Its been warm enough, and there's been plenty of progress on the color of this thing, so I feel like I can show you some of what I've done. They're bad pictures because they're all taken at night and the lighting is from a CFL bulb. So yeah, these pics don't do the bass any justice. I'll have nice ones when its all done.
I used some dye from stewmac to get my results. When the body was initially prepped with water, it was a lot easier to see what my results were going to look like. I started out by using the balled up t-shirt method, but ended up just going with a paintbrush. I gotta say, I'm a lot happier with the paint brush method. using sandpaper helped clean it up and look like a better fade.
Here's the body with some of the dye on it after it dried out:
I started adding poly later on. I did the first coat when it was about 35F out, so it came out pretty cloudy. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of it, but I was pretty unhappy with the result anyway. Since it was the first coat, I wasn't too worried about sanding through with the 600 grit, as long as the dyed areas didn't get affected, which they didn't. Here's the 2nd coat done at 45F:
As you can kinda see, there's no cloudiness at all, but the importance of a dust free environment shows. When I sand with 600 grit, any particles of dust get swept away, but when I do my final coat, Its going to be in a dust free atmosphere, as the final coat will be pretty thick. I'm planning on putting 7 coats of poly on this thing. There are 4 right now. after about the 3rd one, I noticed that it was really starting to look like there was a piece of glass covering it. I'm pretty excited about the results!
The headstock and neck each have one coat of poly over them. The headstock is looking ugly, so I'm going to hold off for a bit until I figure out what I want to do with it. The neck came out pretty sweet though. I'd like to put one or two more coats of poly on it before I show off any pics though.
When I do this, btw, I do about a week between coats. The reasoning behind that isn't because of the timing. Heck, i'd do it every 3 days if i could. Unfortunately New England weather likes to change daily. So the following week after it was 50F, it would be down to -9F or some crap like that. Its a long process, but I'm glad I'm taking my time!