the edge and definitely no slow 'icicles/stalactites' this time.
Eventually it was looking half-decent (despite not being nearly as cool a colour as the green) so step 5 & 6 I sanded up to 2000 grit and then did a few hours of Turtle Wax wipe-on-wipe-off polish. Removed the tape, put everything back together, strung it up and spent the next 500 years on the vibrato & tuning. Haha. For the switch indicator film thingies I put the bottom (larger) ones as white and the top (smaller) ones as black. So when the pickup is off, it shows entirely as black, and when the pickup is on, it shows white on one side, depending which way you slid it.
Despite the lid of the can being pretty much what it looked like when first sprayed, the duck egg didn't end up as green as I expected it to, it was more like a pale 'sonic grey'. In addition, the clear coat was a bit ambery, so the colour has also browned a bit. Here it is between 'sonic grey' (L) and 'daphne blue' (R) for reference.
What do you think? I think the pickguard suits it nicely in the end. I was going to have to get a black or white one, since the tortoise wasn't red enough (or too red?) for sherwood green. They looked really wrong together. So at least there's that. It was meant to be a "Christmas guitar" so it's too bad it was 4 weeks overdue. Honestly compared with 'Plan A' I'm not extremely enamoured with the final colour but it is much nicer than the original so-called "sonic blue", which objectively looked fine apart from the fact that it was subjectively just too plain, like 2/10 on a scale of interesting. And it sounds nice, feels comfortable and plays well. We can now cross "Mustang" off the wanted list.
The green looked nice, but for some reason (probably since original Mustangs were only offered in a handful of finishes) the blue looks 'better' somehow to me. FYI- Duplicolor spray clear works well with their regular paint.
