birds eye maple

[Mark Vaughn]

hey i was wondering if anyone knew of a good tobacco brown dye stain for be maple. i was in this museum and they had some furniture with birds eye maple and the way it was stained it looked like walnut burl at first until i looked closer.. are there any other colors that work well with be maple? i want to try a mahogany-ish stain thats kind of dark purple/brown looking, any suggestions? thx

[Jim Becker]

Get some of the various browns and mix your own, using scrap (and your intended top coats over the dye) to find your solution. And be sure to document each mixture so you can reproduce it later. ;)

[Chris Padilla]

"Scrap" BE maple? Is there such a thing??!! :eek: :confused:

;)

[Jim Becker]

"Scrap" BE maple? Is there such a thing??!!


Good point, but there is always some material that can be used for this purpose. Since the finish can make or break a project, even noteworthy "scrap" from BE really has to be "sacrificed" to be sure that the finishing regimen will work. For my current tiger maple Shaker style candle stand, I fortunately, had some curved cut-offs from the legs that I could leverage for this purpose, but I would have used a piece of straight curly board if I had to. I learned a hard lesson a few times awhile back when I didn't "test enough" prior to committing to the finish.

[Steve Schoene]

For a fairly dark color on maple, you may need a dye, since maple is so dense that pigment based stains don't penetrate. The alternative of just sanding more coarsely just leaves a muddy finish, in my opinion.

By the way, old maple may well have reached that tobacco brown without benefit of stain, just the affects of light and air over a couple of centuries.