Stewmac Colortone Liquid Stains

[bassocontinuum]

I'm planning to stain an alder body using Stewmac Colortone Liquid stain followed by a Tru-Oil finish.

I have never used stains or Tru-Oil before. I am looking to achieve a Burgundy/Bordeaux/'Darkish red wine' type of colour so have bought a bottle of 'Cherry Red' as this appears to be the closest colour.

I have tried this stain on a piece of scrap using the recommended concentration (2 fl.oz stain to 2qts water - I made this a ratio of 1 part stain to 32 parts water).

With a coat of Tru-oil, the result is much 'more of a plain lightish red than I'd like so I need to work out how to darken this. As far as I can gather there are several possibilities:

1) Higher concentration of cherry stain? Not sure if this will make much difference.
2) Additional coats of stain
3) Mix cherry stain with other colours (adding brown, black, and yellow to the main cherry red has been suggested elsewhere, but no guidance on rough amounts of each).

I can obviously spend some time experimenting with these but I don't want to re-invent the wheel, so if anyone can give me some guidance it would be much appreciated.

If I need to mix several colours of stain does anyone have or know of a colour chart that would help me get the right ballpark ratios without too much experimenting?

Thanks!

 

[tfarny]

In general the way to go is experiment with all of the above methods on scrap wood until you're happy. Higher concentration will make a big difference for sure. A little bit of dark color goes a long way - a drop of black into your red solution will probably be very noticeable. I've hit the dark red wine / approaching purple dye color on maple on my most recent build using MEK dyes from LMI. I like working with them much more than I liked my experience with the stew mac water based. You might start with a concentrated red solution and mix in just a bit of black at a time until you get what you like. I doubt you'll need the whole set of stew mac colors.

 

[bassocontinuum]

tfarny - thanks for the info.

Your guitar looks like the sort of colour I'm getting at the moment.

I'm looking for more of this sort of colour (a Warwick bass I owned a few years ago that I think had an oil finish - or maybe it was wax?)...

The flash is probably making it look brighter than it is. What do you think I need to do to get closer to this colour? Or do you think it could be the type of oil/wax that is creating the difference?

 

[Mor Paul]

It will darken up and get richer once you have the final coats on, such as the wax.

 

[tfarny]

Yeah, mine has no finish yet - that's just the plain dye. To get that more 'pinot noir' color, you might put a bit of yellow in and see what happens. At least with the MEK, 'red' was very much on the blue side of the spectrum, but it didn't occur to me to add yellow till too late. Ah well I like this color.