Quilt maple soloist & birdseye neck build

[ragamuffin]

The back is looking great!

 

[Sadie-f]

The back is looking great!

Thanks ragamuffin! It seems to be coming along.

Next step, I've laid a second layer of colors over the partly hardened oil, now she sits a day, or perhaps I'll screw up my courage and start in on the front.

I learned a couple of things, the tung has pulled up a small fraction of the black dye, that will stop after this first application of oil has fully polymerized.

 

[Sadie-f]

Color & first go of tung oil on the quilt top are down.

I'd seen this on the back, yellow is hard to make prominent over black, makes sense, I'm sure I can address in future layers.

It's looking better than I'd dared hope, will see if I can keep it going.

 

[teleme01]

thats some chatoyance

 

[alexreinhold]

Super wild. I like what I see.

 

[Sadie-f]

thats some chatoyance

Super wild. I like what I see.

Hehe, thanks guys to my eye this top was the best in stock from plenty of good ones, so I'd feel I was messing up badly if that wasn't showing up in the finish work!

 

[Rick]

The crenulatiions really stand out!

 

[Sadie-f]

I've added 2 layers of tung, and then brought the colors in a bit further, happy with progress, should improve as gloss builds with more layers.

I've gotta make a start on the neck soon, first I'll get some basswood and do a practice run on carving the blank paddle headstock.

 

[NedRyerson]

That is absolutely gorgeous.

Or, may I say, fabulous

I love it.

 

[NedRyerson]

I've gotta make a start on the neck soon, first I'll get some basswood and do a practice run on carving the blank paddle headstock.

Good plan.  I used MDF to do my practice runs, which had the added bonus of resulting in reusable templates (at least, the ones I didn't screw up!).

 

[Sadie-f]

That is absolutely gorgeous.

Or, may I say, fabulous

I love it.

Eep, high praise from a builder I admire (thanks!)

I'll try to continue not effing it up ;-).

 

[alexreinhold]

It's a personal thing, but this might be the first burst finish I really like.

 

[Sadie-f]

It's a personal thing, but this might be the first burst finish I really like.

Again, praise from someone whose work I especially admire, thanks!

In the vein of continuing to try to not eff this up here is color correction number 4 and oil application 5. I'm extremely happy with the effect on the quilt front.

Yellow, and to a lesser extent orange are proving harder to fade into the black dye. I'd be good finishing colors right here, however I'm also likely going to continue working on saturation of that yellow.

"Bursting" the hard maple back this way is proving lots harder (as I expected from prior work), and I may yet simply fill in the entire back with solid color. TBD .. I'm confident I can do that later if the fade / burst on that side isn't looking up to snuff.

 

[mayfly]

I really like it.  Nice work!!

 

[PhilHill]

Absolutely Fabulous!....Maple can be a real pain when it comes to stain. I have confidence you'll triumph though.... :headbang:

 

[Sadie-f]

Absolutely Fabulous!....Maple can be a real pain when it comes to stain. I have confidence you'll triumph though.... :headbang:

Thanks Phil, however my concern for the back is well founded, my prior strat is just 2 colors and the "burst" is simply blue on the E/6 string upper half, and red on the E/1 lower side, the two colors don't meet so the blends in this build are challenging.

The top / quilt is going great - the black dye goes deeper & differently than the solid colors. On the back, the color isn't sunk into the surface, so I think a real burst just isn't possible.

Best right now, however, I've just wet sanded, and the corner / edge of the quilt is now black & maple, and I think it's going to stay that way. The sides are deep black, should be easy to make that go well.

The colors are now all fully locked in the polymerized oil. It takes a couple layers of tung to get there, and now I think I'm 100% happy with where that is now, so from here (knocking wood) it should just bringing up the polish with many tung applications.

 

[Sadie-f]

Here we are at about 16 total layers of tung, with various color corrections along the way. I've now switched to polymerized tung which will be needed to get to a gloss finish. I'm at 8 layers of that, it  has to be done working outside because of the VOCs.

The only color corrections left to do will be on the sides where the black needs to be added in spots, and that's easy, I can do it anywhere along the way now.

As I said on the prior post, I'm really jazzed for the lower edge where I was able to sand back all the color, leaving just black dye and maple contrasting, the top edge is a little more colorful and I'm okay with that too.

 

[NedRyerson]

As my daughter used to say when she was still learning language and pronunciation, "so shimey!"

 

[Sadie-f]

As my daughter used to say when she was still learning language and pronunciation, "so shimey!"

We try to bring the shimey because we know the children love it!

 

[Rick]

That's a work of art Sadie!  It's shimey!