My newest build, A 12 string electric

[Eric Schmitt]

It’s been a while since I’ve completed a guitar and been around the forums. You know how it is, work, bills, life in general gets in the way of the fun stuff. So this guy has been about a year in the making and I finally finished it up last week. I’m pretty proud of it, this is the first guitar I’ve done where I didn’t make any dumb mistakes that I had to figure out how to cover up or hide.
This one is an electric 12 string with mahogany body, poplar center stripe, Maple neck with rosewood fingerboard. All the hardware except the tuners are allparts brand. I got the tuners off eBay, not sure what brand they are but I’ve used them before and they work well. The pickups are GFS Dream 180’s (advertized as P-90’s in a humbucker config.) It’s wired up in the standard Les Paul configuration.

For the finish I wanted to go with a matte oil look. I used 4 good coats of tru-oil on the body and neck, enough to fill the grain and give me a good top layer to buff out. Once the oil was built up enough I knocked down any rag marks with 0000 steel wool using light pressure. I buffed out the dullness from the steel wool sanding using birchwood casey gunstock sheen. It came out exactly how I wanted, a good protective finish keeping the natural look and feel of the wood.

Here are a few quick picturess I took earlier today. Sorry they're not the best

[Art Davila]

Very Nice.
I love the finish.
What bridge did you use?
Can I ask what grit you sanded to prior to oil?

[John Kingma]

I like your design. Good job.

[Eric Schmitt]

Very Nice.
I love the finish.
What bridge did you use?
Can I ask what grit you sanded to prior to oil?

For the bridge I used the Gotoh 12 string bridge purchased from allparts. The main strings go through the body and the octives are run through the back of the bridge.

I've used Tru-oil many times and I'm really happy with the results. For the finish I pretty much followed the instructions on the bottle. Started off by sanding with 60 grit to remove any tool marks, then went to 100 grit, and a final sanding with 220 grit. The first coat of oil I put on pretty generously since most of it gets sucked into the wood to fill the grain. The others are used to build up the protective layers. I don't have any set number of coats I put on, I just keep building up layers until I'm satisfied it's thick enough for good protection and to buff out. The instructions say to use 00 steel wool to sand down the top layer but I prefer to use 0000 steel wool. I find with 0000 its enough to smooth out any rag streaks without accidentally going through the top layer. For a matte finish I like to use the gunstock sheen & conditioner, it buffs out the dullness from sanding without bringing it to a high gloss. For a high gloss finish I use the same procedure but after the 0000 steel wool sanding I'll go with a 1500 grit paper or micro mesh (depending on what the hardware store has in stock) wet sanding then buff to a shine with 3M rubbing compound.