It’s a pretty headstock; at least I think so, and now it needs a logo. Over the course of the build so far I dipped my toes in various options for what the logo might be, and how I’d put it on the guitar.
My only other guitar build was a Telecaster style electric, built from a kit I got online – with that one I wanted a Fender-like logo (Fender makes the real Telecaster for those not in the know). I found a company online that made custom waterslide decals and used that back then:
This time I wanted to do something with a vintage 1950’s vibe, so I spent some time googling images and fonts, coming up with lotsa bad ideas…
I used Word and PowerPoint to mock up some ideas, and also looked up possible ways to put it on the guitar. One idea was to acid etch a piece of aluminum and embed it in the headstock, or do a custom inlay, but based on my inlay experiments when working on the fretboard I wasn’t terribly confident about that and didn’t want to mess up the headstock now that I’ve come this far. So, waterslide decals it is! A big benefit being if you screw up, just waterslide the thing off and try again. Once it’s right you then seal it on with varnish or something like that.
Further toying with the logo ended up with better results…
And I decided to go with the gold flake-backed ‘KB’ with the vertical ‘covid’. ‘k-tone’ is kinda funky, but it’s a smallish headstock which makes it tough to fit a lot of bling onto. Now, not wanting to buy finished decals online, I had to figure out how to do it myself. Not too tough, actually. First, find some decal paper on Amazon…
Next, print the logos, reversed (you’ll see why in a second). I tried a few times with different line thicknesses (you’ll see why in a second).
The inkjet can handle the black, red and blue colours, but gold flake ink isn’t available – at least for my ancient Canon Pixma printer. So I use gold flake paint to manually do this. I first hit the printed sheet with a coat of spray laquer to seal the ink from running, then carefully apply gold flake paint to the sheet, keeping inside the lines…
The decals will be placed upside down on the guitar, which reverse the reversed images so they aren’t reversed (?), and the gold paint is behind the printed lines. So it should look clean.
I do a test on one of the spare veneers left over from the headstock build. This is basically cutting out the logos close to the image edges, soaking it in warm water for a few seconds, then sliding it (hence “waterslide”) onto the surface and smoothing it out with paper towel, pressing out any water I can. Let it dry, and it looks…
…not bad, if I say so myself! The gold actually shimmers more than the photo captures, too. I think the thicker lined version looks better, so there we go.
Putting the logo on the actual headstock will have to wait until the neck is done, though – I want to get the tuners installed so I can be sure everything lines up correctly. Which means I guess it’s back to the frets next…
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