Transtint penetration

[Ferd Farkel]

Black, liquid dye, on maple. Any way to get it soaked in deeply enough --

1/16" or so -- that light sanding won't burn through it?

[SonomaProducts.com]

Maple doesn't like to take color. I do a full strength wash of transtint black on curly maple as a first step to excentuate the figure. It takes very little hand sanding to get it back to mostly white maple. Infact you can see some samples here of one project that used that technique. I use water as a base but it is the same story for alcohol.

proud of this finish by the way.

What are you trying to accomplish?

[Ferd Farkel]

Nice, good to see someone shooting for depth.

Black stain that doesn't muddy the grain, that shows off PVC resin inlay. Transtint in water doesn't stick to plastic as much as Transtint in alcohol (good), but the color on maple is more red-black than black-black (not so good). Still have a few minor bugs to work out.

[Sonny]

Avoid sanding so aggressively. Just what are you sanding, the raised wood fibers, nibs and such? To avoid as many nibs, like raised wood fibers, wipe your piece with just alcohol first, to get those nibs to rise, then sand them. Repeat this process if need be. This way, there won't be so many to sand after applying the dye stain.

Beyond the nibs and such, the stained piece should, ideally, not need to be sanded.

Sonny

[tiredofspam]

Nice table. Curious, did you turn the legs on a lathe, or do them by hand or router table?

> Very proud of this finish by the way.

[SonomaProducts.com]

Well... he said sheepishly... this was a kit from Bartleys Collections.

I bough the kit as part of my competitive research; I am going int the kit business hopefully. Then I wanted to do a real world test of a curly maple finish I have been working on. So I built the kit to testthe finish on a real piece. So I am super happy and proud of the finish but all the milling was done by the guys as

m

[SonomaProducts.com]

[SonomaProducts.com]

You can do second coats and it will darken. The color will look very different once you apply some lacquer or shellac or whatever. Dramaticially different. Dye colors always look like a mistake, dull, gray, flat until you hitthem with some film finish or oil. Then they pop!

You might look into ebonizing. One method to do this is to dissolve steel wool in vinegar. Do a google on ebonizing. Here is one result

[SonomaProducts.com]

Look here for an even better method of ebonizing

[Ferd Farkel]

deeper, results are much more predictable.