Crist Muttley - I mean, yes, VP is an idiot, but come on. Correct him when he opens his mouth with erroneous information, and then drop it. You two are making this board a real pain to read.
Let's see - I've never used any waterborne lacquers, but I have a lot of friends who have. When I've looked at their guitars, most of them still look kind of blue to me. I can't say as that I'm interested, but then I've actually got a real spray booth, so I don't have to worry too much about my Nitro exploding on me. (Because, you know, giant balls of fire tend to ruin ones day!) I'm going to go with the assumption you don't have a spray booth, since if you did you wouldn't be asking the question.
Of the waterborne lacquers I've seen, LMI's KTM-9 is by far the best looking, and the guys I know who use tell me it is quite easy to use. They had some adhesion problems when it first came out, but they seem to have that taken care of.
EVH, by the way, finished his Franken-Strats with rattle can spray paint from the hardware store, and his necks were unfinished - which is why he ran through them in about a year or so. Maple neck need a hard finish to be stable. If you don't want a high gloss feel, get a satin finished neck - it feels great, and still protects the neck.
That being said, take anything that comes out of his mouth on how he does things with a EXTREMELY large grain of salt. He seems to think he needs to guard the "secret" to his sound. (it's not really a secret - use a variac to drop the line voltage, which drops the voltage to the plates in the amp - but it does wreck tubes awfully fast, and isn't very good for your amp. If you want to see a better way to do it, check out London Sound's Power Scaling amps, which do the same thing without wrecking anything.) He has been known to spread all sorts of bull shit about his sound. Apparently, at least for a while, he had an amp on stage with only three power tubes in it - I'm assuming a dummy amp meant to throw people off since amps just don't work like that, but who knows. The truth is, it doesn't matter what amp or guitar he uses - the REAL secret is in his hands - but like most drunks he is insecure about his position in life, and over-compensates. As a result, you can never trust him when he talks about what equipment he is using.
Light
"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
