Choosing a Stain

The front of the guitar was to be seafoam, or in my case, green. All the other surfaces were to be stained - or maybe not. It was possible that merely applying lacquer would darken the wood enough to be close to the color of the Gibson.

I found a piece of mahogany scrap lumber that was close to the same color as the mahogany used in the guitar kit. On this I brushed a few coats of lacquer. The color of the wood looked close to the results I wanted. I knew better than to trust that the wood on the guitar would behave the same way. I used a small brush to paint part of the inside of the control bay. This did not darken the wood like it had on the scrap lumber.

Testing the lacquer.

I pillaged my father's stain collection and sampled several on un-lacquered areas of the control bay. Like trying to conjure up just the right seafoam dye mix, this was a bit of a crap shoot. Just because the stain in the can was a good match, I had to actually put it on the wood to see the final result. The winner was ZAR Fruitwood.

Stain tests in the control bay

This seemed like a good match

I masked the binding and trusted myself to keep it off all the green parts. I applied two coats to the back and sides to ensure even coverage. The result was a little darker than I had expected from the test. Still, it looked pretty good. It was nice to get a glimpse of how the body would look when finished.

Masking the binding

The stained body

As before, there was some bleeding of the stain onto the binding. This was just as easy to clean up. I taped the same razor blade into the cardboard and scraped all around the guitar.

Scraping the binding

After a few days of drying, I would be able to start spraying the clear coat.

A glimpse at the finished finish