RC-4 Stuarts project

Wudtone is here-- ready to go, one final go over with 180 and I will staAttachment 21004Attachment 21005rt on the back

First Black Magic Woman deep colour coat.

Front and back are reasonable, the sides are, well we will see. Quite surprised at the variation between the planks in taking up the colour. Quite a few areas on the sides where the colour didn't take well. Mostly where the shaping has cut through the grain, and the grain is very dense. Notice this when i was sanding as these areas wouldn't rough up.


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Deep colour coat used up. Could have done with a tad more as the wood was still taking it in places.

Front has 4 coats, back has 3.

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Now just have to clear the banding up, Wudtone suggested not masking it.

Doesn't look as bad in real life as it does on the photos. Looks characterful but highlights the poor matching of boards at manufacture.

I don't think 180 grit was not quite rough enough to take the colour!

Unfortunately each piece of wood is different, so it's very hard to say just what the right grit level is for best stain uptake vs. body smoothness. The rougher you leave it, the more top layers you have to add in order to get a smooth final finish.

Had you made it all yourself,you could have tried out the stain on the offcuts first. But with a kit, you are at its mercy as to how well the various pieces take up the stain. It doesn't help that the planks are joined at an angle either - makes any slight difference more noticeable.

The back looks fairly homogeneous, just a bit lighter than the front. By the time you get some scratchplates, bridge and pickups on, you aren't going to notice the slightly different shades anything like as much.

So are you going to get more stain and try and darken the lighter areas, or leave it as it is?

To be honest, as much as I like Wudtone I think the bottles are a little on the small side, I've just used half of a bottle tonight with one coat on the Strat body, the plan was doing that then mixing a coat with grainfiller, sanding down then a coat on top, that means for me buying another bottle I am guessing.

I think I would give it a light sand and go again.

Dark stains on Basswood is a hard thing to get right. If you stop sanding after 120 grit there could be some slight sanding marks & scratches to deal with which makes us all move on up to 180 to smooth them out. Problem is the stain works better at 120 than after 180 so the trick is to get it as good as you can at the coarser grit. Another trick is to wipe the body down with water in a just damp rag 12 - 24 hours before you intend staining as that makes the fibres in Basswood stick up, perfect for absorbing more colour yet most folks sand again to make things even smoother and then try applying stain with poor results.

Tend to find it is better to start staining on a rougher bit of timber and add more top coats to help level and smooth things out.

Quick initial clean up of the binding. Certainly makes it look a lot better.

Tried an area with some from some of the little I have of the deep colour coat I had left to see how much more colour the body would take. Quickly came to the conclusion that it would take bottles of the stuff to get it as dark I would ideally like, so going to stop here.

Looks better after a days drying and seems to be getting a similar finish as other projects using BMW.

Also included a picture of my "simple" binding cleaner tool, knife blade-insulating tape and a cotton bud.


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