MIMF

So this was an interesting guitar that was built to order. It's a fairly different design than I tend to go for, but it was really fun to do the inlay and really hell to get the glossy black finish to come out to my satisfaction. Anyway, the details... It's a mahogany top braced similarly to Taylor's V-Class guitars over a hollowed out mahogany back. The magnetic pickups are TV Jones Super'Trons in P90 mounts with an LR Baggs LB6x saddle transducer. These both go through a Bartolini MPB2 buffer. The buffered magnetic and piezo signals are sent to a blend pot and then to a master volume and tone control. The fretboard is Ebony pieced with hard maple and bubinga for the ribbons and inlaid with MoP skulls (note that the eyes serve as position markers). The finish that finally worked out was spraying TransTint black in very thinned shellac as a base coat with Crystalac Brite Tone gloss over the top. The back and sides as well as the back of the neck have a coat or two with Paint with Pearl red ghost pearls added which look great in bright light but were very hard to get a decent photo of inside (and it's way too cold to do it outside). It's probably overall the least fun guitar build that I've made due to the several finish iterations not mentioned here, but I think the end result was pretty good. It's owner seems happy so far.

That's a heck of a fretboard. Nice job.
For the finish was it a matter of luster, or color, or all of it? I'm curious to hear a little more.

Really Nice

Regarding the finish, the original plan was to stain the mahogany black and fill the grain with red--this led to all sorts of problems. For whatever reason, the deeper grain in this wood was sort of patchy so there ended up being some areas that just didn't have much to fill and it made the whole thing just look sorta gross. I decided to just fill and go all black and thought I'd use TruOil which has been successful in the past but either the bottle I had was getting old or I was doing something differently than normal but it was not coming out very well. From there I moved on to General Finishes' EnduroVar which had also worked well in the past with a brush application. That was coming out pretty well and then I took the guitar out in the sun and realized that there were some patches where the stain coverage wasn't as good as it should be. These didn't really show up indoors, but were very obvious in the sun. So back again to a stainable point. At this time I had the idea of the ghost pearls on the back, switched to spraying (including building a half-assed paint booth, and used the rest of the GFEV to put that coat on. Unfortunately, when I went to buy a new can it was a new formulation that for whatever reason didn't seem to be laying down nearly as well. I had seen some of Chris's videos from Highline Guitars and thought that I'd give CrystalLac Brite Tone a try. That finally seems to be the winner. The finish came out very well, I strung the guitar up and absolutely hated the neck profile. The customer wanted a C-shape, this was I guess what you'd call a chunky C (too much wood left in the "corners"), and since I tend to like a soft V it was horrible and had to be fixed. So this led to re-finishing the back of the neck which was ok, but not quite as good as I would like with blending the pearls in. To do this I taped off the front of the peghead which was straight black and upon removing the tape pulled a chip out from around one of the tuners which then led to refinishing the front of the peghead.

So long story short, finishing was a nightmare which was partially self-induced. I hate this guitar with every bit of my being due to the drawn-out experience of getting it done, but it really did come out pretty well in the end and sounds really good.