Yep, I bookmarked that post. Thanks for weighing again.

When you use that lacquer without the abalone, is the grain still visible through the wood (can you tell it's wood underneath)? By "on top of the epoxy," I gather you mean over the seal coat, not over the fiberglass, right?

: I posted before that I use abalone shell sprayed with colored
: lacquer for inlays. When I sand too much and go through the
: lacquer I use a pen of the same color to touch it up. The first
: time I tried that the ink from the pen bled into the epoxy as
: you said. However, the next time I tried carefully blotting the
: epoxy carefully over the touched-up area and letting it cure,
: then going with precoating the whole thing or skip the precoat
: and go right to glassing. This worked fine.

: All that said, another thing I have done on guitars is to take the
: dye and blot it on with a rag almost like a drybrush technique,
: with the other areas taped off. If you dry brush very carefully
: in thin layers you can control the bleeding.

: I still think you might want to try a nitrocellulose lacquer in a
: candy color on top of the epoxy rather than dying the wood. Of
: course if you're wanting to accent the grain like on a nice
: flamed or quilted maple then dying is certainly better. In fact,
: I have plans to build a wood surfboard with flamed maple as the
: stripes down the board, and I want to dye the stripes, so we can
: learn or screw up together. Please keep us posted on this as I
: am curious to see how you end up doing it.