If you oil & wax the body you do not need to laquer it, just wax it every year or so, as and when needed.
If you want to paint or varnish it later you could try sanding it down & rubbing it with something like turps (google has ideas on how to do this), or you could sand off the wax coating & paint/varnish with a linseed based paint/varnish.
My original plan was going to be to paint the body & maybe leave a little wood if any was nice enough, but after sanding down what was below the crusty black stuff, I saw sense.