So 10 years ago I got an Aria Mosrite copy. At some point during high school, my mom was throwing a temper tantrum, presumably about my grades, and decided to kick it over to teach me a lesson. Broke a few of the original tuners, and the vibrato tailpiece. After high school, I replaced the tuners and made do with the lack of a working trem, it still held the strings in place, but I decided to just go ahead and try my hand at restoration. I filled the trem pocket with bondo, drilled it for a les paul style bridge, and painted the whole thing green.
I also had cut a new pickguard and replaced the pickups and electronics because they were all pretty much shot. However, once I started to go to school for guitar repair, I realized something I had never taken into account. Bridge angle, and scale length. No wonder it never tuned right. So I pretty much just let it sit for the last few years, occasionally tuning it down for "the rain song" by Zeppelin. Over the winter I decided to strip 'er down again, and filled all the holes...again. I primed up the body with some flat black, and was going to repaint it black this time, but the paint reacted with the primer and started bubbling.
Well, I couldn't let it stay looking like that and have it show through the final coat of paint, so now i'm stripping it yet again, and probably just gonna leave it natural, with a bigsby/wigsby trem on it to cover the bondo.
This time I used my heat gun, and it went so much more smoothly. After that I used paint stripper, and it'll still need some sanding before I can do anything with it. I'll post more when I have time to work on it, I just wanted to get started before my next paying repair job comes in on wednesday.
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