Guitar Body Finishing

Hey guys,

I am not sure how many of you are familiar with building a guitar, but I am sure some of you are familiar with wood working and the like. I am soon purchasing a semi-hollow body tele style guitar kit to put together. The body comes like this:



The top is made of basswood, which is from my research not the best wood to stain. So I don't really want to ruin it with staining and I thought about just painting it. Getting some paint from ReRanch and doing it Fender custom black or Fender Custom Dark Wine (very, very dark red). Then I stumbled across the method of burning finish as seen here:



So I thought about doing it and attempting to do a stain over it, or I could do a paint and then go over it with a heat gun and burn the paint to get a burn paint effect.

Then I found some information about Metal Reactive Paint. It is paint with a lot of actual iron flake in it and it will react like iron does. You can paint it then go over it with a rust solution and make it rust to turn it into something similar to this:



I was just wondering what you guys thought and if you guys had any information about cool finishes for wood.

 

All I can say is that a dark wine finish with a white 3-ply pickguard would look sexy af man. What kind of pickups are you planning on putting in it?

 

my uncle makes guitars, you should get a wooden mold and make a couple and test out different styles of paint.

go to the local depo store and get some paint you like, and there is a few diff types of a gloss you can use to paint over that, and it will give it that metalic shine/glassy look you see on guitars.


if you cba doing that then buy a peice of wood just like the guitar is made from and practice painting on that first

 

I am going to stick with the (most likely cheap) humbuckers that come with the kit for now, until I can sell my college books then I am probably going to try and get a set of Golden Age humbuckers from StewMac or a set of the offset humbuckers from StewMac. I am not sure yet. I am going to have to do some more research. I am looking for a sort of blues-y sound.

If I paint it I'll probably get some clear nitrocellulose lacquer because it is fairly quick dry. I could seal it off with gunstock oil but it takes like 2 months to cure and I am not up for curing for two months. I want to play it within a couple days of getting it.