flyerman1202 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2019 6:23 pm
Would blonde over ash be see through? I kind of thought it was too greyish, what do you think?
Not
really. Blond is
sometimes rather translucent (especially in the 50s), but often this is quite subtle (especially later), and eventually it's basically opaque.
Starting in roughly 1960, the blond finishes got MUCH more opaque-seeming, with less wood grain showing through. My '68 Tele, for instance, basically just looks like an opaque color... I can't see any wood grain anywhere.
In your case, with the finish so thin in many places, it becomes really unclear in a photo whether it could be blonde or not. The clearest sign would be if you can identify whether the wood is ash. If it's ash, it's not a
definite that it was originally blonde, but it's a really good clue. I've seen opaque Fender finishes over ash, but they're
almost always Alder. And blond is only ever seen on ash (I've yet to encounter a single exception).
I've even heard of a few supposedly-original mahogany stratocasters, almost all from 1964 (this kind of thing is the ONLY reason I won't
definitively rule out a Desert Sand on a jag... Fender was nothing if not full of contradictions!).