I thought about that, but I'm afraid this guitar will end up burning the eyes of people in the audience if I keep adding reflective metal to the front of the body
OK Solfege, this one is for you. I took pictures of the finishing process as I went along, because I wasn't too sure where I was going with this, but some of the steps seemed relevant to the finish you want on your pine Tele.
First, here's the back with the steel wool/pence solution and a little sanding:
As you can see, it's easy to get the natural orange/pink of the hard growth rings back with a little bit of sanding, since the vinegar penetrates deeper in the softer wood in between. I could have stopped there, but I wanted the back to be darker, like I did for my brother's guitar.
I wanted something more subtle for the front. I filtered a bit from the original solution (which was two modern English pence and a full ball of steel wool) and diluted it with water, about 1:1. Here are the two jars and my test piece. Note that the darker bit on the right has black shellac on top, and I hammered the sides of a large washer onto the wood to see if I could get a fish-scale effect. This is best achieved by doing the hammering AFTER the wood has been dyed, because the dye has a tendency to blotch out when going into the severed grain.
Anyway, the blue portion on the left is the straight diluted solution applied to bare wood:
That blue in the picture is pretty much what it looks like in real life. It might be an option for your build, bearing in mind your wood might react differently. Make sure you practice on scrap, as those chemical dyes penetrate a lot deeper than aniline stains do and you're in for a lot of sanding if you don't like what you see.
Here's the same diluted solution applied to the top of the body:
Nice and subtle (and definitely blue), but I wanted something a bit darker to get the binding to pop. This is where things got messy. I started rubbing a black shellac burst into the body. That shellac + India ink combination works great at darkening the stain. Problem is - the yellow in the shellac counteracts the blue of the dye. Here we are, mid-process (applying coats of black shellac/sanding/starting again), with a view of the Rorschach cavity under the bridge plate:
It looked close to what I wanted, but I wanted a slightly warmer tint. I think that's thing with that steel wool/pence blue - it definitely feels like a cold color. I applied a bit of the cherry stain I used on my brother's guitar's top, then used regular shellac to get a bit of gold back into the wood.
I'll take more pictures of the top as it is now later today. I put a thin coat of laminating epoxy on the top yesterday, to harden it a little bit and get some shine going. I also applied it liberally to the controls cavity, because that body is still pretty thin and there wasn't much wood left between the bottom of the cavity and the back of the guitar.
I hope this helps!
