I just built a maple blanket chest that needs a stain that will work with my customer’s red oak furniture that looks like the stain is a honey amber. It just needs to blend in and definitely not match. I’ve tried a few mixes but they seem to be coming out too brown. Any off the shelf brand/color name that might work or a blend of off the shelf stains that might get me close that you might suggest. Thanks for any suggestions, just tired of mixing samples and this is why I hate to stain furniture. Thanks for your help.
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Unfortunately making many samples is the only way I know of the get a specific stain color, particularly if you are trying to match something. Maple can be difficult due to its propensity to blotch and the fact that it has a tight grain structure. Blotching can be controlled by a thinned out wash coat of shellac. In the past I would do a sample board where I stared with what I thought would be a given - i.e. wash coat of shellac, then do large stripes of various colors to compare. You might have to do this more than once to zero in on what you want. I usually use aniline dyes or Transtint in water. I would even add some Transtint to the finish coats of shellac or lacquer to make any corrections. No easy solution that I know of.
By the way, Tom McLaughlin has a YouTube video dedicated to this process on maple. Good luck!
If you go out to Amazon and search for wood color wheel, it will pull up something made of cardboard that shows you what wood and color you have and by rotating to what you want, you can see what to add to get there. Relatively inexpensive and could be helpful. I bought one but haven't used it yet.
Check the stain mfg's color samples.
It would be interesting to see this work live.
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If you are using oil based stain on maple the color intensity is almost solely conditioned by the final sanding texture. 150 grit is about as fine as you can get for the stain not to just wipe away and leave a light tone.
Interesting, is this becuase of the tight grain/pore structure?
Would you say not to go more than 150 on any tight species?
How low could you get away with?
That only applies to maple or similar woods and gel stains, mahogany for example will not exhibit that behavior and stain evenly but on North American hardwoods, the surface tends to glaze and the stain wipes away. Back in the days, I worked in a factory that would turn 1,000,000 pmp of sugar maple per year in colonial style furniture and sanding was key to obtaining an even caramel color from the oil based stain we wiped on, most sanding was done no finer than 120-100 grit.
I don't use any gel stains at this time, but it's very good to know this. Thanks for sharing.
The only way I know how to do this is to have a full or large pallet of stains at your disposal. Scrap wood of the thing that you want to stain to test on and start mixing ,keeping track of the ratios (measure and write it down) until you come up with something you like. Sometimes something straight out of a can works but often you need to adjust. If you do this long enough eventually you will have so many cans of stains of various types and dyes ,finishes etc. that you won't know where to keep it all!