Carved top starting to split apart, please help me save it!

[Manisk]

Boiled linseed oil polymerises, so you’ll get a hard finish in the fretboard surface if you use that. Some people use unboiled linseed oil, which can harden over time but is mainly a fairly thick oil. Lemon oil is the most common oil used on fretboards and mentioned in guitar care articles, but other similar mineral oils can be used. It just needs to be absorbed by the wood to make up for lost moisture, but not remain on the surface so that it makes your fingers oily. As a result, lemon oil or mineral oil is light enough to evaporate over time, which is why you need to oil the board fairly often. Here in the UK you can normally get by by doing it once a year, but i know in warmer, drier climates, you may need to do it every three months.

I don’t know enough to know if bowties will do much good in this instance. I think you’ve had the worst of the shrinkage so sealing the surface should be enough to keep things stable. But you do want something firmer than wood glue, say epoxy, in the crack to give a more rigid filling that can spread any compression loading between the pieces of ash.

So its really a matter of preference as to which oil to use? by the way i may have misnamed the oil that i have, brand name is Teak oil but i assume it mostly consists of linseed oil, or am i wrong?

I did buy a bottle of teak colored oil stain, supposed to get very hard surface but i really didnt like the way it made both the ash and mahogany look, it lost character, especially the ash, now when oiling up the ash using the regular teak oil it really gains depth and a more natural color

You can see in the pictures that i've posted, within the carve of the ash above the low E, the color change in that area is from testing the stain, i can add some of the regular teak oil to the opposite side so you may see the difference

Some comparisons, the camera really doesnt do the teak oil justice



I will re-sand the entire thing when the final adjustments are done