I recently purchased a thinline body off Ebay for a refinishing project. I wanted to make a dark-cherry/blood red guitar with black grain showing thru. Hardware will be all black - strat headstock - maple neck and Warmoth hybrid style pickguard etc... basically just like my other partscasters but with a semi-hollow and in red. get it? 
Started finishing 2 weeks ago and stained the grain black. i've decided to dye the body and then spray on a good number of sealer coats instead of filling the grain since I'm too lazy (i did fill the top one pass, but won't be doing it a second time to fill the imperfections - back is completely raw), i kinda want to go for the hand rubbed voodoo look (except the colours are in reverse - red /w black grain instead of black /w red grain).
Too bad the back has a nicer grain than the front  Step 1: Stained the entire guitar with black stain (this was a dark cedar coloured stain). Then sanded back with 100, 150 and finished with 200 grit sandpaper. The stain stays in the grain since ash is generally an open pored wood and takes this type of treatment well.
Step 2: Using alcohol based dyes bought from Reranch, I dyed the whole body in Scarlet mixed with a hint of black for a black-cherry finish. The dye was handrubbed. Step 3: The excess dye on the binding was scraped off. At this stage, I wanted to seal in the dye and decided to spray some sanding sealer (I used "Prime-It" clear colour sanding sealer - sprayed with a Preval unit.) A couple shots after the body was dyed and binding scraped. I screwed up on parts of the binding and didn't notice that it was scratched before applying the dye - so one or two spots have visible scratch marks 
Here's a couple shots after a couple coats of sanding sealer (while drying). The stuff dried to a satin/hazy finish. But it's already bringing out the color alot better than I expected. Can't wait to put the gloss on. I abandoned the idea of red top/black bottom and went for black cherry instead.
Unfortunately, the sealer was kinda fucked and i forgot that it was water based - i mixed it with solvent instead which really fucked it up. So I had to sand everything back and restart. After a good few days of work, here's the current progress: This time I used a lacquer sanding sealer instead - worked MUCH better. The humidity's been a bit high in the past couple of days - so still waiting to put on more coats of clearcoat. This is after around 1 can of clear coat. 3 more cans to go then it's the long 30 day wait before wet sanding and buffing. Here are two pics while the paint was still wet: 
See how it's starting to show reflections after it dries? That means everything's going well! 
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