Rustic T-Style RT 160 BL Body

Rustic T-Style replacement body in knotty pine (character pine)
Specs:

-Nitro Lacquer finish -Translucent Blue over a silver metallic base coat. Weathered look!
-Early vintage T-style specs.
-Wire channels are drilled as are neck holes and jack cup hole.
-String through holes are drilled
-Bridge mounting holes are located but left shallow (roughly 1/4″) to insure a solid connection when you install your bridge.
-String ferrules are installed.
-This body weighs 4.25 lbs as pictured.

The build process:

We start with hand selected, rough sawn 8/4 (2 inch) character pine. We source our character pine in roughly 8″ wide boards that are 14 feet in length. Each board is cut into roughly 8″ X 20″ billets which are then jointed and glued up into a body blank. Because of our careful wood selecting process, we typically yield 8 billets per each 14 foot board. We take extra care to make sure that each of these 8 billets is glued up with its neighbor within that initial 14 foot board. At this point, the body blanks measure 16″ X 20″ and are still a rough 2″ thick. These rough blanks ( usually 50 at a time) are then run through a state of the art surfacing machine. This machine is capable of first planing and then sanding three progressively finer grits in one pass. Each blank is sent through the surfacer once on each side, resulting in perfect 1-3/4″ body blanks. The body blank is then oriented on the cnc machine making sure that the glued seam of the body blank aligns with the center line of the final T-style body. The cnc initially routes the cavities and then the perimeter of each body. After a tool change, the cnc drills the bridge location holes as well as the neck mounting holes. The final step of the build process is to radius the perimeter of the body with a table router.

The finish process:

The first step in any finish process should begin with surface preparation. This rustic finish is no exception but the prep on this type of finish is very different than that of a “like new” type of finish. As mentioned above, we hand select each board that we use in our builds. In the case of these rustic finishes, we select for interesting grain and features like knots which are highlighted in the finish. The surfacing machine that I mentioned above leaves an incredibly smooth surface, which is opposite of what we are going for with these rustic finishes. Our goal is for the interesting grain and notable features such as knots, to “telegraph” through the painted layers. In order to have these features be revealed in the final product, we first blast all the surfaces of each body with walnut shells (in place of sand) in our blast cabinet. Blasting deepens the character of the body by removing small particulates from the softer portions of the wood, creating a sort of “topography” on the surfaces of the body.

The textured body is then painted with white nitrocellulose lacquer as a base coat. Following the base coat, a nitro color coat (either metallic or pastel) is applied. The body is then clear coated with nitro lacquer. The enhanced grain telegraphs through the paint and can be felt. A flat block sander is run across the surface to remove some of the color paint coats down to the white under coat and bare wood in places, after which another clear-coat of lacquer is applied.