Fig. 1. One of the eBay listing photos for the Ibanez RG321 MH. You can see that the finish is not perfect, but the worst gouge does not show up in this photo. |
Fig. 2. In contrast to poly-coated guitars, getting down to this much bare wood only took a couple of minutes on this guitar. Also note the slightly more rounded tip on the lower horn. |
Over the course of a couple of short evening sessions, I removed the neck, hardware and electronics, and sanded the body down to bare wood. The only tricky part was sanding the back without scratching the chrome string ferrules. I used an old razor blade for that (Fig. 3) to scrape around the ferrules. Keeping it flat and working slowly, I was able to remove the finish without scratching the ferrules or gouging the wood.
Fig. 3. Using an old razor blade instead of sandpaper to avoid scratching the shiny chrome finish on the string ferrules. |
On each of the next three evenings, I put on a thin coat of tung oil, lightly sanding with fine steel wool between coats. I ended up with this:
Fig. 4. The body, after three light coats of tung oil. |
Unfortunately, the seams between the different pieces of mahogany show up more clearly with the lighter finish. But I like it better than the original dark stain, which made the guitar look too dated. I just reassembled and restrung the guitar—here are the before and after pics:
Fig. 5: The guitar as purchased (left) and after refinishing (right). Not a huge difference, but the scratches are gone, and I greatly prefer the lighter finish. |