Staining Maple

Maple is a wonderful wood. It is often the choice of manufacturers because many colors can be applied to it, be it light or dark. The problem with maple is that the grain is real tight so there’s not much for the stain to bite into and when there is, it’s uneven. Often there are imperfections in the wood that causes the wood to look blotchy when stain is applied incorrectly.

Maple should be stained almost entirely with a fast dry spray stain. This will allow you to control the amount of stain biting into the wood much easier than if you were to wipe stain it. There are those who would recommend using a wash-coat prior to staining in order to ‘prime’ the wood for even stain application, the problem with that is that it adds a unnessesary step to the finish process.

The trick is to spray the stain on with even wetness. You can spray it on dry so the stain lays on top of the wood, or you can spray it on wet so it soaks in a little- whatever the color calls for. Just be sure if you spray it on wet, do it evenly, if you have dry patches it will look blotchy.

One thing that can be done to ’slow’ down the dye stain to allow it to be applied with an even wetness is to add a retarder such as butyl acetate to the stain. This will also help with blowback shadows that appear on the inside corners of cases.