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Were the grain fillers oil based? If oil based it's best to use an open woven coarse cloth like hessian to remove the excess. Also a cotton cloth just slightly dampened with turpentine will help remove the stubborn areas, it also helps to stop that muddy look that you can get with such grain fillers. As someone stated earlier that look is more to do with not removing the excess thoroughly enough.

Yes

I really want to go UV. Thats next

On oily woods, zpoxy picks up oils, mixes with epoxy, and then can darken light sap wood and bindings. anybody who has used epoxy on oily woods can attest to this.

The secret sauce is in the Etorre Squeegee. I usually buy the 12-18" wide ones, cut them to 6". Cheap cheap cheap. They will last several guitars. Wash with DNA. Get them at any big box store. I use Caruth scraper on big drips and ridges, razor blade (rounded corners, tape on ends) on finer issues. Grind the epoxy into the pores. For me, the final piece of the puzzle was the highly diluted wash coat and the adhesion promoter.

I found that oil-based paste wood pore filler works a lot better if I do a seal coat first.

I cannot attest to that based on my own experience. For example, these two guitars below. Z-poxy was applied directly to bare wood, bindings, and white purfling with no bleed in either case. The top one is Indian rosewood with koa binding and the bottom is Indian rosewood with cocobolo binding. There was no discernible bleed from the rosewood to the koa and in both cases the white purfling was unaffected and remained completely white.

The rosewood sets on these two were oily and the cocobolo binding was definitely oily cocobolo. I've also done two guitars that have bloodwood binding (which bleeds) next to white purfling and had no problem. It seems that there must be some difference somewhere in the methods that we use that would account for the different experiences. I wonder what it would be.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Nice examples Jay, beautiful lines on those ones.

All I can say is the next time you use zpoxy on an oily wood, take a picture of the epoxy residue that you scrape off. I never saw this problem (as bad) with EIR. But when I did lots of African Blackwood and Cocobolo bodies, def saw it. Run a strip each of coco, EIR, and African Blackwood through a drum sander with 80 grit paper. Tell me what u see. There is oily wood, then there is REALLY oily wood.
(nice work by the way!)

I think this discussion is helpful. What I would like to understand is why you've seen bleeding with epoxy on oily woods and I haven't. Maybe I haven't seen it because I haven't built a guitar with cocobolo back and sides yet and I might very well see bleeding when I get around to using one of the sets I have. Based on your experience with cocobolo, I will definitely do testing on scrap before go ahead with the pore filling on a cocobolo guitar. That still doesn't explain the different experiences with Indian rosewood and my not having problems with bloodwood. Maybe some minor difference in technique somewhere? I don't know.

One thing I've learned over the years is that if a procedure is meant to work under worst-case conditions, it can include steps that are not needed under less than worst-case conditions. I have an aversion to including steps in a procedure if in fact they are not actually needed. It's not useful to make a procedure longer or more complicated than it needs to be. On the other hand, it's good to at least be aware that the method that has worked for me on the woods I've used may not work well with woods that have even higher oil content. So reading about the ins and outs of different finishing procedures from discussions of other builders' experiences like this is valuable.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Jay, ABW and Coco will def bleed under epoxy. Seeing this happen led me to find a good sealer.