The heavy woodworking is done and all the pieces are now one. I suppose I could install the tuners, pickups, knobs, etc. and start making some noise, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. This is true for just about any project I work on. The building can go fairly quickly. And the finishing can often take as much time or more!
The first step was detail sanding the entire body. This is the time to get rid of all of those scratches that I’ve been telling myself to take care of for the past month or so. As soon as you put stain or dye on a scratched piece of wood, that scratch will jump out and haunt you for the as long as you own the piece. Yet even with hours of sanding down through 120, 220, and 320 grits, it seems impossible to find all the scratches. So I do what I can and accept some imperfections. Mask off anything that you don’t want to get dyed with the pore filler.
I am using Timbermate wood filler. This is my first time using it, but am impressed with the product. I started with the Timbermate Tinting Base and added TransTint dyes to try out a variety of colors. Here’s a couple of early attempts on a piece of scrap mahogany from the body. The one on left is close to what I settled on, though I darkened it up a bit more for the final. The piece of maple in the top of the photo was a test of grain enhancement for the top.
I ultimately ended up with a mix of about 45% Honey Amber, 45% Red Mahogany, 5% Bright Red, and 5% Black. This resulted in a nice deep brown with a hint of reds.
I don’t have any shots of it going on the body, but here’s a shot after some sanding and prior to sealing with lacquer. I still need to do some sanding, though.
Next time I would do a second, extremely thinned coat of filler after my initial sanding, followed by a light sanding. I think that this would leave more of the deep brown/red color. This effort filled the pores in nicely, but I ended up sanding off the color from the rest of the wood. Alternately, I could have sprayed some tinted lacquer after sanding to deepen the color.
