I'm gonna go on a bit of rant here...
I've tried using the stuff, and my experience with the Timbermate filler and guitar bodies has been less than thrilling. If I were repairing wood windows/doors/mouldings or other heavily distressed and/or open-grained wood for later coating in general-purpose household finishing, it would be great. It's a fine product that performs as advertised. You're just looking for a relatively consistent shape/surface that doesn't draw the eye, and that'll get you there. But, for instruments exposed to close scrutiny, you want something finer.
The problem with the stuff is it's water-based. Wood and water don't work and play well together when it comes to fine finishing. Water raises the grain due to absorption and subsequent expansion. Timbermate says their concoction doesn't shrink, and that may be true, but riddle me this: if the wood expands because it's been exposed to water, what happens when the wood dries out and shrinks back to party dress size but the filler doesn't?
Finally, according to Timbermate, it's water-soluable
even after it dries. That's just asking for trouble. Sweat, beer, spit, riot control measures - most liquids you will get on a guitar have more water in them than anything else.
Now how much would you pay?
I'm not saying don't use Timbermate, I'm saying don't use water-based wood filler. In fact, don't use wood filler. You want a solvent-based
grain filler. It's a similar but different thing. The difference is mainly the absence of water and the size of the of the solids used to do the filling. Grain-filling solids have to be much finer to get into the grain because those are smaller spaces than cracks and nail holes. Plus, the solvents won't expand the wood, so there's no shrink-back. There are numerous suitable products out there, but you probably won't find them at the local home improvement store. You'll need to go to a woodworker's or luthier's supply house (or the same thing online).
If you
must use a water-based filler for religious, political or mental impairment reasons, there is a solution. You can block wood's tendency to absorb things by sealing it. Of course, you don't want to use a water-based sealer for the reasons already presented, so once again, you're hell-bound for alleged crimes against humanity.
As for oil finishes... they're fine for fancy wooden display bowls full of plastic fruit, picture frames, or that cat you carved out of Cherry for your mother. But, for anything you're gonna handle or move around constantly they're not very durable. On the plus side, they're easily repairable, which is a Good Thing because they need a lotta repair if you want them to look presentable. They're a relatively soft finish that doesn't stand up well to abuse.
The argument that "they're used on gun stocks so they can't be
too useless!" is fulla holes. For one thing, they're
not used on modern gunstocks - they use polyurethane, as god intended. They used to use oil back 1,000 years ago when there was no such thing as poly, but then, soldiers used to have to search pretty hard for something to do during those weeks-long periods of boredom between the 5 minutes of pants-shittingly terror-filled bursts of activity that occurred when they finally engaged an enemy of some sort, like a rustling noise in a bush. Plus, you generally can't completely disassemble your gun to refinish the stock out in the field, so you need something you can just wipe on. Finally, it was just to keep the stock from rotting due to exposure, not stand up for bright lights and photo ops.
And that's my curmudgeonly input for the day :laughing7:
