HELP! Staining gone bad 🙁

[machiavelli1079]

i put in a tremendous amount of effort building an entertainment center, and then put 2 coats of a stain that looked brown on a sample piece of the furniture. Now it is mahoganey (makes sense, because the stain is red mahogany, but we bought it because it was the deep brown we wanted when we saw it on a sample piece of wood from the furniture). Now it is too red for us, and I’m told there is no way to remove oil based stain from it. I used 3/4 inch birch plywood and minwax wood stain 225 red mahogany (2 coats). The reason I am near suicidal over this is because the whole point of building this piece is that it was one of 4 pieces I was building to color-match exactly (or as close to exactly as you can get). We wanted the ever so popular deep deep deep dark espresso (warm but near black… think cheap “sold at target” espresso finishes. We did not really care to see too much of the grain in the wood either.

So my question… how do I save this thing? Can I bleach out the oil stain? Am I really stuck with it? Can I go over it with a darker stain (which I already tried and it doesn’t work in dulling the red nor in hiding the grain). My girlfriend wants to “paint” on the stain in a thick layer, but won’t this remain tacky and never dry? I really am deeply deeply upset, so any advice would be more than welcome. Thanks… heres a pic of it now… it looks good (i think) but its just not what we wanted for our living room set:

http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f213/machiavelli1079/DSC00046.jpg

[Unregistered-bexterinni]

http://www.popularwoodworking.com/features/fea.asp?id=1097

Thought this might help. Good luck!

[Giddaymate]

Hi Machiavelli1079 ,
I had a look at your picture and I can see you have done a great job building your entertainment centre. Please don’t let the colour stress you out and dont give up on it. Remember the old saying. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” With some more reseach you will find the answer somewhere out there.

I did a search on the net using words like remove redwood stain or lighten redwood stain then replaced redwood word for mahoganey wood and this is some of the sites I found.

http://www.antiquerestorers.com/Articles/jeff/using_wood_bleach.htm
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/199711/1997.11.05.11.html

This site sounds a bit like what us girls do to remove the brass tones from blond hair. Except we use the colour purple not green.

http://www.alan.net/prg2000pre/msg00187.html

Also do a search on oxalic acid to lighten your timber then you can re-stain it with a better matching stain. Don’t forget to first pratice staining on some off cuts of timber to get a good match.

Please keep us posted on how your entertainment centre turns out. “Keep your chin up”

Kind regards Noelene
from Sydney Downunder

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