A Less Painful Stain

I cleaned up the streaky mess I made on my guitar a couple days ago using 100 grit sandpaper and then worked my way back up to sanding it w/ 400 grit. I wiped off the dust w/ mineral spirits and it's looking quite a lot better now:


The hanging thing obviously wasn't working for me so I'm just setting it down and doing one side at a time. Oddly enough, the back looks better this time around:


The front doesn't look half bad though:


My strategy at this point is to keep adding layers until most of my mistakes aren't too noticable. For now, in between layers, I am evening things out w/ 4oo grit sandpaper on a block but I'm going to switch to 0000 steel wool once I get things a little better. Once that's done w/, I'm gonna give it a couple or a half-dozen coats of the wipe on poly to get it nice and shiny and then I'm thinking I might go w/ a wax coat on top of it.

Next time, I am going to use a regular stain and then just finish it w/ the wipe on poly if I don't spray it. The combination stain/finish has really proven to be a pain. Regular stain and the wipe on finish are both easy to get on in thin and even coats but the combination seems to like to glop up a little. If I were finishing a railing, I wouldn't worry about it but hopefully, this will be a bit more musical in the end. Oh well--I suppose that's how you learn.