Who would hav thought staining would be so hard......

Well today didn't go exactly as planned. I thought that I would have almost a full day that I could devote to working on the guitar, but things were just working against me. First thing I did was to finish sanding all of the pore filler off of the body and neck. That went fine. I really didn't like the look of the plain Spanish cedar neck with this guitar. It was too light and since I have a 3 piece tail, I didn't like the glue lines that show. My thought was to stain the neck dark to try and match the body. This is where things went south in a hurry. I mixed some stain and tested it on some scrap neck wood until the color matched the EIR back and sides. I proceeded to apply the stain to the neck, and then wipe it off. Yuck! The color didn't look right. It was too dark, and it there were some spots where the filler didn't sand off completely and the stain didn't penetrate. I tried to sand these areas , but that just made things look worse. I finally spent quite a bit of time sanding the stain off as much as I could, and this was quite a chore on the slot head! The neck now was back to close to the original color with dark spots in the pores.

About this time, my cell phone rings and on the other end was one of my customers with an emergency so I had to drop everything and go to work. 3 hours later, I was back home and in the shop. Thinking about it, this was probably a good break because it gave me some time to get away from it, and think about my next plan of attack. I decided that I would try some mahogany red with a bit of brown mixed in the stain to see if I could get a reddish brown look to the neck. Since the pores were dark, almost black, I figured that if I made the neck more red, it would look like it was a planned design color instead of a mistake. It doesn't match the body, but that is okay because as long as the color is significantly different, it will look like it was a purposeful choice. I would rather it look very different that 'almost but not quite the color' . That would look like a mistake to me.

Anyways, once I got a color I liked, I stained the neck again. Once it dried I sanded it down a little and then re-stained. I am pretty happy with the results. I wish the pores weren't so dark, but the color is good and it goes pretty well with the rest of the guitar in my opinion. Hopefully once the finish goes on, it will look good. I was going to try and start finishing tomorrow, but with this setback, I probably won't get started until sometime this week. I forgot that I still need to finish the bridge so I can get it located and masked off before I can finish the body. Tomorrow will be devoted to finishing (or ruining!) the bridge.

I did have a highlight today. Over at the Official Luther's Forum, they are having their spring swap meet. I was able to score a beautiful Honduran mahogany very highly striped back and side set for a very good price.

Here is the neck all masked off ready for stain. Little did I know at this point how things were going to unfold in just a few short minutes!

Here is the finished stain job. Who would have thought that staining a piece of wood would take so much time and effort. You can easily see the darkened pores in the wood. I can't figure out why the stain wouldn't darken the filler that didn't get sanded off the surface, but it would stain the filler in the pores. It doesn't make sense to me.