Staining a korina guitar in Green

[osharan]

Can anyone tell me how I can do this without issue. A lot of the info on the net seem scattered at best. Makes It hard to work out a procedure where I wont botch this.

 

[bagman67]

If your plan is to do a transparent green, you can do it by mixing green dye or green pigment in the compatible clearcoat of your choice (a tinted clearcoat is called a "toner" in the wood finishing industry).  Alternatively, you can mix up a stain with the pigment using a vehicle of 50/50 lacquer reducer and lacquer retarder.  The retarder keeps it from flashing off instantaneously, gives you a little more working time and reduces the likelihood of blotching.  NB:  Dyes do not make for a good stain on darker wood like mahogany or limba. 


If you want an opaque green, you'll just use a lot more pigment in the lacquer or what-have-you.  You can also start with other shades of green pigment (Mixol offers several, go to their website or to Woodcraft for a color chart) and doctor with black, white, or other shades to get it where you want it.



The Mixol grass green no. 13 in a stain is what I used on the telecaster below.  Transtint (marketed as Colortone via Stewart Macdonald) is darker and leans a little more blue.  Both are compatible with nitrocellulose lacquer.  I don't recall about the dye, but the Mixol pigment is a universal tint, so it is also compatible with other oil- and water-borne finishes.  As always, test your finishing schedule on scrap before you start inflicting your will on your actual workpiece.


For a stain color coat, I would use the following schedule:
Sand to taste (220 might be enough, 320 is also fine, any more than that leaves too little "tooth" for the finish to take hold)

Apply stain
Seal with unwaxed shellac (I use Zinsser Bullseye from a rattle-can) or a wash coat of lacquer
Fill grain (the specimen below was filled with water-based Timbermate neutral, tinted with Mixol black no. 1)
Repeat grain fill/sanding until you are ready to throw it out the window
Probably one more round of grain fill
Seal once more with shellac or lacquer
Pile on the lacquer clear coats. 
Let it cure a couple weeks
Wet sand
Buff/Polish
Assemble
Summon the lightning from the heavens with your new implement of doom

Notes on the above process:
I was a little stingy with the clear coats on this axe, and I regret it.  It's thin, which some of the snake oil salesmen will tell you allows the wood to 'breathe' and 'improves your tone,' but that is arrant bullsh1t, and I really would have preferred a little better protection. But this was an early effort by yours truly, and one lives and learns, hopefully.


But I digress.


The schedule I would use for a tinted lacquer color coat is:


Sand
Seal with unwaxed shellac or lacquer
Sand
Fill grain
Shellac or lacquer again
Scuff sand
Color coat
Repeat color as necessary to get desired intensity
Top coat with clear lacquer ad nauseam
let it hang a couple weeks in a dust-free environment
Wet sand
Buff/polish
Assemble
Rock out

 

[Cagey]

That'll work. Although, for a transparent finish I wouldn't use any pigment. Dye only. Even thinned out, pigment is opaque and designed to cover, and with a transparent finish you probably want the wood grain to show off as much as possible. For some woods, such as Swamp Ash or Black Korina, it's probably not quite so important, but anything with any chatoyance to it such as a curly or quilted wood would probably suffer some loss of refraction.

 

[bagman67]

I'm taking my lead from Tonar, whose yellow coat on his sunbursts (at least on alder and ash) is tinted using universal pigments, and the grain shows through just fine.  But I agree that for woods with some chattoyancy, you'd want to use a dye rather than a pigment to keep from losing some of that flashiness.  But even so, you can see on my green tele that the pigment stain leaves plenty of visibility for the grain banding to show.

 

[fdesalvo]

I need some mean green in my life.

 

[bagman67]

Agreed, Frank.  It's good for what ails ya.

 

[bassetman]

i made an orange red mix for this on korina. i had no special issues. start at a lighter shade than you think you need. i use alcohol as the dye carrier. try a couple spots in the neck pocket to adjust the dye colour then just do it.

 

[BigSteve22]

Is there any reason not to put the color in the shellac? For instance, seal with plain shellac, grain fill, then a shellac base coat with the dye before top coating with clear lacquer?