What are the best tips and tricks for staining raw wood? We’re going to show you the proper way to stain raw wood by walking you through the steps for staining a raw newel post for a set of stairs. We will turn the post into a much darker and prettier wood.
Setting Up
For our stain, we’ve chosen to use Honey Minwax 272.
I want to show you the correct way to apply, so that you don’t stain your wood too dark or too light. It’s important to start with a good clean and smooth sanded surface on all the wood you’re going to stain. As we see on our newel post, everything’s been sanded down. Everything’s smooth.
Before you start, make sure you clean your hands really well. You want your hands to be free from oil and grime. You don’t want it to interfere, because this is an oil-based stain. And if you’ve got extra oil already on the wood or on your hands, it’s not going to apply very well.
Then we will get a conservative amount of stain on our rag. Use a clean cloth – something that doesn’t do a lot of shedding. And then we’re going to apply it in a large field area and spread it quickly. The reason to do that is because the longer stain sits on the surface of wood, the darker it gets.
If you want your wood item to be darker, then you can always apply a second coat. But once it’s dark, you can never make it lighter, because the wood sucks ups the stain.
The Application
So what we’re going to do is apply the stain quickly and spread it thin. Cover a lot of territory fast. Get the largest portion of the stain off of your rag quickly by covering as much territory as you can right off the bat.
Now that we have the stain largely off our rag, we’re not going to let it sit. We want to work it into the grain of the wood. Work it into the grooves as much as possible. There is always a lot more than stain in your rag than you realize. So get the majority off of it quickly.
This way, you don’t have dark spots or light spots. It’s all real even. As we can see from our newel post, it’s all starting to come together as we work into the grain and grooves repeatedly.
So you can see with just one cloth how much of the post we covered. With just one dip of stain on our cloth, we covered practically the entire piece of wood. It’s nice and even and beautiful. There are still some areas to touch up, but that covered the majority of it.
Next Steps
Next, we want to make sure everything is very lightly sanded again, and then we’ll apply a coat of clear semi-gloss polyurethane to give it protection. And the reason is because, if you don’t seal or urethane your stained surface, then it will still be susceptible to soak up oils. So if you walk with your hand across this piece of stained wood and you have any grease or grime on your fingers, it will soak it up and give the wood dark spots. We don’t want dark spots. So anytime you stain anything, come back with a clear coat and seal it.
I like to use Minwax polyurethane for my varnish. But use whichever you like best. This tutorial shows you the basics for the proper way to apply a stain coat to raw wood. We’ll show you in another post how to apply the polyurethane varnish.
Please share this video with anyone who might find it helpful, and let us know in the comments what you think!
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