Hound

Your nephew is a fortunate young man. Good for you building it. In case your family is rather small I am available for adoption.

A planer with a helical cutter will plane figured woods with no issues. I have seen them run and they are great. They are expensive. I run a cabinet shop and own an old 13" planer but wish I had a 15". A trick that an old timer taught me is to wet the surface of a figured piece before you put it through the planer. Somehow it helps with tearout. I have done it myself and it works.

Thanks Drak. I have used Golden fluid acrylics and the transtint products to tint waterbased laquers before. I experimented and figured that out. I will eventually figure out a way that works for me this time also. I think that is is wise to seek good counsel on any matter and feel like I have come to the right place. I am a believer when it comes to experiments first. Why would a guy ever think about finishing all of his hard work without having a very good understanding of how it was going to turn out? I bet I have 3bdft of mahogany experiments in my spray room right now. I have learned that mahogany dyes nicely with the waterbased dyes that I have. Nice and even color. I tried several colors of dye just for giggles over the last few days. Yellow looks good. Red looked good. I didn't try orange yet but I bet that it would look good. My guess is that any warm color would look good. Blue looked a little funny to me. The pore filler thing is sort of new to me. The Behlen stuff was not clear to start with and todays tinting resulted in an odd greyish color. So now I have an experiment with some ugly grey stuff in the pores. Kind of reminds me of the primer on the cars that I had in college. I will get a hold of some clear stuff and try tinting that. Next I have to figure out if I want to fill the pores before or after staining. My guess is that it will work better staining after filling. If you don't keep trying diffiult things you never learn anything! Hound

Can either one of you guys point me in the direction of your favorite filler. I tried some Behlen waterbased stuff today that I tried to tint black. It was rather thin and I did not really like working with it. I would like to have a product that is pre tinted black.

Thanks guys for the responses. Drak those are better pictures. Thanks for the link. It does look a lot more brown in those pictures. I agree that it must have only the smallest amount of black toner on it. I want a finish that is a more black than brown. I would like to see a black(dark) band and the next band would be lighter. My mahogany is quartersawn and very straight grained. The bands are really tight. Perhaps if I fill first and then shoot it with a stronger toner. All of my experiments so far were on unfilled mahogany. This lap steel is my first instrument and it is also the first time to try to get mahogany some other color than reddish brown. Thanks for talking to a newbie. Hound

Hello everybody. I am wanting a black translucent finish on a mahogany body I am making. Something that looks black but that you can still see a grain image through. I have expermented a little but haven't been able to make any progress. I have tried a black waterbased dye. The result was a very uniform dark black that did not have any grain image to speak of. I tried a silver/gray waterbased dye. The result was still brown but with a grey "cast". I made a black toner with a water based laquer and the black dye and the results were not what I was looking for either. I am after something like the resonator in this link but a little more black. Would a filler tinted black get me in the right direction? Am I trying to do something that just doesn't work with mahogany? Does mahogany absorb the dye too uniformly to allow black to work? Do I just need to dilute the black dye more? After several experiments I want some advice about the direction to try next. Thanks Hound