Well, here's a picture of the front. It's turning out to be nowhere near what I thought it was going to be... But it is looking really nice. The only problem I can see with testing the tinted oil out on the routing is that it is much rougher and wouldn't give an accurate representation of the final product. Also, the tinted tru-oil worked great on a piece of scrap wood as a first coat. It really worked like a tru-oil stain if there were such a thing. However, my attempts to add color to the scrap wood when it already had a couple layers of non-tinted tru-oil were somewhat in vain. The layers of tru-oil that go on after the first few coats are so thin that the color of the coats after the wood is already filled matters very little. Basically, unless you use the tinted tru-oil first, on the wood that you want to tint, it will be very hard to get any depth of color out of coats following the first few. The only reason I didn't do that in the first place is that I've heard alder can be very blotchy when it is stained. Is that an accurate statement? Anyway, I don't want to sand all the way back down to wood again - in fact, I'm not even sure how possible that would be with tru-oil - so I'm just gonna build the guitar as it goes and jettison my original plans. I'm thinking about a white pearloid pickguard and gold hardware with this one... What do you guys think?
