Sanding Finished...For Now

I'm a bit late posting this but I spent some time sanding down the body by hand on Sunday afternoon, to remove the last bits of paint from inside the horns and to try to remove at least some of the white residue that was still there over most of it. The paint actually came off more easily than I expected, with a left-over piece of coarse sandpaper from the power sander and a bit of elbow grease. I'm really glad I didn't try to do the whole body by hand though!

The result looks like this:

Still a bit of the residue left in there but that's OK for now.

I then got my sanding block and some coarse sandpaper and went over the whole body bit by bit just to give it a once-over; it seems to have helped a bit, and although it's not all that easy to see from the pictures I definitely managed to get rid of some of the whiteness. It's probably more noticable in the rib and arm cuts, and round the edges, due to the darker colour of the edges of the plywood.

Back:

Front:

It's a long way from perfect, but it's better than it was and that's all that matters for now. I had planned to spend some more time sanding it down, getting it into an even better state, but then I realised that there's not a lot of point at this stage. Once I'm done cutting/carving down the body to lose some weight, I'll have to sand it all down properly ready for painting, both the bits that are modified and the bits that are unchanged, so it seemed a little unnecessary to go through it all at this point.

So the next task is to figure out and design exactly what I'm going to with it, and then actually start some woodworking. The really daunting stuff begins here :-)

Since I already posted about some of my ideas regarding what I could do, I'm going to work a little on refining the plans (and picking exactly which idea(s) to go for) over the next few days and then hopefully post something a bit more definitive soon. Something of a plan is already formulating, but as before, any ideas and feedback would be appreciated!