Gryphon,

Beautiful piece of wood. Are you doing the woodwork yourself? What action are you bedding into it?

It will be a very blonde stock unless you tone it down a tad. If you are going to stain it, make sure you use aniline dyes instead of pigment based stain, since pigment stains will muddy the grain. With a piece of fiddle maple like that with the right finish, it will be magnificent. Maple is one of my favorite timbers, I have used a lot of it in my profession.

Actually, if it is a very hard piece of maple, you can get a very high gloss finish without even using any top coat at all. Keep polishing with finer grits of sand paper till you get up to 12,000, but of course you have no moisture protection, but it is mind blowingly gorgeous.

Lynn Miller