Wudtone Examples..?

hi guys,

A bit of feedback on Wudtone colour selection...

Speaking for myself - chosing a Wudtone colour for a new project is daunting and difficult. Unfortunately a few of the colours on offer dont have guitar examples, and those that do are usually strats and rather poorly lit (in my opinion). If you only do one or two projects a year, the choice of colour becomes a rather stressful decision!

To try and reach a decision, what I inevitably try to do is to think of the builds I have seen in the forum that use each Wudtone colour and then mentally cross-reference and look back to get an idea of how the colours look when applied on a real customer's (successful!) project. This can take hours and by the time I'm done, I have to start all over again!

Now what would be *really* great, and a real selling tool for Wudtone in my opinion, is a way to access each of the customer builds that have used a specific Wudtone colour from the Wudtone product list. Even better would be a gallery of customer build photos for a specific Wudtone colour (taken from the GOTM archives?) as an accessible link from the product page.

It's a bit of work to get this set up I know, but I think it would benefit both customers and the Pitbull business.

anyway, just my 2 cents.

cheers,
Gavin.

I agree that the colour samples displayed on the Wudtone product pages are too limited to make informed decisions, unless you're already familiar with a particular colour. And, with the huge variation in finish that can be achieved from a given colour, depending on wood type, application technique, number of deep colour/base coats, type of top coat etc., displaying a gallery of actual results from completed builds is probably the only way to get an accurate picture of what can be achieved with a colour.

There have been builds posted on the forums that cover most of the Wudtone colours, but there are a few that haven't been done yet. I'm sure Gav wouldn't mind DB using his fretless Beatle Bass to show off Conch Girl ;)

Gavin - great idea - I think there are colours that may be being underused as people can't see it on a guitar. I think the other issue is that the examples from the Wudtone site are all (from memory) using highly figured ash bodies as opposed to the largely basswood models from PBG... Another variation - to make life easier in the short term, maybe put the name of the Wudtone colour in the name of the build diary - that way you could search on it...

What's also difficult is that it is almost impossible to accurately show the colours on the internet due to the fact that the photos themselves are often inaccurate due to compression and color space limitations. On top of that most monitors have limited colour spectrums. You can only ever get a general idea of the final colours unfortunately.

Good idea Gavin, we'll get onto that. I'll try and make a start tonight.

Just thinking on this and the gallery - without wanting to make people submit photos twice or an admin needing to move stuff around, is there some way we could have a wudtone gallery as well - see what sort of finishes are possible with wudtone given the range of options available... Maybe just a place where you can post links to the guitars in the gallery for each wudtone colour? Just thinking a newbie looking to work out what colour Wudtone to use may benefit from a concise list of guitars in specific finishes.
e.g.,
Wudtone Gallery
- BMW
- Post 1 Link to DB's TL1-B
- Post 2 Link to Tim's YB-4 "Midnight"

Any thoughts?

Excellent suggestion. This will be a valuable resource.

Great idea, do it the same way as the kit examples thread...

Yeah I think threads cross-linking to entries in the gallery would be a great solution to the problem.

cheers,
Gavin.

What about whipping up a "sample selection" that you can post out for a couple of bucks? Like paint chips or laminex samples. Just some 2 inch squares on a plain wood square that'd fit in a standard envelope. Then someone would be able to ask for a sample of Conch girl, Black magic woman and Surfer girl to get an idea of how'd they look as a burst.

There'd obviously be differences when it came to wood types, and grains, and number of coats and gloss vs satin etc, but even a square with a single coat would be closer than pictures on the web.

Another idea is you could have colour swatches on the screen, but also put in a pure white square or a grey card, that way if your screen gives a pure white off the card or nice grey tone without colour casts, you are getting good colour balance.
I used to do professional print processing for advertising and magazines and can pick a cast pretty well,most digital devices like laptops and ipads etc have a faint blue tinge to their screens...

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/<\\/p>[]<\\/p>/Quote from phloggy on August 27, 2013, 15:43
What about whipping up a "sample selection" that you can post out for a couple of bucks?

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Phloggy - like the thinking, but my fear is that it would be quite time consuming and hence cost prohibitive. If you are needing to see a guitar in the flesh, your best bet would be via photos on the web or the next guitar swap meet with PBG'ers... I'm trying to find a happy medium that would allow for people to search for their colour /s of choice and find them in a straightforward way and see what sort of outcomes can be had...

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/<\\/p>[]<\\/p>/Quote from Brendan on August 27, 2013, 20:34

Quote:

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/<\\/p>[/<\\/p>[]<\\/p>/]<\\/p>/Quote from phloggy on August 27, 2013, 15:43
What about whipping up a "sample selection" that you can post out for a couple of bucks?

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Phloggy - like the thinking, but my fear is that it would be quite time consuming and hence cost prohibitive.

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That was my initial thought as well and I wasn't going to suggest it, but then I figured a bottle of Wudtone seems to go quite a long way, and I don't know how much a few pieces of thin wood would cost, but if you could get 100 x 2 inch squares out of a single piece (that's like a 50x50 cm square, so not huge) that you then post out at $2 a pop or so, that'd be like $200 which should be enough to cover materials at least. And you'd get a few of bits of wood that size out of a single bottle.

Having said that, it's not my time or money being spent on doing all that, and I'm sure as hell not doing the sanding, so I've only got the outsider's perspective. You guys who are actually doing the work have a much better idea on the potential of payback.

It's one of those things where people say "Those guys should do this! It'd be easy and they'd make millions." without having the full understanding of the implications. :)

Phloggy - other thing will be results will differ significantly in terms of how much you use, what wood you use (e.g., Maple is not BMW's friend), how long you leave it, etc., etc... Hard one...