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Re: walnut desk and bookcase
holy .. self moderated. That is nice I really like the color that walnut. Care to share your finishing schedule?
I'm slow to get back but here goes.
The walnut was all air-dried stuff. Not all from the same log obviously. The crotch figured wood was from wood collected over 10 years just sitting up in the rafters. Lots of color challenges.
In this case I wanted to move the color AWAY from the red tones. I have built a good number of pieces in walnut that look very close to mahogany. This time I wanted to move toward brown tones. To make that happen I needed to use dyes(water based).
Moving red walnut back to brown I used green tones to move to brown. If the wood was too dark red, I lightened it up with some household bleach. Once I had some uniform light browns, I covered the whole piece with yellow dye. Ugly but required. Now it was step by step bringing the browns to some uniform level. Trial and error.
I don't have a list of dye names to recommend. I buy some med brown, dark brown, red, green and yellow dyes. I mix small amounts and test and try. To see the final result I wipe on some mineral spirits or naptha. It dries quickly and it doesn't distort the colors as you adjust.
Once I have the base color, its time to fill the grain. This is a long process.
Once the grain is filled, I use dewaxed shellac to seal in the filler and lock the base colors. There is still a bit of "wiggle room" if it isn't just right.
Now I have to use blonde shellac colored with alcohol base dyes. In this case I put a few drops of Transtint in the small shellac mix and used it to darken some light areas that did not match. I still have some work to do in this area.
Hope that's a start.
holy .. self moderated. That is nice I really like the color that walnut. Care to share your finishing schedule?
I'm slow to get back but here goes.
The walnut was all air-dried stuff. Not all from the same log obviously. The crotch figured wood was from wood collected over 10 years just sitting up in the rafters. Lots of color challenges.
In this case I wanted to move the color AWAY from the red tones. I have built a good number of pieces in walnut that look very close to mahogany. This time I wanted to move toward brown tones. To make that happen I needed to use dyes(water based).
Moving red walnut back to brown I used green tones to move to brown. If the wood was too dark red, I lightened it up with some household bleach. Once I had some uniform light browns, I covered the whole piece with yellow dye. Ugly but required. Now it was step by step bringing the browns to some uniform level. Trial and error.
I don't have a list of dye names to recommend. I buy some med brown, dark brown, red, green and yellow dyes. I mix small amounts and test and try. To see the final result I wipe on some mineral spirits or naptha. It dries quickly and it doesn't distort the colors as you adjust.
Once I have the base color, its time to fill the grain. This is a long process.
Once the grain is filled, I use dewaxed shellac to seal in the filler and lock the base colors. There is still a bit of "wiggle room" if it isn't just right.
Now I have to use blonde shellac colored with alcohol base dyes. In this case I put a few drops of Transtint in the small shellac mix and used it to darken some light areas that did not match. I still have some work to do in this area.
Hope that's a start.
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