Tricks to finishing White Birch?

[Prashun Patel]

I am makig a sofa table for a friend to match some existing furniture. That furniture is white birch and has been finished with an 'espresso' type finish. Before I invest in all manners of dyes and stains, does anyone have any advice for achieving a dark finish on a wood that appears to be blotch prone?

[Scott Holmes]

Dyes and toners. And a large selection of trial pieces; keeping copious notes as to what was done to each sample. Get the friend to pick one and you know your plan of attack.

Another option is to have the friend pick a complimenary color as apposed to an exact match.

[Nick Sorenson]

Chemical mordants are another option (i.e. Lye, etc, etc) Those may be less splotchy. The other option is to spray the dye on in a fog. Or easiest, tint the lacquer.

The only thing tricky about that is that you need to get the tint right. Too much and you'll have spray stripes and un-even looking patterns that way. Too little and you'll be spraying lots of coats to get the darkness you're after. But that's one of the easiest ways to keep it even.

[Prashun Patel]

Well it worked.
I used aniline dye. First I colored it brown, then applied black to get the right darkness. It's a pretty good match. I'll post a pic later.

I had previously only used transtint liquid dyes. For the black, I used Transfast powder. I did not like it. I had a tough time dissolving it completely in water or ethanol. We actually stock the solvent used in the Transtint premixed liquids, so I'll give that a shot too. But in the others, I found that they required a little filtering, and were really tricky to clean up - lots of rinsing required. Also, it appears a little too blue to me, and it did not spray well. I had to apply it by hand, which worked.

So, the question is: what's the best, easiest true black dye? The turners around here tend to be partial to india ink.