I’ve found my finishing problem: I’m building things out of pine.
Traditional stain, gel stain, urethane, tung oil, danish oil…on oak, cherry or maple many of these look fine. No matter what I put on pine, it comes out looking like a septic prolapse.
I’ve built lots of stuff from pine and stained it, but I was never super happy with the result.
Some stains have a dual sample card where it shows how it will look on oak, and another on pine. I never got close to what their pine reference example looked like. It was like you need to have a few drinks first and then it looks sort of accurate.
That’s not to say that stained pine looks BAD in and of itself, but it feels dirty to even call it “staining” when it’s such a far cry from how hardwoods look when they’re finished.
Something something it’s called stain when it’s from the hardwood part of France, but here in Pine Country, we call it sparkling dye. 🤷