Hofner Colorama II restoration project (part 13) - finishing the neck

Our vintage Hofner Colorama II guitar neck was initially lacquered about two months ago. Since then, after a month, it was sanded back a little and a few more layers of lacquer were applied.

There is now enough thickness to consider finishing this, but before doing so, we need to deal with a couple of pesky areas where the lacquer ran.

This is what I’m talking about:

There are several ways to tackle this, but I’m going to do it with a razor. Here you can see me (very carefully) scraping the surplus lacquer off, one thin layer at a time. The razor needs to be held extremely level here, otherwise one of the corners will dig into the finish where you don’t want it. You can add a little bit of tape to each end of the razor to minimise this risk, but I prefer to just be careful.

Here’s how it looks after removing the unwanted material.

Now we’re ready to give the whole neck a final sanding. I’m wet sanding this with 1200 grit sandpaper. You could get a little more aggressive with this, using 800 or maybe even 400 grit paper, but I noticed even the 1200 grit paper was starting to sand through to the decal pretty quickly, so I didn’t want to push it.

This is pretty much how it looks after the wet sanding. It looks like it’s gone through to the wood, but it hasn’t:

Next, rubbing compound is rubbed into the neck to polish up the remaining lacquer:

And this is how it looks after polishing: