Saturday, February 6, 2010

Newest to my collection

Hey all,

Been awhile since I've posted, but I like to check in here every once in awhile. I recently received a Mitchell MD100S free from a friend. I'm picky about my guitars, so I immediately went into the process of improving aspects of it. The saddle/nut will be converted to bone, the plastic pins will be swapped out for ebony wood ones, surface nicks have been filled, and the pickguard has been removed.

This friend of mine has had the guitar about three years...so it was no surprise that a pickguard tan would be present. I started to think about how I could deal with this issue. Well...easiest technique would be to buy another pickguard that I liked. Too easy if you ask me. Any that have read my posts in the past know I like to do things the fun way. I decided I'd try my hand at retanning. I read a few ideas people had for this...most said it was more work than it's worth. With that I decided I'd have to find out first hand. With some low adhesive tape, a scalpel, and wax paper, I decided to go for it. The process is shown below...I will repost pictures after I let the guitar see some sunlight and show how successful the treatment was. Enjoy!





Here you can see where I filled the surface nicks. I will level those with a razor blade and then polish them out flat.



I realized after the fact that I forgot to take a picture of the guitar without tape on it. It's hard to tell...but the tan line was pretty significant. The lighting in my kitchen doesn't do it justice when you compare it to areas that didn't have tape on them yet.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Last term at UP

It's finally here. My last year at the University of Portland. I'll be working at Providence St. Vincent's Emergency Department for my capstone placement and then the second half of the term will be spent at the Fragile Children's Center at Providence Portland.

Once school is over I'll probably take a month to study for the NCLEX exam...hopefully pass it, and then start working at the ED if it suits my style well.