I was very happy with the look, weight, and tone I was able to get with the old traditional style French polish I did on my first Woodsman guitar.
I used the thin outer albumen layer (the watery egg white part) to seal the wood:
The shellac flakes I used were the harder unbleached flakes and Everclear alcohol:
I like to use the Everclear because you don't need to wear gloves to apply it and the fumes won't immediately give you brain damage. I am not using any oil so the sense of touch during application is even more important.
The weak link, as I see it with French polish is the alcohol, well not necessarily the alcohol but the impurities in it that cut down how hard the final finish is. With Everclear a 190 proof bottle is 95% alcohol the rest is water. That is about as pure as you can get when distilling. Denatured alcohol which is often used instead of Everclear has additives to cut down on the water by basically adding poison.
I found a small distiller in Maine that does small batch distilling and then uses a molecular filtering system to remove the water leaving 100% (200 proof) Ethenol alcohol. I look forward to giving this a whirl!
Cheers!
Mark