Staning

STAINING

Staining is not an easy task and we are unable to cover all the many possible problems you could face when attempting to stain your floor.

Start designing your room from the ground up. Wood floors can add beauty and value to any home. Solid Timber Floors will provide stain wood care products leaving your floors durable and beautiful.

There are basically 2 types of stain, water based (thinned with water) and spirit based (thinned with white spirit) both can be used with Bonakemi products.

In the case of spirit based it is important that it has completely dried before varnishing, overnight if possible or a minimum of 6 hours.

The professional way to stain a floor is to sand first leaving your floor silky and smooth, then use a stain or even several stains mixed together and diluted. Look at the instructions of your chosen stain to see if it is water or spirit based and dilute accordingly, to achieve the color you are after. When mixing stains make sure they are both spirit based or both water based. The majority of stains available are spirit based and water based varnish can be used over spirit based stains as long as the stain is left to dry overnight. It is impossible for us to give you an exact colour to use, to achieve what you want the final outcome to be. All stains are effected by the colour of the sanded boards . The original colour of pine boards can vary considerably according to:

1. Age

2. Country of origin

3. Age when felled, etc

Floor staining is difficult, finicky work, with unpredictable results.

Even flooring professionals lose sleep over this process because there are dozens of variables that can make staining go wrong. And when it does go wrong, the only solution is to re-sand the floor and start all over from the beginning. Staining floors, especially for first-time do-it-yourselfer’s, is a tricky business.

4 X REASON’S WHY STAINING IS DIFFICULT:

1. Stain makes sander scratch shockingly visible.

The most important reason to think carefully about staining is that it accentuates even minor flaws in

your sanding job—flaws that would be undetectable in a clear or natural-finished floor. Remember,

stain is made of fairly large particles of colour, called “pigment.”

Pigment colors wood by lodging in depressions, such as pores, scratches and gouges.

The larger the cavity, the greater the amount of pigment that will lodge there, and the darker

and more opaque the cavity becomes.

Unfortunately, inexperienced sanders (the very people who are most likely to want to stain their floors

because they assume it is easy to do) tend to leave many such deep cavities, scratches and gouges in the floors they sand. When the stain is rubbed into the wood, the color is absorbed more deeply along the scratch lines than in the surrounding wood. In other words, staining a floor sanded by a beginner is a lot like tattooing a floor.

Sanding Equipment is particularly prone to leaving cross-grain scratches that, when filled with stain, are still more obvious because they run against the main grain direction of the floor. There is no greater proof of an amateur job than edger swirl and cross-grain scratches that have been highlighted with stain

2. Some wood species are not meant to be stained.

Before applying stain to your wood floor, you need to know what species it is. Floors made of maple, birch, and coniferous woods (especially pine or fir) are all very difficult to stain evenly. Maple and birch are tight-grained woods

with very small pores, and the density of the pore wall fibers varies drastically. In other words, the

particles of stain pigment have fewer places where they can wedge themselves and those places are

not regularly spread through the wood.

Pine has the same variations in pore wall density, but to make matters worse, coniferous wood fibers

contain resin or sap that actively resists stain. Even though stain manufacturers provide sample chips

of stained maple or pine, do not be fooled; those sweet little chips are easy to stain precisely because

they are little. Over a large, uninterrupted area like a floor, blotching and mottling will be much more

apparent.

Red oak and white oak floors absorb stain more uniformly, but be aware that there is a difference between the density of earlywood (or springwood) and latewood of these species. As you can see from the photo, the more porous springwood stains considerably darker than the dense latewood, giving the boards a distinct zebra-striped look.

3. Bleed-back is ugly.

Stain is applied differently than almost any other finish: it is usually rubbed onto the wood with a soft cloth and then immediately wiped off. The amount of stain that a floor can absorb is finite; the floor will not get darker if you flood

it with an excess of stain or apply a second coat. Using excess amounts or applying multiple coats of

stain can cause the stain to 'bleed back,' where it wicks back up to the surface of the board as solvent

begins to evaporate. Bleed-back can also occur after a finish coat has been applied to a layer of stain

that has pockets of uncured stain in the gaps between the boards, in which the pigment seeps up and

into the clear finish, leaving a cloudy streak.

You can also get something similar to bleed-back if you coat over a dried stain with an incompatible

finish. If your finish contains a solvent that can re-dissolve the binder in your stain, particles of stain

pigment (even if they were fully dry to the touch before top-coating) will blotch or seep into your finish. Using stains and finishes that are advertised as compatible (like our products) is the most foolproof way to avoid solvent interference

4. Stain adds waiting time. A lot of waiting time.

Latex paints have set very high expectations about drying and recoat times—expectations you need to leave behind if you are staining a floor. This is because stain is just the first step in the process of finishing your floor. Pigments alone do not provide much in the way of abrasion or solvent resistance, so most people add two or three layers of some clear, protective finish over stain.

But if your stain coat is not completely dry, it will not allow any subsequent coats to bond. This leads to a sticky, ugly mess that must be sanded off and re-stained. Given the dire consequences of coating over stain too soon, we recommend that you allow stain to dry for 24-48 hours even under the ideal heat, humidity, and air exchange conditions specified by the manufacturer.

All stains dry by solvent evaporation; if your windows are closed or if the heat is set too low or turned off, the solvent cannot evaporate, and the stain takes longer to dry. Low temperatures, high humidity, using too much stain, and not wiping it off thoroughly will all lengthen the drying times. For example, if you are staining during a thunderstorm in Autum/Winter you could wait up to four days before it is safe to topcoat that stain—four days, plus a day for each coat of finish, and then a day to allow the last finish coat to cure