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I want to use a transparent stain / lacquer finish for my twin Dobro project. I haven't decided yet whether to use white plastic bindings or flamed maple wood bindings. I've done two previous Dobros that had plastic bindings by masking them off followed by a light cleanup scraping wherever needed. This works well because the plastic doesn't absorb the stain.

However, how do I prevent stain wicking into wood bindings? I don't think that masking the bindings is enough to prevent getting stain from wicking into them. Scraping wood bindings after the stain is applied would likely ruin them.

Anyone know any secrets how to do this?

My first thought was to seal the bindings before installing them, but after the stain is applied. Maybe use shellac. If you use CA to glue them on I think that will work. Then scrape the bindings clean before spraying your lacquer.

The other thing you could do is spray your sanding sealer coat over the stain, then install the bindings and continue with your lacquer. Again CA should stick, but I'd test that first. I wouldnt do this and use Titebond glue but I think CA will stick. I only use CA on my bindings now.

Thanks for your comments Kevin. I've been wondering how to do this for quite awhile and Google didn't produce an answer for me. However, today I came across an article on Stewmac where Dan Erlewine does exactly this with having a natural wood "binding" strip on the top of an electric guitar body. Instead of having actual binding Dan masks off the side edge of the guitar top to leave it natural while staining the rest of the guitar body. He used vinyl pin stipeing tape for masking, which seals really well. It should work even better in my case especially since I will have a glue barrier between the binding & other surfaces. That is what I basically did on the Dobros I previously stained with transparent dye. I will test this theory using some scrap wood to see how well the tape seals the wood bindings before actually doing a Dobro.

Here's the article I found: https://www.stewmac.com/video-and-ideas ... eparation/

learn to scrape binding well there is a tape 3M 233 you can use to mask off. That may help but I have gotten real good at scraping stained binding

Ok, after considerable research, I've discovered several ways to do this. All require some scraping wherever necessary after staining. However, sealing the binding and using automotive pin striping tape or Gluboost tape for masking before staining makes the most sense to me. It's a lot of extra work though. Here's the best video I found: https://youtu.be/_ZnfAusjuNM

I'm not an acoustic builder, so I'm not sure, but why wait until the bindings are in place to stain the wood?
You don't have to do that with an electric, if you are adding binding.

Stain first, then add the binding...

In my case the binding and the wood are almost never perfectly flush with each other in places after the binding is glued on. That requires some final careful sanding, which would remove the pre-stained wood in spots along the binding. That would likely result in a big mess for me unless I'm missing something.