[brose1313]

Hello everyone - I am currently building my first guitar and really enjoying it. I have run into a little snag that I was hoping you guys could help me with. The top of the guitar is two joined pieces of beautifully colored brown maple. The plan is to give the guitar a natural finished to show the character of the wood. The issue I have is at the point of the top join, the two pieces are not identically colored even though they come from the same board. The left side is very light while the right has a slight brown/reddish tint. Is there a easy way to uniform the color of the guitar top that any of you have used before?

Thanks for all your help.

 

[Steve Neul]

The only thing you could do to bring the color the same is tint the lighter side with an dyes. The dye would have to be very very thin and sprayed on. You would have to mask off the darker side to keep from darkening that side. If you have some scraps from when you cut it out you could use to test the dye for color before putting it on the guitar. If you use the guitar for practice there is no telling how many times you would have to sand it off before you got the color right. It's just something that takes a lot of tinkering.

 

[phinds]

brose, do you happen to know what species "brown maple" is? I've never heard of it before.

Thanks

 

[Quickstep]

This probably does little to answer your actual quesiton.



I think three things when I see your picture:

Thing 1) The guitar looks awesome (as it is)

Thing 2) You'll probably never get an exact match

Thing 3) It will probably even out in time with some exposure to light etc....

Your guitar looks great. One of the things I like about wood is the variation in the grain and color.

 

[Quickstep]

OK, two more thoughts.

If you want to disguise the difference between the two halves, you could put in a piece of abalone.

http://www.prsguitars.com/santana/

or-

You could put on a Bigsby


Seriously, though, it looks great the way it is.