Staining Wood - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson, Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a video, one of a series of videos I'm doing to answer frequently asked questions. And today's video is about stain and how I use them in my restoration work. I don't recommend staining old furniture. Typically, antique furniture comes with its own color, which we work hard trying to preserve. But obviously, in doing repair work, you're frequently in a situation where you need to stain something to match the existing color and finish. So basically, I use two kinds of stains, pigment stains and dye stains. Pigment stains consist of pigment, actual pieces of color, and a carrier and a binder. The kind most familiar to my viewers and everyone, really, are the oil stains you get at the hardware store. So you have your pigment and it's suspended in a solution of a carrier, which typically is a solvent like mineral spirits, and a binder like linseed oil. And so the carrier spreads this across your board. The pigment gets trapped in the grain and in the scratches and anything else. And then as the solvent carrier evaporates, the binder remains and helps it to stick to the wood. So the effect that the oil stain has on the wood greatly depends on the type of wood. This is a piece of pine I'm going to try it on, and how well the wood is sanded. In other words, oil stain, the pigments are larger molecules that depend upon the scratches, the grain and any other defects in the wood to grab hold. So we have wood sanded to 100, sanded to 150, and sanded to 220. And we're going to see what the different effects are from one stain. In theory, when I apply this stain, the 100 will be darker and the 150 less so, and the 220 less so, because the heavy scratch pattern of the 100 should pick up more of the pigment. And likewise, the other ones with much finer scratch patterns won't pick up as much. Pine does not take stain very well, does not take oil stain very well. We'll see what happens. Yeah, so I think that you can see the 100 is a lot darker, 150 medium, and then the 220 is even lighter. Same piece of wood, so it's all because of the scratch pattern with the sandpaper. Okay, now I'm going to try the same thing on my oak board. Oak is not nearly as soft as the pine, and this is white oak. Let's see how it works on this. Boy, it's interesting how on the oak sample, there's very little difference, maybe no difference, which really brings up a couple of points. Number one, how drastically different different types of wood are with the same stain. And then again, how they were sanded. The pine being softwood was much more dependent on the scratches for the stain. The oak, this big open grain and the pigmented stain stayed in there, and they all look more or less the same. There's not that much difference. This really shows how the theory doesn't always match the reality. In fact, oftentimes when you apply the stain, it won't match exactly what you're trying to get. Here's a project where I used the oil stain in an attempt to even out the color of some mismatched boards. And now, I'll start experimenting with the stain on the bottom here. I'm going to start experimenting with some oil stains because they would be the easiest to deal with if I have any bleed through onto the unstained surfaces. I've got a stain here I like a lot, brown mahogany. This is a fast drying stain. Boy, that looks really good. This brown mahogany stain looks great. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to do this middle section of my sample side here, let it dry, and put some finish on it. See what it looks like. Okay, let it get set for a minute or two, and then I'm going to form the rag into a pad like this. Just kind of pat it off. It doesn't seem to be affecting the part that I've sealed off much. And I'll dip the corner of my rag in a little paint thinner and go along the outside of my line here. Okay, I've let the stain dry for a couple hours. I'm going to put a little finish on it. See what it looks like. It's not bad. It's a little light, which is good. I can always make it a little darker if I have to. I think I'm going to go ahead and put a little more finish just in this area, let it dry, and then figure out what my next step might be if I need to make it darker. It's really not bad at all. It's a good color. It could almost be a little redder and a little darker. I've got to think about that for a little while while it's drying. Even while my sample area where I put the clear finish is drying, I think I'm going to experiment a little with the stain. I'm going to take the same stain, which is the oil stain that I used on my sample area, put a little in the cup, and then I'll add a little bit of dark red mahogany dye stain, see if they'll mix together and change it a little bit. I think that in theory the dye stain shouldn't mix that well with the oil, but I'll give it a try. Let's see what happens. It doesn't look that different, but maybe I'll add some more. Okay, I added a lot more of the dye stain. Let's see what happens. Let this sit for a minute. I don't think it looks that much different. It might, though. Even though I thought at first it doesn't look that different, I could be wrong. I think I'm going to do this larger area with this new stain, let that dry, and then put some clear finish on it. Okay, this secondary has dried for about 45 minutes. That's the minimum amount of time for these stains, but I'm anxious to see what the color looks like. I think it looks really good. I think it looks better than the first stain. You saw in that clip where the oil stain wasn't giving me the exact right color, so I added dye stain to alter it a little bit, and that's quite fitting because really in my work I use mostly dye stains. So let's talk about dye stains. You can get dye stains in a powdered form and mix them yourself. I prefer to buy them already mixed. They're mixed in a solvent such as acetone or alcohol. These are NGR stains. That means non-grain raising. A lot of dye stains were traditionally mixed in water, and that just caused a lot of problems. You had to pre-wet the wood, raise the grain, sand it off, then stain it. It was much more complicated to use. We prefer these stains. In a dye stain, the solvent ionizes the color. When it's applied to the wood, at a molecular level, it electrically bonds with the wood fibers. That's one reason it can be very tough, if not impossible sometimes, to remove that stain from the wood if you make a mistake. With a pigmented stain, the pigment's lying on the surface, and that implies a certain amount of opacity. With a dye stain, you've penetrated the wood. All you see back is the wood grain itself and the chatoyance, which is very important if you're using figured woods. Maple's a good example to demonstrate dye stain. It's the kind of wood that doesn't really take oil stains very well at all. It's just too hard. It also is very uneven with the oil stain. With a dye stain, it can be done evenly. This is a perfect brown stain. I've thinned it out 2 to 1 with thinner. Okay, so that stained that a nice light brown. Now, one of the advantages of dye stains, a big advantage, is I can apply more now of the same stain to make it darker. So I can keep going with that and make it as dark as I want it to. In fact, maple is one of those woods that if you did want to stain maple to look like mahogany or walnut, you have to use dye stains. So now I'm going to try it out on this nice piece of mahogany I have here. This has also been sanded to 100, 150, and 220. Let's just see if it makes any difference. Now I'll add a little alcohol to the rag just to help even it out a little bit. So unlike with the pigment stains, the level of sanding doesn't make nearly as much difference, if any at all, with the dye stains. So here's a clip of a 20th century reproduction bed where you'll see I used dye stains to blend back the repaired areas to the original color. Dye stains really come in handy when you are doing repair work to a factory piece like this one. These posts on these beds are made of maple. They were stained to look like mahogany, and they almost certainly used dye stains in the process. So here where we've done some repairs, I've sanded areas, sanded areas here all the way to the bare wood here, sanded the finish somewhere where it was marked up. So now I'll stain these with dark red mahogany dye stain. Okay, even though this bed is super dark, I'm going to mix the stain 50-50 with alcohol. You can always put on more and make it darker. So this is a great place of the bed to start because it doesn't show very much, so I'm going to experiment a little bit. So what I'll do is carefully brush on the stain. I have a rag handy to wipe it off if I need to. Well, you can't really wipe it all off. Okay, this is looking good. It's not as dark as this area over here, but that's fine. I can make it a little darker. I'm going to let that dry for a while. I'm going to do the inside here and then move my way up. Okay, so now I'm going to move on to this area, which we've sanded that area down to the bare wood. This has a mixture of finish and not, but I'll go over and see if I can blend it in. Okay, so that area still may be a little light, which is great. I can brush more on, but now for this area, I'm going to put the stain on my rag and kind of use a patting motion to blend all that in. And now for this top area, which was all scuffed up, and we just went over it really aggressively, but just with a gray Scotch-Bite pad. I'll just pad this out. So as you can see, with the dye stain, you can brush it on and leave it on, so you can sort of get your color, carefully just leave it. Like I see this area here needs a little more color. Well, I think I've got this post pretty close. I'll let the stain dry, and then I'll seal this with shellac. And if anything, I hope it's a little lighter, because if it's slightly lighter, I'll tone it with a brown mahogany aerosol toner and bring it in exactly where I want it. So you saw there how well the dye stains work on blending in a partially sanded area on the bed post. Let's talk about how pigment stains and dye stains are used together. You saw in the clip on the small tabletop how I added dye stain directly to the pigment stain. But more commonly, what you would do is stain the wood first with a dye stain, get your background color, and then go over it with an oil stain. Here's a clip where I do just that on a contemporary chair. All right, I've sanded it really well to 220, and I mean I've sanded it really well, as well as I can. This is a hard wood. It's like beech, something like that. You need to make sure it's really, really smooth so that the stain is as even as possible. And I'm going to stain this first with a dye stain, light red mahogany. Comparing it to my piece of the chair here, I think it's going to be okay. As long as it's a bit lighter than this, I'll be good. The dye stain is dried, and I'm going to put some mahogany oil-based stain over that. Try a little corner down here to see what it looks like. That's good. It's pretty close. Maybe we'll need a little bit of red toner to bring it into that, but I like what I'm seeing. So you see how well that worked on a contemporary chair, but I also use that technique sometimes on antique furniture. Here's a clip where I made new mahogany feet for a federal chest of drawers. Okay, so now I'm ready to stain it. I'm going to stain it with some walnut dye stain. But with the dye stain, I can let this set for just a few minutes and then come back and put more on. Now, the next step is I'm going to stain it with some dark walnut oil stain. Now, this side looks a little dark to me, so maybe I'll get some paint thinner and just wipe it off a little bit. So now you've seen how I use dye stains and pigment stains to do most of the color work, but sometimes they don't quite yet look pretty good. You need to use toners and glazing, and I'll be discussing that in an upcoming video.