Day 76 progress

32. Upgrade my Squier '51: I've done some more work, even though I haven't made much overall progress.

I pulled all the electronics, removed the control plate, and removed the neck. Then I filled the pick guard screw holes with toothpicks (which fit perfectly) and super glue. Once the glue set, I clipped the toothpicks almost flush with the body, and then sanded them down. After that, I painted over the toothpicks using a coffee stirrer to drop pain directly on the spot.

After the paint dried, I sanded down the paint to make it smooth with the body. This is where the fun and headaches began. When sanding, I masked off the area I wanted to sand so I wouldn't damage the original finish on the rest of the body. While this worked reasonably well, it would lead to issues later. When the paint touch up was satisfactory, I removed the masking and used a wipe on polyurethane to seal the body.

Well, when the first coat of polyurethane dried, It was obvious where the sanding occurred. To remedy this, I used medium and fine grain synthetic sanding pads to pull all the original finish off the front of the guitar; I then applied a fresh coat of polyurethane.

After this coat dried, I found obvious application lines in the finish. I did some light sanding and then applied a second coat, thinking that the finish would even out as I applied more coats. Well, it didn't. At this point, I decided to go with a matte finish, which I was somewhat impressed with when I was doing some of the earlier sanding work. I used the damp sanding pads to take down the polyurethane finish to the matte finish underneath.

At this point I am satisfied with the results. Sure, it doesn't have that super glossy candy apple look, but I like the more subdued matte look. Another side effect is that the chrome hardware stands out even more and it looks really good.

I'm waiting on my parts from Stewart-MacDonald, which should be here mid week. I also made a change to some of the electronics I am going to include. I decided to skip the lipstick tube style single coil pickup and go with a Lace Sensor-Silver single coil pickup. This is one of the pickups that Billy Corgan installed in his homebuilt Stratocaster and it should provide a hotter, heavier tone than the more twangy lipstick tube.

So, all that's left to do is order my pickups, install the electronics, glue in the new nut, install the pickup rings, and restring the guitar.

42. Read 50 books I have not read before: I finished An Abundance of Katherines. What can I say without being overly critical? Well, if I had been the target audience, namely a junior-high or high-school student, I may have taken more away from the novel. In terms of style, there were a few things that set me off: overly cute turns of phrase, the willful abuse of periods in an attempt to create emphasis, and an overabundance of pointless footnotes.

In terms of the story and the characters, I could understand their motivations, but could not empathize with their attitudes or their behavior, which were vapid, trite, and often time irritating. If you read it for fun, it's not so bad, but I have the feeling that the target audience would probably look at this book in the same way that The Cather in the Rye was viewed by young readers. In fact, this books tries a bit too hard to be The Cather in the Rye without being nearly so self-absorbed or irritating.

I will begin reading Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev this evening.

51. Save $1 cash each day for 1001 days: I put aside $20 bringing my total to $80.