Help with lousy stain job?

[Hobo]

Ok...no laughing, please. I'm pretty irritated about this. This is a saga kit and I knew the top was weird grain and looked soft in the center. Is there anyway to save this? I used minwax stain precondition to avoid stain blotches and ended up with a real mess. Now the areas with the preconditioner won't get darker and that soft pores just keep getting darker. I think a wash coat of shellac would have worked better. Miniwax products sux. Is this firewood? I guess it happens.

[Pribar]

I don't know about their mandolin kits but Saga guitar kits come with a sanding sealer on them that makes staining all but imposable, try a light sanding, that removed almost all traces of the stain on a guitar kit a guy brought in after something similar happened to him, if that doesn't work maybe lay down a couple layers of shellac then add a tint layer to soften the look? make it a blacktop?

[sunburst]

I've never seen anything but red spruce do that. Could Saga be using red spruce for those kits!?

Once a piece of wood is dark colored, there is not much we can do to lighten it. We can easily go darker, but going lighter is close to impossible.
If you have spray equipment and some experience with it, the easiest thing to do now would be spray it "Sherriton Brown" and move on. (Spruce isn't very good firewood, might as well keep it a mandolin.)

[mrmando]

I don't need help with a lousy stain job, I can do one all by myself. This looks like a good candidate for blacktop.

[belbein]

Hobo, the same thing happened on my Saga kit. I think what happens is that they use a multi-part top, like people do a two-piece back. And they use crappy wood, too.

So, you have a couple of choices. As Mr. Mando says, you can always go very, very dark--either black, or nearly so. Or you can burn it in the fireplace.

You can do what I did. I sanded the sucker down as close to bare wood as I could get it. Then use whatever solvent dissolves or removes or dilutes your stain, and scrub the hell out of the wood until you remove as much as you can. Then start working little by little on the edges to match as closely as possible your dark center stripes--whatever shade they are after you do all this. It's going to be a combination of stain/tint/die on the lighter parts and sanding sealer or something on the dark parts to balance the shades out. You will be able to get pretty close, if you're careful. It's just always going to look mottled, which is in part a problem with spruce, and in part a problem with whatever Saga uses in these kits.

If I had it to do over? I'd just finish it as is, string it up and play it, and buy the next kit. I didn't go that route, only because I'd spent a long, long time on some lovely inlays and I didn't want to throw them away.

[sunburst]

...And they use crappy wood, too...

Sorry, but we can't blame our materials for our own inexperience. Until we run into problems like this we don't even know they exist, let alone know how to handle them. It's how we learn.

[belbein]

Re "how we learn": True dat. I'm not blaming them for my inexperience; I take full responsibility for that. I'm only blaming them for using crappy wood.

In fairness to them, the kit costs $99, so I didn't expect AAA grade. It's also true that the kit that made it to my hands may well have been a Saga "second" or "discard," given that I bought it on E-bay, not direct from Saga, and at a pretty hefty discount. And ... the education I got was worth a whole lot more than what I paid, too. So I guess I should thank them for using crappy wood.

[testore]

You can do a white face too since the white is opaque.

[Marty Jacobson]

How about Pelham Blue?
Subtitle: "Who let the Les Paul guys into this side of the shop?"

[Pete Jenner]

A black stripe down the middle could look good.

[j. condino]

.....Spruce isn't very good firewood.........

I disagree!!!!!!!!!!!!


j.
www.condino.com

[Paul Busman]

Embrace it. I think it looks pretty good. Maybe not what you expected, but interesting in it's own way. You've already invested too much time and labor in it to trash it.

[mirwa]

Sorry, but we can't blame our materials for our own inexperience. Until we run into problems like this we don't even know they exist, let alone know how to handle them. It's how we learn.

Agreed

I don't know how many times I stuffed up to get where I am today.

Twenty years ago I would have been devastate with that finish, now a rub Back a tinted lacquer and all is good

One cannot blame the wood or ones tools, the end result is what we make of it

[Hobo]

Interesting comments, all. I'll have to think about this.

[David Houchens]

I've only built 53 mandolins. Out of that number, I've had 3 that gave me racing stripes. One actually had a light streak in the middle giving a double stripe. Sand it back, seal with shellac and spray a dark stain over it. If it looks intentional, its not a mistake.

[Jim Hilburn]

How thick is the top in the center? You'll probably never get all that stain out but the thickest part of your top should be right in the center. Unless you carved very thin you might be able to scrape/sand enough to remove some of that stain, enough to go for a small center sunburst, but that's up to you to determine just how far you can go and still have enough wood to hold up.
I've been there and done that. I used an orbital and got enough out to make it work. And that's on my personal mandolin.

[Jim Rowland]

To my old rheumy eye,any wooden thing with a deep,even shine looks good. Were it the fashion,you could charge extra for it. Few coats of good clear and a good polish is the ticket.
Jim

[belbein]

[/I]If it looks intentional, its not a mistake. [/I]

If that were just in Latin or Greek, it would be a great aphorism for my Family Coat of Arms.

[Marty Jacobson]

Videtur quod voluntarium dubium est non.
Courtesy of Google Translate. :-)

[billhay4]

Heck, Martin, I figured you went to Sewanee or something.
Bill

[Hobo]

The first Saga kit I received was returned because of nasty black streaks in the bottom plate. The replacement kit I received looked much better -- but, I noticed a wide white stripe up the middle of the top plate, where the pieces were joined. It is obvious Saga is using 2nd rate wood in these kits and that's to be expected. After all, the kit sells for around $100 with a fully bound and fretted neck. I learned that miniwax stain pre-conditioner is not a good product for avoiding staining blotches on soft wood. I wish I had used a wash coat of shellac instead. Thanks all for the input on the thread.

[sunburst]

...I noticed a wide white stripe up the middle of the top plate, where the pieces were joined. It is obvious Saga is using 2nd rate wood in these kits...

Some of the best spruce I have has that stripe up the center. It is something about the sapwood portion of certain pieces. I've learned to deal with it when I stain, so as far as I'm concerned it is not second rate wood by any means. If the wood has poor stiffness to mass ratio or has poor damping characteristics, then it is second rate wood. If it is visually flawed, that is as important as we want to make it, but it doesn't keep it from being excellent tonewood.
This top is one of the best pieces of red spruce I had on hand. Any guesses what it looked like before I finished it?

[belbein]

Well, you have a point, John. It's easy to forget that the purpose of a musical instrument is to sing, and that anything that sings is fulfilling it's purpose, even without French Polish, inlays, and other geegaws.

I am curious, speaking of red spruce (since I'm about to start finishing the top of my octave mando, which is red spruce). Does it tend to stain splotchy ("splotchilily"?) like spruce spruce?

[swain]

I need to pharaphrase what my only non-music related hero, Andy Rooney, used to say:

Did you ever wonder,,,,,,why "Sunburst" and "Blackface" were "invented" in the first place?

swain

[Pete Jenner]

Any guesses what it looked like before I finished it?

White?