H's LPA-1. How much more black?

I couldn't get anything else to look good, so it's ended up as black as I could make it. It's actually a very dark brown, and the ash grain effect comes up really nicely in all but the dimmest light. In anything other than sunlight, the brown doesn't show much and it just looks like a textured black.

Only thing I'm disappointed with is the final coat of stain getting into cracks in the binding, which I'd avoided up to this point. Scraped and scraped without result, so I'm just going to live with them (and am thinking about relic-ing the rest to match).

Tru oil's going on nicely, I think I've got as much on the neck as I want, the body's got maybe a week more of twice-daily applications and then curing. I reckon it'll look good with the black hardware, although I'm now kinda wishing I'd gone with gold.

http://i.imgur.com/Lkd7w2I.jpg

Nice save, and it's looking good to me.

With the ink, you probably could have tried using an airbrush to apply the darker burst colours and got a more evenly graduated result. It's something else to buy if you don't have one, but if you carry on using ink and plan to build more guitars, it's worth thinking about. Anything more viscous than ink and you might need more than an airbrush, and a mini spray-gun will give you more even solid coats if using paint or lacquer, but sticking with ink and cloth-staining the base colour would remove that requirement.

Nice work H

Thanks guys.

Yeah, an airbrush is definitely on the list of stuff that I want. The wife wants one too, so it's something that might actually happen in the future :)

wow, cool result, you can make out the brown in your pic.
i have a 335 on the go with stain in the binding cracks as well, will just have to live with the ye olde effect

Looking Good H.

Not too late to switch to Gold hardware, just depends on how far your budget will stretch.

I did the black burst on my ES-5 with an air brush and auto acrylic( for the black, the green is ink). They are cheap on Ebay and handy lil buggers

Yes, I think I got my current air-brush + compressor recently on eBay for around £90 (A$145). Fine for general small-scale spraying duties. If you go for one, get a compressor that has an attached air storage tank (receiver) and a pressure regulator/gauge on the compressor output. The receiver means that the compressor doesn't run continuously and also smooths out the airflow. My first airbrush's compressor (both bought a long time ago and long gone) didn't have a receiver so ran continuously and the air came in pulses, which didn't help the spraying.

Thanks everyone!

Gonna stick with black hardware and see how it goes. Can always change later (after christmas when I'll have more spare money) if I want.

The ash veneer on this build has many small "holes" that the timbermate didn't fill and the tru oil didn't fix after ~10 coats. So I've tried the technique of applying the tru-oil with a bit of wet/dry sandpaper (2000 grit), leaving the resulting slurry on the wood for 10 minutes, then vigorously "polishing" it off with a cloth. After 3 goes at that, it's looking much smoother. I can see my (distorted, wavy) reflection in it now, but I can't seem to get a photo that shows how it differs from the previous pic. It feels much nicer though.

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Originally Posted by UpperCaseH

Thanks everyone!

Gonna stick with black hardware and see how it goes. Can always change later (after christmas when I'll have more spare money) if I want.

The ash veneer on this build has many small "holes" that the timbermate didn't fill and the tru oil didn't fix after ~10 coats. So I've tried the technique of applying the tru-oil with a bit of wet/dry sandpaper (2000 grit), leaving the resulting slurry on the wood for 10 minutes, then vigorously "polishing" it off with a cloth. After 3 goes at that, it's looking much smoother. I can see my (distorted, wavy) reflection in it now, but I can't seem to get a photo that shows how it differs from the previous pic. It feels much nicer though.

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Tasty H, looks like it will come up nicely!