Quick update--I thought some might find this interesting or possibly even useful.

I've been experimenting with the solarlux stuff for the past week or so on various pieces of scrap wood taken from different pieces of english walnut that were sealed and pore-filled exactly as I would a stock, then knocked back to bare wood with 400 grit, stain applied, then a few topcoats over the top of that to see the "finished" color and look.

For what it's worth to those who might try some, here are my observations:

On some wood the medium walnut gives a nice color, but it's more subtle and can quickly look too orange...really tough to strike the right balance between saturated-enough color and too orange. I'm not sold on this color.

The American walnut seems like the best color to use straight, although it really has very little or no red color to it on most of the wood I tried it on--it looks very brown. I liked it on wood that already had some red color in it, but in those cases I probably would not choose to stain it in the first place.

I thought all of these colors looked better as fairly saturated colors, whereas the very subtle tones looked nicer to me, but the color looked more "stained", i.e. not natural...it's hard to describe, but suffice to say that the richer colors looked better to my eye.

I found it harder to get EVEN colors without thinning the stain, so if you try some it seems worth getting the reducer at the same time. My best and most natural-looking colors came from roughly 50/50 or weaker stain/reducer mixes with 3-5 one-wipe applications.

In the interest of achieving that particular "dark with just a hint of red" look I was after, I tried mixing the 2 walnut colors with the blood red. The red very quickly overwhelms the other colors, so while my favorite color yet was the american walnut mixed with the blood red, it only takes a drop of red to do it...my favorite mix was 60/40 reducer and American walnut, total volume about 6 teaspoons, with about 2 DROPS of the red. This was applied in several coats and resulted in a look that was very dark walnutty, but that clearly had just a hint of red in it without any of the "pink" from my previous experiements with the blood red.

Hope this is helpful to someone.
Dave

P.S. Steven--if you read this, can you move the right-hand of the two photos above so it sits under the other pic? My monitor isn't wide enough!


Last edited by David Furman; 03/12/10 11:29 AM.