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Help - First Neck To Finish


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To my esteemed mentors on the PG forums. I am nearing the completion of my first neck but my dilema is how to get a Gibson type cherry red finish on only the mahogany portion of the neck without bleeding into the maple center strip and the maple fret board.

Will taping off the maple suffice or do I need to put some type of sealer coat on the maple portions first. I would also like to slightly stain the maple to "pop" the grain but I am not sure how to go about this without bleeding into the mahogany. Would it be better to use a toner coat in the lacquer and spray the whole neck or.......???

Is my angst warranted or am I way off target with what I am trying to accomplish? :D Any comments, opinions, thrashings would be appreciated. Thanks!

Here are a couple of pics of the neck in question.

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j140/hyd...ntwmachines.jpg

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j140/hyd...6DSneckcont.jpg

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hm, there are many options, the way I would go about this is tape over the maple, spray a cherry toner coat onto the mahogany, remove the masking tape on the maple, then tape the cherry colored mahogany (not really necessary, you COULD just scrape the dye off the toner coat, but tape will make it less messy) and you could dye the maple with a wipe on dye. The main thing you want to avoid is using a wood dye with only tape, i tried this on a top to get a natural binding and the wood soaked it up which left an un-clean looking line. If you use toner coats they wont bleed and itll leave a pretty clean line as long as you do the taping right.

Do a search for "natural binding" and read up on that, it should give you an idea of what to do here.

Edited by Ledzendrix1128
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....tape over the maple, spray a cherry toner coat onto the mahogany, remove the masking tape on the maple, then tape the cherry colored mahogany ...and you could dye the maple with a wipe on dye. ... If you use toner coats they wont bleed and itll leave a pretty clean line as long as you do the taping right.

Thanks for the advice LedZ. That makes sense. I'll just have to practice on some scrap before I dive in on the neck.

Cheers

HG

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Hydro, I haven't done exactly what you want to do but I did just finish a mahogany body guitar with a maple cap in Gibson cherry red toner. Here is the part of the thread that's most relevant.

I sprayed a vinyl sealer on the mahogany back and neck, then applied a dye to the maple top. Even then, I had to be careful of bleeding into the mahogany. Since I had white binding on the fretboard, I sprayed some sealer on the neck including the binding, then masked off the binding when spraying the toner. After I removed the tape, I scraped the binding clean - wasn't hard due to the sealer.

I believe your cherry red toner should be sprayed on wood that has been sealed. At least that is what I did and seems to be a standard step in the StewMac finishing book for any Gibson cherry finish. For your practicing, I'd suggest spraying with a sealer (you could mask off the face of the fretboard if you wanted but leave the sides exposed. I believe the sealer will give your maple strip some of the pop you want without staining. After sealing, you could mask off the maple strip and spray the toner on the mahogany. I'd remove the tape carefully after the toner has had time to set but not completely harden. Pull the tape away at an angle. You can scrape with a single sided razor blade any bleed through - shouldn't be much. After that, you can begin to apply the clear to lock the toner in.

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Hydro, I haven't done exactly what you want to do but I did just finish a mahogany body guitar with a maple cap in Gibson cherry red toner. Here is the part of the thread that's most relevant.

I sprayed ....

John,

Thanks for the info and link to the thread. I think I have a handle on how to proceed now. Man, your SG is beautiful! :D You have just inspired me for my next project.

Cheers

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  • 2 months later...

Yeah, I'd like to see some follow-up pics as well (and yes, I realize that the last post on this thread was......). I'm trying to figure out a solution to a similar problem. I want to do my neck-through cherry red, but it's a maple neck with mahog wings. I was planning on filling in the grain with a pretty dark grainfill, but I know that a) The maple won't take the grainfill as much as the mahog will, and :D the maple will come out a lot lighter than the mahog, with the same amount of coats. However, I want to keep the color as consistant as possible, over both pieces of wood, and haven't been able to think up a good way of doing it, save from just layering quite a number of coats onto the maple.

Any tips on doing something like that, anyone?

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Yeah, I'd like to see some follow-up pics as well (and yes, I realize that the last post on this thread was......). ......

Xanthus, sorry I don't have any pics yet. I have been procrastinating :D on this neck and working on three others that are a little more straight forward on the finish. I will post some pics when I get back to working on this one. Good luck

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