Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Sparkly finishes are very hard to do because they are unforgiving in case of boo boos. You must respray the whole thing instead of just touching up.

We will see.....I generally plan on everything going wrong that can go wrong, but that's why they invented sanders.

teb wrote:We will see.....I generally plan on everything going wrong that can go wrong, but that's why they invented sanders.

......and beer!

Well, sparkle-ization actually went very well, I picked up one of those Finex guns that Paul mentions on his videos and they really are nice (especially compared to my old Harbor Freight guns - where the knobs turn, but I'm not sure they do much). I shot two coats of clear with sparkles over the red base and the distribution was very uniform with no real effort needed to even things out. Then I managed to get five coats of clear over them the second day, sand it smooth and shoot four more coats yesterday. Unfortunately, by then it was blowing about fifteen knots out in the "spraybooth" and I figured I'd better quit for the day before something yucky blew into my wet varnish. Now it's getting cold all the sudden, so the next round of clearcoats will depend on the temperature, but it seems to be doing OK and looks pretty good. These are really tiny sparkles, so it doesn't have that glitter look that we've seen on some refins. From a lot of angles, it just looks red, but when the light hits it just right, it's sparkle-city. They're hard to photograph and actually much denser than they look here. I guess I'll have to jump around on stage a lot more to get maximum sparkle exposure. Yeah....right...

That looks great! I'm not a big fan of red, but the sparkles make it work...

Looks like the finish on a bumper car! I like it!

I love the 350-style body you made for the 430's neck and hardware. it looks MUCH better than the old body. You did a fantastic job! I have often thought of buying a 430 and having just such a body made for it and now I can see what it looks like. What a sweet guitar!

Yeah, I kind of like the "now you see them, now you don't" aspect of these mini-sparkles. I've probably got one more round of sanding and varnish coats to go before I can sand it all out and polish it, but the weather out in the "spray booth" has been lousy lately. I don't really have any idea what its fate will be after it's done as I'm not planning on taking the 350-style one apart and it has the rest of the parts on it. I did consider buying a Warmoth neck for a twelve, some pots and a couple of toasters and can get a 430-style bridge base plate/tailpiece from Winfield. I have a set of black Schallers and a twelve-saddle bridge in the parts box. The resulting Frankenbacker twelve might be interesting.

Or......I might get lazy (or realize that I don't really need three electric twelve-strings) and sell it or eBay it to someone who wants to customize their old 430.

teb wrote:Yeah, I kind of like the "now you see them, now you don't" aspect of these mini-sparkles. I've probably got one more round of sanding and varnish coats to go before I can sand it all out and polish it, but the weather out in the "spray booth" has been lousy lately. I don't really have any idea what its fate will be after it's done as I'm not planning on taking the 350-style one apart and it has the rest of the parts on it. I did consider buying a Warmoth neck for a twelve, some pots and a couple of toasters and can get a 430-style bridge base plate/tailpiece from Winfield. I have a set of black Schallers and a twelve-saddle bridge in the parts box. The resulting Frankenbacker twelve might be interesting.

Or......I might get lazy (or realize that I don't really need three electric twelve-strings) and sell it or eBay it to someone who wants to customize their old 430.

Make sure that dosn't infringe on copyrights...good luck

There is nothing about it would infringe on anyone's copyrights. It's perfectly legal for me to do whatever I want to my Rickenbackers for my own use, and it's also perfectly legal to stick a different brand of neck on one and honestly sell it as what it is, or would be - a modified, genuine Rickenbacker body with mostly Rickenbacker parts and an aftermarket neck added.

Wait a second... You are thinking of selling the Rick body that you modified because you are only using the 350 style? Am I reading this correctly?

Yes, The original body was old, beat-up to an extent and to my eye, not a particularly nice shape. I knew I would replace it with a new one before I even bought the guitar - Exibit A.

The new, 350-ish body went according to plan and came out pretty nice. Looks good, plays well, sounds good - Exhibit B

Rather than selling the old body as is, or sticking it in a closet somewhere, I decided to re-shape and refinish it for fun, to see if I could come up with something I liked better than the original - Exhibit C, still waiting for final varnish, sanding and polishing.

I like B better than C, The figured, veneered, gloss headstock face and satin neck look great with the figured gloss top and satin bubinga back of the new body. So B will remain as is and be my solid-body six-string.

This leaves C an orphan. I don't play much six-string stuff so I don't need two of them. So it boils down to either converting it to something I'd get more use out of (maybe a twelve of some kind) or selling it to somebody else who wants to switch out their existing 430 body for a different shape and color.

Looks Great!

Rub-a-dub-dub. Still buffing, but it's going well for an old guy with just a couple bottles of goo and a piece of cotton cloth. The sparkles look really nice from those angles where they show, but they don't photograph well. They tend to over-expose if you try to force them with lighting on the photos. Instead of thousands of tiny red sparkles, they show up as big white dots that look like powdered sugar.