Inconsistent staining on body due to different pieces of wood

[jtoh]

Help! Newbie here, working on a telecaster with alder body.

I’ve followed the instructions and sanded down the body with 240 grit. Stained with first coat Dingotone butterscotch yesterday and today, it’s very clear the woods absorb differently. In fact, it looks like the lighter tone piece didn’t absorb much. I would post the images except it doesn’t look like there’s an option?

[wazkelly]

Hi jtoh,
Sanding past 180 can sometimes polish the wood to a point that it won't readily absorb stain.
Without pics it is hard to offer advice other than lightly sand back after 7 days to allow each coat a chance to cure and keep applying the DT stain coats no less than 7 days apart until it starts to look more evenly applied.
I used DT on builds 1 & 2 on Basswood and it can be the hardest wood to work with for stain absorption. Ended up using all the stain and intensifier to get a decent all over colour. This was approximately 5 coats of each which can lead to dramas when sanding back as the stuff can take much longer to cure than what you might think.
For light sanding do not use 0000 steel wool as recommended as this can leave behind small bits of crud that will give you no end of grief on subsequent coats. Only way to go is wet sanding with proper wet & dry paper.....400 can take a lot off as can 800 so go the finer grit and go slow and easy, remembering to rinse the paper every couple oif passes over the work area.
Cheers Waz

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[JimC]

The icon with a tree about 3rd from the right does pictures, but there's a severe size limit on the forum which means few camera phone pics will load. I have an image resize app on my tablet and shrink them to 33% before upload.

[jtoh]

Ah I wasn’t in the full site to get the option to upload image. Here it is, you will see the the lighter shade where the adjoining piece starts.


I’m not going for perfect, just want to get the colours matching up across the whole body. Cheers

[wazkelly]

Keep adding stain as previously mentioned.

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[jtoh]

Thanks for the advice, I’ll keep going!