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I'm getting to the point on my Les Paul build where I need to start focusing on the finish. It has a quilted maple top.

I want the top to have an amber color under nitro - like this one.

I've been playing around with some TransTint/ColorTone dye mixed with water & applied to bare wood. I think I've got the color in the ballpark but I'm a little confused.

For a straight color, not a burst or fade, is it better to color the wood or the lacquer?

In terms of dialing in the color, it seems a lot easier to color the dye and test on scraps than to mix up test batches of lacquer & spray.

Any ideas, experience or recipes would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin Looker

_________________
I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

I would think that it would be easier to get one consistent color if you wiped the stain on. It's real easy to get lines in your color if you're spraying. I found a good article on using the stuff, breaks down different uses of transtint and how it works different with different thinners. Worth a read


http://www.joewoodworker.com/transtints.htm

There's no real right or wrong here - direct stain often looks more 'dramatic', particularly with a sand back, but slightly less '3D'. Testing on scrap is key to deciding what particular schedule works best for me.

I would probably seal and then spray tinted coats - easy to control how dark you want it, more so than wiping on stain. Or a combination of initial wipe on and fine-tune using tinted lacquer before going to clear coats.

You can colour the wood, (which accentuates the grain, but can blotch or streak if you're careless) or tint the lacquer (which is more straightforward but has a masking affect on the grain). In either case, I think you definitely get more even & consistant results by spraying (...if you're getting lines spraying, the blend is too intense, IMO). I use little 1oz mixing cups to dial in the blend (so many drops this & that per oz...eg 5drops amber/2tobacco/1red mahog). Once you get the blend, use a multiple of it to get the intensity (eg. 15A/6T/3RM per oz)

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Dave
Milton, ON

Kevin, my understanding (badly paraphrased) is that the figure in woods like the flamed maple in your picture is due to the fact that the wood grain cells don't all lie in the same plane, the flame has them angled to the surface, where the area between the flame has them more parallel. As a result, when you apply stain to the wood it is absorbed more by the flame than the wood in between, making the flame darker or stand out more. In fact, you can apply a darker stain and sand back which will really pop the flame, or you can apply just your amber which will make the flame stand out, but not as dramatically.

When you tint the lacquer you get depth of color, but it doesn't pop the grain as much . Therefore people tend to use it on sunbursts where you want to control the color of the burst - most often on wood like spruce that doesn't have a lot of figure.

I did both on my Lester - a couple of applications of stain directly to the wood, sanded back, then the tinted lacquer to do the burst. I think you've seen this, the finishing starts at page 8

http://acapella.harmony-central.com/sho ... Paul/page8

Thanks for all the replies so far - they've been very helpful in trying to understand what's going and to realize that one trait can adversely affect another e.g. staining can improve figure pop but at the risk of being splotchy.

It's becoming obvious that I need to give myself a lot of time to experiment.


Thanks & please keep the responses coming.

Kevin Looker

_________________
I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

On this....an option is to take some black Transtint in water and spray numerous, very light coats onto the bare, sanded wood (320-400 grit). Not too much dye in the water...enough to make the water DARK gray. This will highly accentuate the figure. If you want you can then sand such that the light parts go back to the natural white and the dyed parts remain a mid-gray tone. But if you build it up very slowly with numerous coats you'll see that the figured areas suck up the dye and the non-figured areas don't change too much....offering up the possibility of that subsequent sanding is only necessary to knock down the grain raised from the water.

Then pore fill if necessary...and use the amber tint in the lacquer topcoats.

I wouldn't try to get my color by dying the wood....but if you do...make sure you use a light dye ratio and build your color up over MANY light passes. I consider one pass to be a pass in one direction (0-180) and then another, right away, in the other direction (90-270). Atomize it well and use a wide(ish) fan spray pattern..and then let it dry a little bit before you hit it again. It takes a while. If you have an impulsive nature...don't try this The LAST thing you want is to hurry as you build up color. Remember....a run and you're done.

But like I say...I'd do the amber in the topcoats. To me...it's way easier to build even color this way. Each color of the Transtints works a little differently so the process I use when using a new color is to spray test panels, increasing the tint ratio until I get the density of color I'm looking for in one pass. Then I do the math in order to arrive at a tint ratio that will allow that amount of color to go down in SIX passes. I use clear lacquer on the last two passes for a total of eight coats. If the color looks weak after six passes I have the latitude of coloring the last two passes. The two guitars pictured were done using that process....but NOT applying the black tint to the raw wood as described above.

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I read Emerson on the can. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...true...but a consistent reading of Emerson has its uses nevertheless.

StuMusic

Do you want it to look like that photo I would tint the lacquer. Spray vinyl or sanding sealer, sand smoothe, spray toner and spray top coats. That is your "lemon burst" It is so called burst but when all the burst fades away because the original ones weren't light fast, what you have left is the fully faded dye revealing the amber aged lacquer.

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Ken

I would like to change my answer actually, as it was a result of my experience which is not in finishing guitars. My major concerns stem from us having problems with large panels and whole runs of cabinets, and we typically use satin or flat lacquer which gets cloudy through the toning process. As someone who just went through the staining process, I would say that the result of my wiping my stain on was a certain amount of blotch and I think I could have avoided this if I would have tinted my lacquer instead. I have to learn to forget almost everything I know from working as a woodworker for most of my life, and trust the wisdom of those with more knowledge and experience building guitars.

For transparent shading, I like Transtint mixed with either alcohol and shellac or lacquer thinner and lacquer. I use mostly solvent, and a little of the finish. I maybe do Transtint in 1lb cut shellac with alcohol mixed in, or transtint in lacquer thinner with a little lacquer mixed in (how little is a little? I don't know...less than half). It's mostly color on bare wood for the first coat but I find that a little finish mixed in makes it less blotchy and easier to control.

One "trick", if you can call it that, is set your gun for a vertical spray. For whatever reason, it's easier to get an even looking coat. Spray light coats too. After several light coats, any bobbles in your spray technique tend to average out to a nice, even shade.

That's just one way. It seems like people have been successful doing it every which way. Shoot, people wipe on sunbursts and they look great.

Yeah, I just watched a guy do a sunburst by wiping the dark color on as a dye stain and sanding it off the center in a teardrop shape. Then he wiped his lighter color over the whole thing, did some hard rubbing to blend the two colors together and topcoated. It looked pretty good actually.

I love transtint!
Play around with it on samples until you get what you like.
If it's applied to the wood, it's easy to buff it lighter here and there with steel wool.
If you use a water mix, you can blend it with a wet rag even after it's dry.
I really like the look of dark vintage amber on maple.
I used many coats of red to achieve an almost solid color.
I used yellow on maple, but it looks more like a bright amber.

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

Kevin, while this is not a guitar, the finish process was almost exactly as Zlurgh described. I use metal based automotive tinting concentrates, and used a black wash in lacquer thinner. Allowed it to dry completely, block sanded it back down to both level the wood again, (yes, l/t will raise the grain)
and to take most of the black off. I then washed the wood with the same process using the mixed teal. I then took a rag soaked in lac/thin and took the bulk of the teal off blending and smoothing the color evenly. After that, I used the same teal tint and added to my basecoat clear and began laying thin even coats down. This is a very slow process but if followed will give spectular results. After about 10 coats spred over 3 days, I let it set and cure for a few days then block sanded with dry 320 to level the finish. I repeated the clear process with tinted clear for only two or three more coats to get a good even hue, then went to straight clear. Cure, block sand wet/dry to around 2000 grit and buff! It sounds like a lot of finish, but the cutting back with the sanding does take a good bit of the build up off.

Mike



http://i136.photobucket.com/albums/q188 ... /L-man.jpg

Thanks for all the replies.

I've done some experimenting & I've got the best results with:
Stain with TransTint & water - Amber with Mahogany Brown
Sand all of it off
Vinyl sealer
Spray with 50/50 lacquer/thinner - tinted with Amber & Mahogany Brown

I'm using the StewMac amber.
It seems a bit too lemon yellow for me. StewMac says it's the amber for a sunburst - which makes me think very yellow.
I use the TransTint Brown Mahogany to tone it down.

Is the TransTint honey amber a better shade for trying to do a mellow vintage look?

Thanks,
Kevin Looker

_________________
I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.