Firey Red Finish

[wazkelly]

Cheers, Scoured from cover to cover, Lovely Build Waz, I won't copy it verbatim but it sure has given me a lot of food for thought.
I read on another page where a guy did a Tele kinda "backwards", staining the wood first, then sealing lightly before grain filling. It sure was a big and involved process.....
Has anyone here done it that way???

G'day Hobie, glad you found the J Bass build thread. Colour could have been a bit lighter if there was more of the Colortone Cherry Red and less of the red fountain pen ink and it all comes down to experimentation to find the shade that you think might work. In this instance it is the only one out of 5 builds where it ended up exactly the colour I wanted. Mind you, these builds are like babies and you grow to love each and every one of them , even if they don't turn out perfect or how you intended.

For the 'backwards' Tele was that the one done mostly via video and used boot polish as the grain filler/popper stuff? Have to say that was the first time I had seen things done that way and did not absorb as much grain fill/pop as doing that part of the process first.

Thinking more about using Ash and maybe not wanting to darken the grain you could use the stain to do the grain popping for you. Don't for one moment think that I have all the answers, just experimented plenty and come up with a few pleasant surprises along the way. For example, both the EX-5 & EX-1 were basswood bodies but totally different looking grain where the EX-1 colour scheme seemed to pick it up better. This got me thinking overtime when trying to work out what to do on the flame top Tele as was so paranoid about sanding the thin maple cap and used the stain in two stages to accentuate the grain and reckon this might be the way to go where there is plenty of grain but not wanting to make it too dark. Couple of shots below to illustrate what I mean and hopes this feeds your thoughts a bit more....