Mahogany....

[tylereot]

I've always loved the way mahogany brightwork looks on a vintage boat.
With that in mind, I've procured a nice Peruvian 'true mahogany' plank that is fast becoming a Jaguar body.
The wood itself is pretty pale, and I'm thinking there are probably a number of ways of getting that rich brightwork look out of it.
But you guys have finished a lot of wood.  How would you get that deep glowing mahogany look from a vintage Chris Craft?

 

[bagman67]

My guess is marine varnish has something to do with what's going on there.

 

[Cagey]

I'll bet you're right. Just wetting Mahogany with anything at all darkens it up quite a bit...

... then varnish has a slight gold cast to it. That swipe above was just a bit of Naphtha.

 

[tylereot]

Thanks, guys.  This isn't going to be quite that easy.
I think what Cagey has there is African (Sapele) mahogany, and this is quite a bit lighter.
I should take some pictures.
I've wet it, tried a "red mahogany" grain filler (ew... pink!) and swiped a little tinted lacquer on some of the  scrap, and it's not right.
I'm starting to think that doing a more severe tint on the first coats of lacquer might be my best approach.  Then I can build up the color, or sand it back if I go too far.
Next, I'm going to try an amber tint, maybe with a drop of the red mahog to see how that goes.

Board....

 

[bagman67]

Cagey tried potassium dichromate solution on a mahogany body recently, which darkened it up.


Take a look at this:


http://www.bt3central.com/showthread.php?t=27343

 

[bagman67]

And here's Cagey's thread:


http://www.unofficialwarmoth.com/index.php?topic=15229

 

[tylereot]

Ian, that's excellent. 

I imagine those old boats wood has aged naturally to that color, but what Kevin gets here is pretty dramatic.

 

[bagman67]

Available  here:


http://www.shellac.net/Dichromate-Tannin.html


I've ordered Behlen products from Shellac.net before with great success - they have a 1997-era website, but they're quick and competitively priced on shellac and lacquer products.  THey're located in Napa so delivery to you in the East Bay will likely be pretty swift.

 

[Cagey]

I should finish that rascal up. Forgot all about it.

 

[tylereot]

LOL!  I was just about to ask: where do I get some, and what ever happened to that strat! 

thanks gents!

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Yacht varnish is awesome stuff. I'll stop short of implying it should go on your guitar, although if anyone ever did do that I'd love to see it.

 

[tylereot]

Yacht varnish is awesome stuff. I'll stop short of implying it should go on your guitar, although if anyone ever did do that I'd love to see it.

It's very tempting.  Spar varnish can't be as nasty as lacquer, either.
I dropped a note to David Myka, who I met at the Healdsburg show last week.  He works wonders with mahogany (and all the other finishes), and I hope he'll clue me in on how he gets it done.

 

[TBurst Std]

Yacht varnish is awesome stuff. I'll stop short of implying it should go on your guitar, although if anyone ever did do that I'd love to see it.

I dropped a note to David Myka, who I met at the Healdsburg show last week.  He works wonders with mahogany (and all the other finishes), and I hope he'll clue me in on how he gets it done.

You went to Healdsburg? Lucky you!
I have been drooling over pics from there. I am hoping to go in 2015 as I could not make it this year.

 

[Tonar8352]

Here is a custom neck I'm doing for Blackdog. It is a good example of the difference between finished and un-finished wood and also the impact of different pieces of wood. The finished wood was shot with one wash coat of clear nitro, them filled with neutral paste filler from LMI.
Then it was finished with old school 680 nitro. The raw wood will be polished and finished with a hand rubbed oil finish.  Notice the small wing pieces on the edge of the headstock, they are much darker than the wood on the neck and the finished wood is darker than the unfinished.

 

[tylereot]

Thanks, Tonar, that reinforces my thinking that I will need to do something to get more color out of the wood.  I'm going to hunt up some nasty orange chemicals.
Sweet looking neck, too, by the way.

 

[stubhead]

I think your first instinct was correct, that boat is redder than any samples of (yes, even wet!) mahogany that I've seen. I know that fine cabinet makers & the guys who do the custom yacht cabinetry have a whole rack full of different tints, mixers, shaders, bleach and such - because the woodwork on a 50-million dollar tugboat needs to match, and wood doesn't. Match, that is.

http://list25.com/25-most-expensive-yachts-ever-built/

Why yours turned pink, I can't tell you without dicking with it myself. But if you wanna jump down that rabbit-hole, first you need a bunch of little bottles, 1 oz is fine, and a few eyedroppers. My instinct would be try maybe 1 part blue to 10 parts of your pinko red. And if shading it just a bit towards purple seems like a step in the right direction - DON'T put another drop of blue in there, just label it and start another bottle with 2 parts blue to 10 parts red. The only way to know you're going too far is to... go too far. And if you put yourself in the position of trying to pour lots more red in there to "fix" it, god save the queen. You NEVER want to mix a big batch until your recipe is DONE and you know what it's for. When you start "fixing" stuff you usually end up with four big jugs of grayish muddy brown - and no dye left.

Black will darken red but it's incredibly strong. Just a guess, but I'd say if you mix 1 part black to 10 parts red it'll come out a very dark muddy brown. 30 to 1 is more like it. You're dealing with both hue and intensity, here, so:

On your computer, go to start -> control panel -> display -> desktop -> color (down in the bottom right corner). When you hit color a little screen of the primary colors drop down, So hit "other" and a neat little sort of "color wheel" pops up; if you play with that a bit, the whole "intensity" stuff starts to make sense. 

I would never use marine varnish or marine epoxy on a guitar, they're designed to be slightly rubbery and flexible in order to avoid cracking. They trade away a good bit of hardness to get the never-really-dry flexibility. Jaco Pastorius was wrong. Use guitar finishes on guitars, they already have that stuff figured out. Unless you maybe want that nubbly black spray-on truck-liner finish on your guitar....

 

[tylereot]

One thing I'm learning is that light darkens mahogany, just like it does most woods.  So what I'm trying to do is mimic the effect of decades of exposure in a matter of days.  I assume the dichromate actually does something like that.

Here's a couple more examples
1970's firebird bass

An original '67 V... you can see how it's darkened in different areas naturally...

A friend of mine used those examples to inspire the guy who finished his Firebird bass...
Maybe a little too 'Gibson red'...

He used black grain filler, which is a little too dark for what I'm looking for.

 

[Cagey]

One thing I'm learning is that light darkens mahogany, just like it does most woods.  So what I'm trying to do is mimic the effect of decades of exposure in a matter of days.  I assume the dichromate actually does something like that.

That's exactly what it does, only it doesn't take days, it takes less than an hour.

 

[Ddbltrbl]

Well, here is area where I do have some experience. My family lived in Southeast Alaska when I was a kid in the 60's and bought an old all mahogany Chris Craft cabin cruiser like this one.

My father and I completely refinished it twice over the years. We actually contacted Chris Craft and used their recommend finish. I don't remember the brand of varnish, but it wasn't marked "Marine" or anything like that, it just said "varnish" on the cans, but it was a deep reddish brown color straight from the can!
I looked pretty hard for something similar a few years ago, but never found varnish since that was that same deep color! It took forever to dry, but it was hard and durable. I'm sure it did darken a little with age, but it wasn't so much that you actually noticed it.
That was really a different world though. I know we burned through acetone and MEK like it was water back then, actually washing our hands in it to get paint off... I was going to say with no ill effects, but actually it might explain a few things now that I think about it! :tard:  :laughing7:
I tried to imitate it a while back with this mahogany guitar here. It is not quite as dark as it looks in the final pictures.
:guitarplayer2:

 

[tylereot]

That's nice, Ddbltrbl! 

I imagine the marine varnish on the chris craft had a stain right in it.  I thought about using a colored lacquer to get the effect, but staining the wood is just going to give me better control.
The pickguard and headstock are going to likely be of a red tort, or tort-like, so I'm thinking the overall mahogany might be best about the color you got in this shot:

I've been experimenting with grain fillers, too.  The 'ebony' grain filler is just a little too much contrast for me, and tends to produce an effect like this, that might hide some of the 'flame'.