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I've never stained a guitar before. But this customer wants a white oak guitar with amber stain. The binding is going to be curly maple and he wants it as clear and white and natural as it is.

At first I was thinking stain the guitar before routing out the binding but that's not practical as I always end up having to scrape flush the bindings which would take some of the stain with it.

Then I thought once I bind the guitar and sand and scrape it flush very carefully paint shellac on the maple after taping off the body then staining it.

Then I thought perhaps just stain the whole thing and carefully scrape and sand the binding back to white.

Have I missed any options? What do y'all who have done this before so?

I'm thinking particularly about sunburst guitars with bright white plastic binding. How do the do that? Because I can't imagine they do anything other then scrape it off after shooting sunburst.

Good luck...

Haans is correct. I know of one banjo maker who uses lacquer to seal his dyed inlays and banding before dying his curly maple necks. He's very good with a brush. I'm not that good.

That's pretty much it.

Often sunbursts have plastic binding which do not absorb colour, which makes it easy (well, comparatively) to scrape off the colour.

Is there any kind of tape in particular that is well suited to this sort of thing or will regular masking tape work well when pressed in really hard?

Since this is your first time staining next to binding, I would like to suggest making up a mock up of the maple binding against the oak so you can figure out what works and what is problematic before working on the guitar itself. My last guitar was my first time doing staining. It was a mahogany neck stained to match the rosewood body. The fretboard was bound with cocobolo and the rosewood headstock overlay had a black/white/black veneer under it against the mahogany. I used a offcut block of the neck mahogany and inlaid binding into one edge and glued on the rosewood and veneers along another edge as a mock up and did test runs on that. It was a good thing too because I found that the green frog tape worked better than the typical blue painters tape at keeping the Behlen stain from soaking under the edge of the tape and that the tape needed to be rubbed down hard to get a good seal. It also gave me the chance to work out how many applications of stain would give the desired result.

I pore fill my guitars with z-poxy so I used that to seal the binding and the b/w/b veneer edge before staining.

A couple photos of the mock up test block I used:

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

I never found ANY tape that was 100% guaranteed to work every time.

Testing is always a good idea and I should do it.

I am going to fill with egg whites which are clear so I hope that is not going to be an issue. The guitar will be French Polish as well.

One thing for sure,

Yeah definitely going to need to dye and seal first. I just brush on a few coats of shellac before French Polishing. I've been using egg whites for a while now and FP doesn't seem to affect it. The stuff dries glassy hard.

I think a test is in order so that will be my next step.

Staining and then scraping the stain off the binding would be a big mistake...particularly with curly maple binding. The stain will absorb deeply into the curls, making it almost impossible to remove.
Sealing the binding with shellac or lacquer works well.
I do suggest that you stain the binding channels before gluing in the binding. I like to do that because unless the binding rout is perfectly clean, you will have glue in any small chipped places. That glue will result in unstained spots. In most cases, you still will have to touch up some of the stain using a small artist brush. It just goes with the territory.

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John

Good suggestion John, definitely will do that. IT's amazing how a small thing like a missed chip gets amplified under finish.

Based on my experiences, I would consider doing this.

1.) Mask off binding.
2.) Epoxy pore fill. Add brown transtint/colortone directly into your pot of epoxy. Do like 6-7 drops per half ounce. This is a challenge with tape on but doable. You will have some bleed to clean up, and the epoxy won't lay down as nicely with the tape since you wont get nice passes with your squeegee/or pvc card.(I prefer pvc card, cheap on amazon too) You might be looking at an additional application since the tape makes this harder to do.
3.) Spray slightly tinted lacquer, over the binding too.

Things start to look really bad pretty quickly when you have different stains /tints in different places. (ie, your have a different shade going on for the binding than you do for the back/sides/top.) My conjecture is that with this approach, you might say, manage to darken the sides by about 2x and the rest by about 1x. Assuming you don't go crazy with the tinted lacquer, You won't really notice it being darker, but sides/back will definitely have a little something extra. Also, keep in mind that things look better when people don't notice things like "ohh gee, look at that stained wood!". So stain it, but make it so nobody notices.

PS. I have never made an Oak guitar. Dyed epoxy in Oak might look dreadful for all I know. So of course, experiment.

Epoxy fill might be a great idea for such a job. But I can't use epoxy on this guitar. This is one of my Virginia Barn Wood guitars and as such are marketed sort of equally as a folk art project as much as a musical instrument. The clients want them built like they were made in 1910 or something like that. They have nail holes in them, wood-boring tunnels and so on. So they are marketed that way, as organic as it can get. Egg whites and bug poop for the finish. The stain is even made from the native Virginian butter cup by a local tribe - okay I'm kidding about that

The other problem is that I've never used an epoxy fill before so I'd be at a disadvantage at the start. But I genuinely do appreciate your thoughts, thank you.

Hello! First post here (I think) but I JUST bursted an englemann-white oak with maple bindings. It was my first time with wood bindings. Previously I'd just done Ivoroid and scraped.

Here's what I did and it worked pretty perfectly, and I don't consider myself overly talented with detail work.

1) installed binding as per typical process and cleaned up the whole guitar, ready for stain.

2) shellacked binding with a small brush, using magnifier glasses and taking it slow.

3) taped side of maple binding with blue painters tape. Stained sides. Worked well. I went back and scraped with X-acto places the shellac covered side. Stained those areas, removed tape once stain was dry.

4) found the 3m automotive striping tape at oreillys auto, $15 for 3 yds. But this stuff bends around corners nicely (the blue painters tape does not bend enough to seal off top/back parts of binding). I then taped off the top part of the maple binding with this tape, taking my time. Did the same for the back binding. All went well! I had to scrape ZERO binding. I liked process so much I thought I might even do it with Ivoroid too.

Oh and I only shellacked the back strip and rosette and those had zero problems too. So that tells me just shellac should do the job:).

Hope that helps!

Sam


Ps: white oak stained very easily. I didn't seal it...... stained bare wood. No blotchiness like spruce!

Untitled by Sam Van, on Flickr

Untitled by Sam Van, on Flickr

Untitled by Sam Van, on Flickr


With sealcoat:

Untitled by Sam Van, on Flickr

Tape the binding, then stain. I have been softening the edge of my binding with sandpaper before spraying, creating a nice roundover, and the sandpaper does a nice job cleaning up any little areas where stain gets under the binding. But in builds when I haven't done that, scraping with a razor does a nice job cleaning up the understain. There may be a tiny ledge in places from the scraping, but a couple coats of lacquer evens it out just fine.

Wow Sam that looks fantastic, welcome to the forum and thanks for the input... good timing.

So far on my test piece that's exactly what I am doing.