danny.guitar said:
Is the process of painting an electric the same/similar to painting an acoustic? Or is going to get an acoustic painted just a stupid idea?
It is a similar process, but there are a couple of issues. First of all, to do it right you need to - at the very least - remove the neck, and probably the bridge as well. Finishing an acoustic with the neck in the body has all sorts of problems, the biggest of which is the cost of future neck resets goes up considerably, and the avalible quality goes down. It is almost always nessicary to do some touchup around the heal when you do a neck reset, but it becomes ten times worse, and almost impossible to do invisibly, when the neck is finished in. So, refinishing an acoustic right means doing it with the neck removed (the same is true with an electric, but at least on a bolt on neck it is easy to do).
The bigger problem with refinishing an acoustic, though, is a sonic one. The finish on a guitar contiues to off-gas forever, though obviously the percentage of solvents becomes infitesimally small after enough time. None the less, they do continue to off-gas, and as they do, the finish gets harder, which means it becomes more resonant (or, more acurately, it becomes less of an impediment to the transfer of energy). If you refinish an instrument, you loose all those years of off-gassing. Now, I'm not saying you go back to square one in terms of the sound of the instrument, but you DO loose an awful lot of the "age" to the sound. And even a few years will make a difference in the age of the instrument. Hell, a few months, really, will be noticable at the begining of an istruments life. This is an issue with both acoustics and electrics, but it is much more so on an acoustic, particularly on the body.
So, how much would it cost to refinish an acoustic white? I would estimate it in my shop at a MINNIMUM or $1500-2000. If you want it done right, that is what you are looking at, and even at that we would probably try to talk you out of it.
As far as I'm concerned, it simply is not good idea.
Light
"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi