Popping Grain without Splotching?

[John Stevens]

Okay, I'm confused. I've read that maple and cherry are prone to "splotching" if you use a dye to give them some "warmth," and to prevent that, you should first apply a coat of dilute shellac, like 1# cut or less--

http://www.homesteadfinishing.com/htdocs/tech_dyes.htm

But what if I want to use a dye to "pop" the grain in curly cherry or curly maple? Should I first apply a coat of dilute shellac to prevent splotching? Or will that prevent the dye from having the desired effect?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Steve Schoene]

The "splotching" is the effect of popping the grain, its just that the grain isn't always very regular or fully pronounced, so its called a splotch instead of figure. The real problem is not when you have curly cherry or curly maple. In that case the dye, or the oil, will be popping the desired figure. But when you have almost plain cherry or almost plain maple, that's the time when subtle figure pop's to become splotches.

Its basically a matter of personal preference, and varies widely from board to board. Do large enough samples on scraps of the exact wood to see what you want. (I sometimes do a test finish on one of the actual boards, at a stage in processing when I still have thickness to remove, usually when I still have a few saw marks left from the rough lumber. Be careful though since dye can penetrate more than a light pass or two through the planer can remove.)

[Chris Barton]

As Steve said, one man's sploch can be another's pop. But, that said, true sploching is not as much a factor of figure as it is for some end grain exposure or in the case of pine, wide variance in density of the wood itself. I do a lot of work with both curly maple and cherry and can tell you that what you tend to see with these two woods can be related to two differing factors. With maple, curl is what produces most of the figure and some of what people describe as sploching. Cherry is more often a case of end grain variation being seen on the face of the wood where milling has cut across the grain. If I am finishing cherry veneer ply I use a sanding sealer since the peeler veneers have much of this cross grain effect. I don't pre seal maple, ever.

[John Stevens]

Thanks, guys. I've had a problem similar to what Chris described with cherry-veneered plywood, only I was using maple-veneered plywood. The project I'm working on now uses curly cherry, and I want the curl to show, but I was afraid of creating blotching that would tend to obscure the curl.