I’m using all Minwax products and following the instructions. 1st is pre-stain fo oil-based stains. After 10ish minutes of application i wiped it off and applied the stain. I used a brush for both applications and a cut up t-shirt for wiping off 10ish minutes later.
And I still end up with blotching.
The wood is eastern hard maple.
this is a really tough wood to get uniform stain to start w/…
better success is usually had w/ alcohol based stains…
you can leave the blotching and look to it as an attribute or character…
what grit did you use to sand w/ before you started w/ the finishing???..
what I see is popped grain and not blotching…
I never leave wet stain very long before wiping… if it’s too light - reapply…
you could wipe down w/ MS and do a redo…
what did your samples look like…
all in all, only you will see any of this, nobody else will… they’ll only see the character…
there may be some help in these PDF’s…
Blotching aka Beautiful Figure.pdf (241.1 KB)
Wood will Blotch.pdf (78.1 KB)
Blotch Prevention.pdf (497.3 KB)
however, this spot looks like a milling mark…
localized sanding will help w/ that…
the more I look… the less I believe you have blotching…
what you see is the nature of the wood…
Mark, that hard maple is a tough one to stain as it has hard and less hard grain running together.
What you might try is to take a small brush and go over the light spots with another coat and gently wipe it down try to feather the spot out so it is not apparent. Keep doing that until you get what you want.
What do you plan to use for doors, the same material? you might want to prefinish the back side of the door face material before you make up a bunch to see what they look like.
Herb
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