This week's progress:
I have 5 coats of dye on the body and 3 coats on the head face. The differences between the alder body and the maple neck makes it impossible to match the blues, but I have it where I want.
The neck is a quilted maple, so there's a lot of cool grain that I didn't want to saturate with dye.
For the body I wanted an almost midnight blue, but still wanted to see the grain. I applied the dye pretty liberally to get the darkness I was going for.
I've begun to apply my clear coat. So far I have three coats applied to the body and only 2 coats on the neck. I'm only going to apply 3 coats to the back of the neck to keep it as smooth and fast as I can. I'll apply about 8 coats to the head face to get the same luster I want out of the body.
The clear coat application has been tedious. Apply a coat, wait a day for it to dry, the steel wool all the blemishes out. Then repeat.
If I go with 7 or 8 coats, I won't have it done for another week or two.
Apart from some annoying blemishes in the wood, I think it's coming along rather nicely. I can't wait to get this all assembled and finally listen to it.
