Tips From the Pros: Working with Stains Using WoodEpox®
WoodEpox® is the industry leader for epoxy wood repairs. One of the reasons WoodEpox has become so popular over the past 40 years is the incredible ease with which it can be finished. It sands like a dream, plays nicely with just about every woodworking tool, and accepts virtually any type of paint or stain you can think of.
One of the most commonly asked questions our customer service department receives is “Will WoodEpox take a stain?”. The simple answer to that question is, Yes! However- there are a few things to consider when choosing to stain WoodEpox.
• WoodEpox is a very light-colored wood filler. Depending on the tone of the wood you are filling, a stain on the surface of WoodEpox compared to a stain on the wood itself, could look significantly different. For that reason, we sell dry colored pigments that can be blended into WoodEpox to change the tone prior to staining.
• There is a huge range of material that is all lumped into the category of stain. We can’t possibly test WoodEpox with every product on the market, and the quality and performance of all of these products is going to vary greatly.
• The amount of pigment in the stain makes a huge difference. Highly pigmented stains are going to cover much better than stains designed for translucence.
• It may take a little time. When applied to wood, stain tends to penetrate and change the color of the wood almost instantly. When applied to WoodEpox, the stain is quite literally staining the surface of the epoxy without much penetration. Therefore, it takes a few minutes for the stain to set, and simply wiping it on to the WoodEpox might not work as well as it does on wood.
This video shows our in-house test of several types of stains and the results we got by applying them to our unpigmented WoodEpox, as well as WoodEpox that had been tinted with colored pigments.
The artistic possibilities of finishing WoodEpox are virtually endless, allowing WoodEpox to be used on everything from totem poles to historic horse-drawn buggies. If you have any questions about finishing, painting, or staining WoodEpox, please contact Abatron today!
