Hi this is Luke. I have just moved to Australia from the UK with my family. I am currently in quarantine and I have just got my JB-4M jazz bass.
This will be the first Pitbull guitar kit I have ever made.
Colour/finish - I saw a video about a method someone used to colour their guitar kit using rit dye. I really liked the look of that guitar he made and I was planning on doing something similar - because it will probably be slightly cheaper and easier then painting it. This guy used an emerald green rit dye over the entire body, then used blue around the edges and then black right at the edges do give a gradient effect. He then used a few coats of tru-oil or tung-oil (I cant quite remember) to cover the body.
I would like to do this with different colours for my build, hopefully it will work - The body is basswood so I’m not sure how nice the grain will look. I would love to know if anyone has done anything similar to this and knows how well it will turn out - or any tips for a better ways of doing it.
I am starting with the frets as that is all I can do at the moment in quarantine. I have got a drill coming that should get to me soon and then I’ll be able to do the rest.
You can certainly use dyes and stains to get a sunburst effect, but it does pay to have a lot of practice on scrap wood first, as it's very easy to end up with hard colour lines rather than a gentle blend from one to the next.
Your normal Gibson or Fender sunburst will be applied with a spray gun, so it's pretty easy to get a good feathered edge. You can get a very similar effect with blending dyes/stains, but it takes a lot more practice to get an even blend, and to get that blend in the areas you want it.
You also need to think about colour choice and how two colours will mix. With spraying. one colour will sit over another one without mixing, but with dyes/stains, you need to think about how the colours will react. e,g, if you use a yellow or amber main colour and want to fade that to blue, then putting blue stain over yellow stain will result in green. To get a good blue, you need to keep that blue area of wood free from yellow, but the blend area will transition through green.
Your 'clear' coat choice will also affect the final result, and both Tru-Oil and Tung Oil (very similar products in use) have a slight yellow tint to them, which gets yellower the more coats you apply and with age. So a blue finish with Tru-Oil on top will go a bit green (sometimes quite green depending on the shade of blue used). If you want to keep the exact stain colours and you don't want to spray on a clear coat, then use something like wipe-on poly (either bought or made by diluting normal poly varnish 50/50 with turps) which stays clear.
Blue is normally the only colour that you'll have trouble with using Tru or Tung oil, but do bear that slight yellowing in mind.
Basswood can vary from being quite plain looking to having a very strong nice grain pattern. You can't really highlight the grain pattern with a coloured grain filler like you can with ash, because basswood is a closed-pore wood and doesn't have the deep grain lines of open-pored ash.
So you get what the wood gives you and the look will be dependent on how well matched the pieces making up the body will be. Sometimes the grain patterns will be very different and sometimes you can have very dark and very light blocks next to each other, which won't look that good with a fairly light finish, and would benefit from a dark stain or a solid colour finish. But I've also seen people on here bleach the darker wood with a hydrogen peroxide solution, and got the pieces matching in shade before staining.
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