Peavey Patriot MIA

There are times when I go out and I'm on a mission to find a guitar. One of my next projects is to find an arch top to work on. Then there are times when the last thing on my mind is a guitar. OK, those times are few and far between but they DO happen on occasion. So I'm browsing through one of the local second-hand shops (with no musical instrument department at all) and one of the ladies pulls out a gig bag (50/50 on it being worth looking at from the get-go) and out comes this guitar and my first thought is "Good Lord, there's a crime scene missing some evidence and here is the weapon!"

THE BEGINNING



At first glance it is butt-ugly (condition wise). We're missing strings- bad sign. The remaining strings are actually eye-injury booby-traps in disguise. It may have been stored in a sandbox at some point, or used as a shovel. Not sure which. Maybe both. Rusted pole pieces on the pickup (just one) but the whammy bar is present. One pickup wired to one volume pot (tone? who needs to control tone???). And the finish is, well... a disaster. The once shiny poly clear coat has been wiped with something that has dulled it approaching the excitement of a Congressional filibuster. Perhaps it was given a rub-down with alcohol-based hand cleaner which could well be the basis for 20-30 minutes of horribly inappropriate jokes. But I digress...





We're a bit rusty here.



More dings than a doorbell on Halloween. The dark inclusion is in the body itself and actually runs through to the upper horn as well.





Missing the tremolo cavity cover but we've got three springs to work with! Let's hope we don't need more, otherwise we have to find another spring claw with more hooks. So let's look at what we actually have that doesn't make me afeared to close my eyes.



How about this: a micro-tilt neck! String height adjustments are made here (primarily) instead of at the bridge. Not as elegant as originally designed by Leo Fender but a nice surprise.



Mini-Grover tuners!



A pickup cavity with enough free space to insert a Buick! Not something you see every day. Flush-mount jack (yuck) is shot. Volume pot works well after a sitcom's worth of turning back and forth and a bit of electrical contact cleaner (actually labeled in English at the local huge department store). This might actually be an ideal application for a Black Ice cap, will have to do some research.



A Fender-style Maple neck. Peavey uses a bi-laminate design of maple-on-maple. Frets have some wear but a good polish may be all that's needed. There's some scratching on the fret board where some guitar molester used steel wool to "work the frets" but not sure there's a cost-effective fix for that. I would love to re-fret a neck but not this one on this day.



DISASSEMBLY

Some rocks inside the truss rod cover which, by the way, is the chintziest piece of poorly cut bent plastic I've seen in a long time. Tuners off, gunk has much more POP now. Some discrepancies regarding the model- prevalent thought/literature has the Patriot made from 1982-86 but the serial number puts it in 1989. Any wise words appreciated for/against.





Neck plate removed, you can see the micro-tilt adjustment hex screw. Loosen the neck screws and turn the screw in/out and change the pressure on the metal slug installed in the neck.





This may have been a "massive" sustain block as described in Peavey's manual of the day (1989) but not so much when compared to the brass blocks offered by Killer Guitar Components, see the Aria Pro II restoration page for more details. Lots of goo in there by the way.



Neck taped up for fret polishing after cleaning the gunk off the headstock and neck. Debris from fret polishing can stain maple fret boards so I make sure to tape them to prevent damage from my grubby fingers.



Shiny!





There is some grain raised up in a couple of places on this fret board. Not sure what/if measures to take.



Long soak in penetrating oil loosened most of the rust/corrosion.





Neck plate actually has a plastic "gasket" between it and the body.



Never Dull to the rescue.



Headstock isn't sealed with lacquer but is a satin-esque coating nonetheless. Holds onto staining very well.



Strung up and adjustments roughed-in to check everything one last time. Parts take time to get here so I wanted to be sure to get everything I needed; shipping time will give me a good head start on the finishing process.



BODYWORK

After much thought the color is coming off. No good way to fix the finish (even if it wasn't butt ugly) so we're going down to the wood to start over. 100-grit and an evening of hand-sanding.









Lots of pinhole dents and paint-filled scratches.





The dark inclusion as seen in the body and a nasty paint-filled divot. Tremolo cover plate screw holes filled with paint. I'll try steaming them up to get the paint out. Pretty much abandoning the natural wood scheme after seeing the dark inclusions in the wood but since I'm here to learn I'll steam out as many dents/scratches as I can to figure out just hwat and what can't do helped.







Most of the dents steamed up well enough to sand the paint out of them. A few have crushed wood fibers and won't respond at all, those will get filled.





Dust storm from China has gooped up the air for the past few days and now it's raining so I'm waiting out the delays and planning on what to do paint/graphic wise with things. Stay tuned!

Primer coat going on today.



Sanded down it's easy to see where the dings are that wouldn't raise up with steam so after it sits overnight they'll get filled in.



1st coat of primer sanded down to judge putty effect- thumbs-up! Coats 2-3 applied this afternoon. The Aria next to it looks grey when photographed along, but next to a grey thing it ain't so grey!



Life got out of the way long enough to do a little work here. Block sanding the primer coats on the body. 280 then 320 and I finished with a worn 320 sponge pad.



I thought that 3 thick coats of filler/primer would take care of the small imperfections but alas, the answer is no. So, back in with the wood putty hitting every little spot I could see.

**UPDATE** So I'm sitting here all happy like a dead pig in the hot sun because I've just filled all my little dings with wood putty and I can see primer going (back) on tomorrow and I notice there are little black squiggly things on the side of the wood putty jar and as I look closer at them they look like words. So I stick the jar up to my old-man eyes and see the words say "does not dry to a sandable finish." ^#$%^@$#%*^&$%%&$#*^&$

So today, boys and girls, I learned that just because wood filler and wood putty sound kinda' the same, they're not. Painful as it is, this is called learning.



Off to the local giant department super-store to look through their wood selection to familiarize myself with the differing qualities of wood. Should be fun, most everything is labeled in Japanese so it will certainly be a challenge! I'll see if they also have some wood FILLER.

Soooooooo....... I found proper hard-curing wood filler at the local giant department store (30 minutes shopping in America = 2 hours in Japan trying to communicate/locate items). I took two sessions but the dings are now filled and sanded. Two coats of primer then sanded flat. Repeated the primer coats and hopefully tomorrow will be the final primer sanding. Now I have to consider what COLOR to do.

Colors.... as in plural. After a long couple of days of fishing around websites trying to find something that would challenge me I decided on..... digital camouflage. Kind of fitting as Peavey is located in Mississippi and pretty much a solid place to find camo things. My local easy-to-use US supplier carries a handful of the Krylon Camouflage paints, so after much wringing of hands I grabbed 5 cans of four colors: sand (2 cans for the base coat), khaki, woodland light green and finally olive.




BUILDING A DIGITAL CAMOUFLAGE STENCIL

Loads of info came from the Air Soft community. One key resource was a digital camouflage stencil creator I discovered over at the TACTICALCAMO.COM website. I toyed around with the setting using the STENCIL B/W selection, pixel size of 26 (about 1/4"), quantity of 300, a drift of 1, DIGITAL CAMO and CREATE JPEG selected.. I toyed around with the numbers for about half-an-hour and with these settings I started getting the results I wanted. Click the SUBMIT QUERY to see the results.



Evaluate your pattern, click the BACK button for your browser and select SUBMIT QUERY to see another rendering using your settings. When I began to get the right patterns for me I began copying and pasting them into my file editor (I was using Photoshop CS4 but you could use any editor really).



Ten patterns seemed to be enough for me to start with since I'm using a double-sided stencil technique (more later). Off to the printer they go!



Now it starts to get fun. Or stupid. They're so easily mixed up it's hard to tell sometimes. Get a piece of waxed paper a little bigger than your printed stencil. Use the tape to attach it face-up underneath the wax paper. Then start building your stencil by laying down rows across the waxed paper. Stop when you have enough to cover your stencil. Now flip it over, remove the paper and cover the OTHER side with blue tape as well.



Once that's done, attach your paper stencil again, this time face up on the top of your wax paper blue tape monster. Wave goodbye to your sanity and begin cutting out the black parts with an X-ACTO knife. Take your time (like you have a choice) and be uber-neat. You can discard the little pieces of paper you remove and eventually the larger paper as well.



These squares are approximately 3/8" on each side.





Paper removed and removing the male stencils from the female areas. I honestly thought the second photo was in focus but I was babbling incoherently at this point and am thankful I didn't stab my eyes out to make it all stop.





So, to bring things back to a more manageable level, I sanded down the second 2-coat application of primer. Base color is ready to go on but the weather needs to co-operate and right now it is cold AND wet. Booooooo.......



Base coat going on! Three passes with 15 minutes or so in between to make one coat, then a 3-hour wait before the next round. The camouflage paint states re-spray within 24 hours so if I play things right I can get a lot done (weather co-operating).





And the stencil work continues.....



Made a total of six pages which will expand into 12 when peeled from the wax paper. There's also a container with all the little cut-outs making a whole mess of pieces to use for masking areas.



And just for fun a little simulating....





7-day window has passed so the remaining five coats can be applied but now it is rain, rain, rain, Poop.

Applying stencils in anticipation of some nice paint days coming soon. Here I've peeled the tape stencil off showing the wax paper base. A mirror image stencil is on the other side. Since I used 1" wide tape the pattern is broken at the seam, so even the larger pieces don't necessarily have to be placed together.







My stencil tools: a rubber roller found at any decent craft store, fine-point tweezers and a pair of iris scissors. I like the black finish on tools when I can get them, using bright lights with chrome tools adds to the headache potential.





Measuring to mark a few reference points to keep my lines properly aligned.







The edges were a bit of a bother for me, I finally decided to go with the "hot mess of chaos" style where the curving lines of the front and back patterns converge.





And now we wait for the rain to go away.....

Which it did. Windy but it finally died down later in the day. Two coats on tonight then two more tomorrow. This color is called khaki going over the lighter sand.



Beginning the stencil removal process.













Putting on the last stencils (called male stencils) for the last darker color.











Showing the thickness of the paint application. Yuck. Yet another reason I don't like enamel paints. Will end up clear coating the guitar and then wet-sanding to knock down the relief between the colors then re-coat with clear until done.





My one little masking faux paux, and under-spray area where the mask wasn't totally taped down.



Time for a pause. There's not enough time for me to clear coat this one and give it time to cure before the movers come so she'll rest until we arrive in California and get things set up there.

This is my new avatar in some of my social media haunts, courtesy of this project.








UPDATE: So I've FINALLY gotten this one moving again. Here it is in my new off-gassing enclosure after getting the first few misty coats of lacquer. Because of the amount of relief in the paint finish it will take a LOT of clear to get this one flat after sanding so just repeat "more clear applied today" for awhile.

YOU SMELL THAT? That's the smell of VICTORY (a.k.a. lacquer)!