Sunbursting

Someone asked me to explain how I do sunbursts, so I thought I would just go ahead and tell you all about it because maybe someone else wants to know too! I have always loved color, shading, drawing, creating something beautiful, so perhaps sunbursts were always in my future. Some of my earliest memories with crayons and colored pencil is that I figured out that you could change the shade based on how hard you pressed. I found could add depth and movement to the thick black lines of Cinderella's dress printed on the page of my coloring book if I faded the lines into ruffles. Looking over at the other kids struggling to stay inside the lines with their fat markers I had a feeling maybe drawing was something I could be good at. So think that is the first thing necessary for a good sunburst: the ability to see and appreciate colors and how they work together, and to shade them out evenly.

As I started this post, out of curiosity, I asked my dad how he started doing sunbursts, not having anyone to teach him. I expected him to say that he rubbed stain on like Lloyd Loar did for Gibson, but his response was, "You know, I did my first sunburst with a torch." ...Um, what? Some days he just says or does things you aren't quite expecting and you're left bewildered. Like once, Nick and I were making a bourbon cake and I had bought Old Crow bourbon because it was on the bottom shelf at the liquor store and I figured that was the baking stuff. My dad walked into the kitchen and says, "Old Crow, that was your Uncle Max's favorite bourbon." He then walked over to the counter, took a shot of the bourbon and walked back out of the kitchen. Or another time I was sending a set of wood through the thickness sander, and he said, "Well, that will probably turn out really nice. Or it'll blow up." And then he promptly walked away leaving me standing next to the sander wondering if I would benefit from a helmet. They come out of nowhere, so as I said, I wasn't expecting, "Oh I took a blowtorch to it."

So of course, I imagined my dad burning up his newly whittled mandolin and, of course, ending up putting on a beautiful burst with it. Normal people can't do what he does, I don't think. He said had seen a cabinet maker use the technique on plywood cabinets, making them look darker and thereby fancier than what they are and thought perhaps he could use it for shading. He said it actually worked beautifully color wise until he noticed the back seam of the mandolin separating due to the heat, and then realized that ivoroid, the binding we use, is extremely flammable so bringing a flame near a bound mandolin would likely send it up in smoke. He told me he rubbed on stain like Lloyd Loar after that. He also said he used to make his own stain by scavenging walnuts from Granny's fields and boiling their hulls. Apparently it makes a perfectly colored brown stain.

If you are rubbing your stain for your sunburst, it is suggested to do the lighter color first and work toward the darker color, but if you are spraying the dark stain comes first. So I will explain how I do it, but this in no way means it is 'the way' to do it. I am sure other folks have better, smarter methods. As I say in my inlay classes, I am showing you my techniques because it is what works for me, but as we have learned with the blow torch, there are no wrong answers (or are there in that case?) so whatever works best for you is what you should do.

The very first step to a good sunburst is to make sure you've sanded out all of the scratches in the wood. Seriously, all of them. If there are minuscule scratches left in the wood when you spray water based stain, the stain highlights them like the Vegas strip.  That part takes almost forever. I like to check for them in small quadrants within a surface and only focus on sanding each area before I move on to the next one so I am sure to clear every scratch left from heavier sandpaper. I do that until I can't find any more, then I wet the wood to raise the grain, let it dry and sand it again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Hm. I wonder why my shoulders hurt? I bet it's all that yoga. Anyway...

When all is sanded to my liking, I do a three part stain with the spray gun, first with stained water then with stained finish. I begin with the darkest color. I add enough stain to a couple of tablespoons of water and adjust the gun to spray the width of spray I prefer. After the gun is adjusted to my liking, not too heavy-it will bounce off of the binding and cause excess stain to ruin the color distribution, too little and you'll be sitting there for ten years, I start going over the edges. When the outside of the burst is dark enough, I will add a second color if that is what I am going for. Sometimes I add some reddish stain, such as with the Nick Lucas I did yesterday, sometimes I won't, like the light burst I just did on the paw print guitar. Then I go over the entire surface with the lighter, yellow color. When that has dried, I do the same thing with a finish coat. I prefer doing the water stain first because I think it adds a lot more depth to the burst and I can increase shading that way, but using the finish after the water based stain adds more opaque color around the outer edge. I spray the entire burst with the golden center color. Finally I spray a clear coat over the finished burst for good measure. After that has dried I scrape the binding and clean up the edges/purfling. That's it! Except for yesterday.

Starting out with some water based stain.

Started out fun....

I have never felt so defeated and bad at my job than I did yesterday. Usually bursts are one of my favorite things, though they are stressful and difficult to do, I typically enjoy the challenge and had expected to get this one done in a couple of hours tops so I was hoping I could get to finish work before the end of the day. I figured I would get done early so the guitar would have more time to dry before I sanded and buffed out the finish. But nope.

First off, I got started only to find my favorite stain, medium brown, was empty even though every time I come up to work in his shop, I ask my dad what materials are running low so I can be sure to bring or order them before I get to the middle of nowhere Rugby and we are out. Since there were three bottles sitting there he didn't think to tell me to order more, but as I went to fill my spray gun, each bottle had about half a drop in them and a scant amount in the other brown hues I use. I guess had I been resourceful I would have gone outside and scavenged for some walnuts...But I hadn't heard that story yet so luckily my friend Spencer had some that he sent to the shop just as I was trying to eek the last minidrop from our last bottle.

Less fun...

The water based spray worked pretty well, but when I had finished, thinking 'maybe just one more little touch right over here', the gun spat an extra uninvited blob or two of brown stain right in the middle of the finished guitar. That happened a few times which means I either didn't have the air adjusted just right, or it was in the mood to be an a******. Either way, it happened again and again, and the only way to fix said blobs is to sand them out. But how can you sand that out without also sanding the other stain you want to still remain on the guitar you ask? Practice and messing and maybe just sanding the whole thing off if you must because the more you tweak it the harder it becomes to correct it without visible consequences. After adjusting the gun, sanding, adjusting, testing, adjusting, sanding, and a little more testing, I finally got the burst how I wanted it only to have the same thing happen with the finish coat.


When I sprayed the bottom end of the Nick Lucas (where my short arms can't quite reach) I ended up with a big black overspray all over the finally beautiful top. So more sanding, spraying, adjusting, tweaking, spraying. At one point the messing got so intense that I ended up sanding the entire burst off the back and starting fresh. I had to bring in the big guns, 220 sand paper, to get everything off. As a warning, that water based stain really gets in there but I simply couldn't leave it so dark. I believe that even though bursts are wonderful they should enhance rather than cover the instrument because the beautiful flamed maple (or spruce, or whatever is being used) deserves to shine through.

As badly as I wanted to just stop, put everything down, and go inside and lay down with the lights off I had to keep going until it was finished, correctly. Mostly because I didn't want this task to beat me, but also because I didn't want the rumors that my dad does my work to be true. He knew I was having trouble with the job and I know that when he came home from his gig and saw a half done disaster he would take pity on me and probably work on it for me and I would wake up to a pristine work of beauty hanging in the spray room. As much as I appreciate Santa Wayne, I want to be able to fix problems myself, figure it out, take that blow torch to a beautiful curly piece of maple and find out it might not be the best idea for myself. (Pretty sure I already know that one but I hear torching purple heart makes it crazy purple and I definitely considered it when I was finishing that purple heart ukulele...just saying.)

Even though I hated not being able to do well on the first try, maybe messing up is what makes life interesting. One of my favorite teachers said once about a less than stellar kayaking trip we were on that we should really appreciate these things that are going wrong because we won't remember the trips that go well, but we will be telling stories about this trip for years so we might as well enjoy the ride. As usual, he was right and I often think about Ol' Guessepe making the literal worst pizza I have ever had at a random restaurant on Deer Key, Florida. Despite the difficulty, last night I was able to go to sleep happy that I had dealt with the issues myself, corrected my mistakes, no matter how long it took (I started spraying the burst at 1pm, finally hung it to dry at 8:30pm) and even though I might have stumbled a bit getting there, I made something beautiful that someone else will get to enjoy and love for years to come.