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Thread: Some lessons learned about applying gel stain

  1. #1

    Some lessons learned about applying gel stain

    One of my favorite sayings: Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

    Here are some things I just today learned about applying gel stain. In this case, MinWax Gel Stain, coffee color, on alder, but I don't think the brand, color, or wood matters for what I've learned.

    I have two display cases, identically built, each 34 inches wide, 70 inches high, and 14 inches deep, with all boards 1 inch thick. Since I stained them one at a time, I could apply what I learned from the first piece to the second.

    The lessons:

    1. Have lots of wipe-up cloths. I use old T shirts. For the first piece, I think I used maybe two, and they were both saturated with stain by the time I finished. For the second piece, I used about five, and went to a new cloth as soon as the old one became soiled. That's really important, because, as I discovered, the key to a good job is to wipe up all of the excess stain.

    2. I did the first piece in the wrong sequence. I first did the horizontal surfaces and interior vertical surfaces, then the exterior verticals, then the front edges. That might have been OK if I'd done a better job of wiping up, but I didn't, so gobs of excess stain accumulated on the surfaces when I did the edges. I also had some splotches from my hands. (Nitrile gloves wet with stain, actually.) The problem with this sequence is that when I got to the top front edge, the adjacent horizontal surfaces had been drying for maybe 45 minutes. That's too much of a time interval. If I had gone top-to-bottom, including edges, no un-stained surface would be next to a stained surface that had been drying for more than 10 minutes or so.

    3. I had read this, but had forgotten: If, while the stain isn't completely dry, you notice a splotch and can't just wipe it up, you can dissolve the excess with more stain, which you then can wipe up. I did that a bit on the second piece, to very good effect.

    4. After the stain dried, the first piece really looked awful. Dried stain blotches all over, mostly, as I said, from when I did the edges far too late and didn't wipe up well. I discovered that I could just sand out the splotches, get the dust with a tack rag, and restain, spreading the stain a bit past the sanded part to blend in. This worked surprisingly well, and cleaned up my poor initial attempt almost completely. Very good to know! Lots of extra work, but who cares when your project is mortally wounded and you've discovered a cure.

    (A preliminary experiment led to a decision not to use MinWax Pre Stain, because the MinWas Stainable Wood Filler I used on the knots took stain much better without the Pre Stain. That decision I think also made the sanding corrections more successful, since there was no sanded-away Pre Stain to worry about. As an aside, the stainable wood filler worked extremely well.)

    5. For the second piece, my aim was to do the job right, so as not to leave any bad spots that would need sanding and restaining. I used more T shirts, as I said, and also improved the lighting. But the most important thing is that I went top down, except for the outside walls. Those I masked off so I could do the edges without getting any stain on the outside verticals.

    6. I wiped up a lot, much more thoroughly than I did on the first piece, and repeatedly whenever I saw any area I missed, or any new stain that got onto already-stained areas, or even if I just wasn't sure. I did the front edges as I went, restaining previous areas so as to blend the old and the new. And, of course, lots of wiping up.

    7. When I was done, I looked over everything and found a few problematical areas that had partially dried. I applied more stain, rubbed in it, and then wiped up. Then I wiped up again.

    Both pieces now look fine, but the second piece got there much more directly.

    I could summarize all of the above in fewer words, although somewhat repetitive: Stain, wipe up, wipe up, wipe up, restain as needed, wipe up, wipe up, wipe up.

    UPDATE: Thanks for moving this.
    Last edited by Marc Rochkind; 06-28-2018 at 10:02 PM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2013
    Location
    Kansas City
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    2,653
    Thanks Marc. I will be using gel stain on a current project, so this is timely. The more I read your post, I have to wonder if there really is an advantage to gel versus plain old liquid stain - doesn't seem much easier.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    WNY
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    9,648
    Gel stains have less tendency to blotch on blotch prone woods, but sprayed on dyes are best when blotching is a major problem. Gel stains work really well as a glaze over a sealed surface. In this role they are far superior to traditional stains.

    Practice to figure out the best technique to apply something is a requirement with any product.

    John

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