Some observed Blue tape behaviours.
I have recently completed two guitars/basses with real rosewood fingerboards. I have been avoiding the dodgie stuff. The majority of my recent builds have been Maple and mainly sprayed at the same time as the neck so no tape used.
I have noticed that when I do the quick tape up, on the rosewood, for a fret level, recrown and polish the fingerboard appears very faded if not washed out when I take the tape off. I leave it a few minutes and it is fine. I also noticed that when faded it had the consistency of soaked skin...a sort of cloudy loose appearance.
Well, this morning I removed some tape that had been masking off an area to allow a respray with poly of an adjacent area. This respray has taken 3 x 2 days between 3 coats sprayed 10 minutes apart each of the two days....so applied for a total of six days....with a total of 9 sprays over the area.
Under the tape I noted the previously sprayed poly had gone soft and had the appearance of the loose skin once a blister has burst on your heel. The tape did indeed tear a couple of sections which will now result in an all over sand after two days and a 3 x coats and wait about a week to final finish. As long as the 3 coats fill the tears all will be good....if not it will be another series to fill the tears.
Nowhere else on the neck where the poly had been previously sprayed was there any movement, tearing of softness of the poly. It has to be the tape covering the poly and locking the air out....or maybe too early applying and covering with tape when the poly has not finished venting the solvents....or the tape adhesive itself does cause the effect you get when you leave a band-aid on for a long time.
Just a note...be really careful using any tape....and especially removing it where it touches previously sprayed surfaces and fingerboards. I cant speak for paint....but I have noted this twice now on poly.
Note:- I did apply a layer of wax to both fingerboards and buff them up after about 2 hours and they look great now.
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Five strings of low down grunt is done.
Hello all, meet "Tip Toe", and she is done. Well for the moment anyway. Once five string stuff comes back into supply maybe a bone nut, better tuners, a good set of pickups.
She has a nice tone, and does the normal J Bass thing of having to have one or the other volume rolled off a little to get loudest setting. Sounds great though.