Pure Tung Oil finish

[ROGER LAROC]

Hi Guys
I am going to finish my Soild Alder Strat body with Pure Tung oil.
I have seen this done and it looks great.
My question is, can it be used on a all Maple neck?
I have a raw Maple neck and I want to Tung oil the whole thing, ie on the back and front.
I have searched hi and low but can't find any info on Tung oil on Maple necks.
Can I put the Tung oil on over the frets and then just wipe it off?
How may coats would I give the neck? I want to sand in between each coat, is this practical on the fret side.
I will give the body around 5 coats sanding in between, is this ok?
Any info at all would be great.
Also can anybody tell me where I can get PURE Tung oil, not the stuff like in Bunnings etc.
Thanks for all the help.
Rog

[Bob Menzel]

Raw or polymerized? Raw would give you a penetrating oil finish (Danish) and I don't think that's what you want on an instrument. A polymerized oil will cure/dry and allow you to build the finish. I've not tried it (yet) but Sutherland Welles has polymerized Tung oil, but their Uralkyd 500 seems to be the one builders are most interested in.

[Rodger Knox]

It should work as well on maple as it does on other woods.
You need to finish the fretboard before installing frets, it should be slotted but not fretted.

[David King]

My limited experience with Pure tung oil is that it took forever to dry (months) and it picked up a lot of dirt in the meanwhile. I'm not going to recommend it when so many other finishes are available that look as good or better, especially over the long run and will dry hard in hours or days. Well it did smell good and it left my hands nice and soft...

[John Kingma]

I've used Polimerized Tung Oil on many projects. It's very similar to Tru-Oil.