Mojo Jim and The Muddy Wulfs

"The Babe" is one of the lead guitars for welsh blues band "Mojo Jim and the Muddy Wulfs" and is here for a custom paint job. We will be updating this page regularly so check back for progress.

With this one we just did the artwork leaving Mojo Jim, the guitars owner, to give her a light coat of nitrocellulose, which for this project we both agreed was more inkeeping with the guitar.

You can listen to some of their music here. Definately try and see these guys live if you get the chance.

"Tom has been brilliant to work with, professional, creative, patient, taking time to visualise ideas into art for the Babe. Tom's really conscious of care needed, how finish can affect the resonance, tone of a guitar. The Babe is now stunning piece of Blues inspiration, her tone is every bit as gorgeous. Couldn't be more delighted and look forward to seeing more of Tom's work." - Andy

A glimpse into the stages of painting this guitar. Slightly different from most others as we just painted the front leaving the back and sides as they were.

"The Babe" in its original state.

We're only going to be working on the front so here you can see the whole neck back and sides have all been masked off. You can also see there is a couple of bare spots just to test out how easy the finish is going to strip...

...this went well so I cracked on with getting rid of the rest. At this stage there is about an inch of the existing finish left around the edge, as these areas are going to require a bit more time and care to get the finish off the binding. This care is also needed so as not to round off the edges.

This last stage of getting the lacquer off the binding is a bit more fiddly and time consuming...

...but we get there eventually.

After that we sand the top of the body going through the grits to about p320 so the surface is even and smooth. The binding needed a bit of attention to get a nice sharp edge.

After carefully masking off the binding the top is now ready to be primed.

Here you can see the first very light primer coat has gone on. This re-seals the wood and also helps to show up any small imperfections in the wood that cant always be seen beforehand.

In this case it was close to perfect but there was the odd area that needed imperfections sanding out.

Then the whole top gets a full sanding through the grits again ready for the next light coat of primer.

Here we have it after another coat, probably needing one more sand and one quick last light coat of primer.