The quandry as it was posed to me: “We want to do all our trim in the new house to look like a deep red dark cherry, but we don’t want to spend the money on cherry, so we think we’ll use poplar and stain it.”
I don’t like this. Making one wood try to act like another seems a little foolish. Not my call though, albeit I’ll be the one installing the trim. Bearing in mind that the painter isn’t going to stand there with a brush and take the time a woodworker does on a project, and that the tools of choice are going to be an airless sprayer and a half gallon a minute pumping out the end, if you were in the boat where you HAD to pick a wood for interior trim that was, relatively speaking, economical, and the attempt was going to be made to make it resemble cherry, you’d look at . . .?
“The child is grown / The dream is gone / And I have become / Comfortably numb ” lyrics by Roger Waters
Replies
Poplar is not a bad choice to mimic cherry. Poplar can be stained to resemble cherry and it has a similar grain, although it is softer than cherry. Poplar takes stain well. Being a softer wood, make sure that you don't stain it too dark. Test your stain on scrap pieces until you get the desired tone. I assume you will be topcoating it with semigloss urethane.
George
Red alder might be another choice. It's used quite often as a cherry substitute, and at least it starts off of in a similar range of brown. It's generally about thalf the price of cherry, but a bit soft. Slainte.
Website The poster formerly known as Sgian Dubh
Alder can be stained to look very much like Cherry. It used to be, and may still be, used extensively in mass production furniture factories for that very purpose. In one factory that I worked at years ago the most expensive line of furniture we made was Red Alder stained to look like a relatively dark Cherry.
Regards,
Kevin
RW-
7 or 8 yrs. ago when I redid our kitchen with cherry cabinets, I used poplar for all the trim work, including approximately 25' of raised panel wainscoating. I used stain control on the poplar, found cherry stain at Sherwin-Williams that matched the cabinets and no one has ever discovered my little deceit. If someone asks"is this a cherry kitchen", I say "yes". I don't tell them where the cherry stops and the poplar begins.
If I were faced with matching or mimicing cherry, I'd go with Richard's suggestion and use alder. It can be difficult to find poplar that's a consistent color -- often tends to have greenish tone to it or brown streaks. The alder that I've seen is very consistent in color, easy to produce a nice even stain on.
forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
RW, yellow poplar isn't the worst starting point for counterfeiting cherry...but I'd agree with Richard and Forestgirl...If you can get red alder at a comparable price, it's the better choice...Aspen would also be a reasonable choice, but it's not as available...unless you elect to have the molding milled to order.
I'm sure you'd discover this as you experiment with stains on yellow poplar...but it's important to add a little extra reddish pigment to the stain in order to get a "warm" cherry-like hue. The green tones in this species' heartwood tend to yield a drab muddy look, unless you counteract them with an extra pinch of red (burnt sienna) pigment.
Cool enough. It dawned on me reading that I know of a kitchen in alder, and it is a better looking wood than poplar. I will have to pass this on. Muchas gracias all, white russians on the house."The child is grown / The dream is gone / And I have become / Comfortably numb " lyrics by Roger Waters
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