Greco RG-550 - Rebind and Refinish

I bought this guitar from Japan as an experiment in making easy money. It didn't work. I think i ended up snagging the guitar for $500 by the time i got it in the country. The description and photos were fine but failed to mention a couple of things. All the binding had started to rot and was falling off and the pancake body had started to separate. I'm never really a big fan of natural finishes so i think i had it in my head that i would refinish the guitar from the start.

I went and stripped all the bits off and got to gluing up the separating body and cleaning the binding channels. I removed the frets and cleaned those channels as well. I re-bound the body with a white/black/white and the same with the neck. Pushed some new frets in and got the whole thing ready for refinishing.

I like old car colours and decided i would try and mix up a Olive Drab green for the guitar. I found it pretty hard to find an auto paint shop to mix up a good tint with Nitro so i found some nice pigment from St Lukes in Melbourne, a very nice art supply shop. I'd never mixed up an emoltion with powdered pigment before so this was all an experiment.

I sprayed the green over a light grey undercoat and had to build up a few coats before i was happy with the colour. While waiting for it all to gas off and cure i found the bridge pickup was dead so got MJ to rewind the pickup cause i haven't made my winder yet!

I used it as an experiment in checking nitro. I tried the compressed air canisters you can buy from hardware shops, usually used for cleaning machinery i guess. The checking pattern it created wasn't ideal, it didn't really looks like how old finish age but it was a cool affect, kinda looked like retile skin!