Quote Originally Posted by JimC View Post
I'm something of an epoxy fan, used it a lot for boat building. Not much for my amateur level luthiery though.

There are ultra thin paint on epoxies, and I've used one to stabilise lower quality engineered rosewood fingerboards.

Whilst UV resistance is a huge concern for coatings that live out in the sun, I don't think I'd be particularly worried about guitars that normally live indoors and in cases/bags.

For whatever my opinion is worth though I don't think I'm very enthusiastic about epoxy as a body finish material: I'm a great believer that you should play to a material's strengths, and really decorative clear coating isn't an epoxy strength, unless you're using it to cover an underlying epoxy laminate. So if its a carbon fibre body fine, but I reckon there are better alternatives for wood. I suppose stabilising a really spectacularly unstable spalted or burled finish might be one possibility, but really that's playing to the strength of low shrinkage gap filling adhesive properties.

Jim C
Thanks Jim, I think you worded it perfectly. After going over all the comments and actually working with epoxy today I realised this too.
There is a lot that can go wrong with epoxy as a top coat and though it is all fixable, I would end up using epoxy just because I already have it and know how to work it. A pretty weak argument if you ask me, also there are far easier products to work with.

So I'm going to do a bit more reading into poly as I think this has the highest chance of a durable finish that doesn't discolour the underlying colours.