Here is the body as I received it. Note the huge sanding divot on the face as well as the altered body.

I let my planer do most of the finish removal. Check out the sanding divot.

Because of the huge amount of surface damage I had to remove a lot of the original body material. At this point I decided to slap a flamed maple cap on the old body as this would help bring the thickness back up to spec as well as provide some tasty flame for the 'burst finish I wanted.
After I planed the body down I made a template of the original pick, bridge and control routs so I could find them under the new cap.

For those of you interested in a visual of how different SC2 pickup spacing is compared to an ASAT, here you go.

Here is the body with the new flame maple cap. You probably will have observed that building a new body would have been far easier. But that's not how I roll.


Moving on the the final sanding. Here is the body prepped and ready to seal.

I really like nitro finished guitars so I ordered a 60 bucks worth of supplies from Reranch and started spraying.
Here it is ready for sanding and clear coat.

With the neck fitted, hardware placed and prior to final assembly. Note the F100 knobs...I hate the original ones!


And the finished product! Not bad for an investment of less than $300.00 and a little labor. The cool thing is that underneath it all it still retains the original maple body. My only complaint is that it still has the original low frets. At some point I'll get to that as well.

