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I am thinking of staining the mahogany neck on my acoustic.
I’m looking for the sequence others use successfully.

The stain I will be using is ColorTone liquid diluted with H2O.

So over all the steps I need to do are

Sealing, pore filling, finish coats.

Not sure if folks use the stain before sealing, or between sealing and grain filling, or between grain filling and finish coats.

If the stain is before the grain filler how do you avoid sanding through it?

I am not anywhere near ready to do this for real but will test it out on scrap mahogany until I am content with the results.

Thanks.

I always thought that stain needs to be applied to bare wood, the first element of a finish. I'm gonna learn something here....

phavriluk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 15, 2025 6:38 pm I always thought that stain needs to be applied to bare wood, the first element of a finish.

That's always been my thought too, though I suppose the overriding consideration is, "Whatever gives you the look that you want." Experimentation on some scrap wood will hopefully tell you what technique works best for you.

In the absence of other information, I'd go with: "apply stain, let it sit for a while, wipe it off when it's soaked in enough to give the color you want."

With furniture I’ve always stained first. The issue I’ve had with a guitar neck is sanding some of the stain away when filling the grain. The instructions on the can of sealer and grain filling is apply sand back to bare wood. Apply more. The sanding back is where it has messed up the uniform stain.

Just wondering what others do.

The nature of stain is to soak into the wood. That's not possible if there's sealer and filler present. There's lots more to be done and considered lest a perfectly decent instrument gets seriously compromised.

Somewhat like the yacht salesman said, 'if ya gotta ask the price you can't afford it.'.

I haven't done any staining in my instruments, but in trying to achieve better results in my pore filling, I've tried tinting some of them, which helps some in blending better, overall darkening, and increasing contrast. (At the moment I'm using AquaCoat untinted, and it works well that way). So you might find you can get where you want with a combination of stain and tinted filler. Here's a video I found some time ago from McPherson Guitars, filling a Khaya ("African Mahogany") guitar, using a very dark (pre-tinted) filler. I'm watching to see how you make out . . . .Bruce W.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH75BRs88_w

Thanks for the youtube link. That is informative.

Still experimenting but so far adding color to the sanding sealer seems to work very well. I was able to take a test piece through grain filling and top coat and the underlying stain looks very good.

I added 0.6 ml of StewMac ColorTone concentrated liquid stain to 18 ml of CrystaLac Sanding Sealer.

I applied 2 coats followed by CrystaLac wood grain filler.

It’s ready for the top coat now. I very much like how it turned out. It was able to handle the sanding between coats of the sealer and still remain pretty uniform.

I used the color Nazareth Mahogany.

I use all non toxic water based products because I have and enclosed shop in my basement. CrystaLac products have worked well for me.

Looks like you've done what you hoped to do on the neck-looks good. It will also darken under finish. You may already have tried this, but you can get a sense of what that will look like by wiping a spot with naphtha (lighter fluid is similar), which evaporates very quickly. Bruce W.