Maple does not stain

I went to Home Depot to pick out the type of wood I wanted to use for the cabinet.  Maple caught my eye.  It was one of the few hard woods that I could get in both solid wood and plywood.  I also liked the grain, more subtle then oak.  I grabbed a 1x3 board to start testing out staining.

Plain Maple

The color we want is typically referred to as espresso, it's a very dark reddish-brown.  So I cruised over to the stain isle and picked out the darkest Minwax stain, and some pre-stain treatment.  Minwax doesn't make a stain in the exact color we were looking for but I figured this would be a good starting point.

After three coats of stain I realized this was not going to work.

An uneven, blotchy mess. not quite the look I was going for

Doing some research that I should have done in the beginning, I found out that maple does not stain well at all (no kidding) and in fact the way to make maple dark is to dye it.  I had never heard of wood dye and wouldn't have thought it was any different than stain if I had heard the phrase, but as it turns out, it's completely different.  A local wood working shop sells the TransTint brand.  It comes in a concentrated two ounce bottle that you dilute with water.  The starting concentration they recommend is 1 ounce dye to 1 quart water.  I bought a bottle of the Dark Walnut.  I ended up using a double concentration and got much better results than the stain.

I was still missing the red though so I ended up buying a bottle of the Red Mahogany as well and mixed in a signal concentration with it.  After apply two coats of polyurethane on top here's the results:

Much better. Hopefully the color comes out in the images, I was having a tough time getting a shot that was a good representation. The color is very close, I think it may actually be a tad too dark.  One thing I was noticing was the color was much richer when you're applying the dye then when it's dry.  So it would look great when it was wet but then had a sort of faded look after I let it dry. I kept making the dye darker to try to fix that which didn't really work.  Once I applied the polyurethane, however, that richness came back.

That's it for now.  Next post I think will be about the tools I'm using.