Revarnishing over pine cladding. HELP?

[do_it_yourself]

First post so here goes,

We recently moved into a bungalow with a basement made of wall to wall pine cladding.

It would take forever to strip and resand the existing varnish, but we want a dark vengé style varnished look instead of the orange pine look.

is there a product that can just revarnish over the existing pine colour to achieve the dark stain without taking away from the original grain?

I dont want to paint over it as I wish to obtain some sort of opacity and still see the grain.

Cheers
Marco

 

[Scrit]

Is there a product that can just revarnish over the existing pine colour to achieve the dark stain without taking away from the original grain?

The softwood grain will always be there, it's just the yellow colour you need to get rid of, and the way to do that is to strip off the horrible yellow lacquer/varnish. The difficulty is that to apply a new coat over and existing finish you need to have either some way to get a chemical bond or a mechanical bond. If you just apply another coat over the top of the existing one it will eventually bubble, crack and flake off because there isn't a good enough bond between the coats.

Because the original wood is long since sealed trying to get the varnish off then restain will result in a gawdalmighty splotchy mess as some of the grain will absorb more stain than others, so full stripping and staining are out, IMHO. So that leaves the mechanical bond route where you'll need to abrade (sand) the surface to provide a mechanical "key" for a paint or lacquer. I'd suggest going to something like P120 grit just to remove the glossiness of the surface then wipe-down with a cloth damped in white spirits to get rid of any dust. Seal the surface with some white (almost clear) French polish and allow to dry - this seals the coats beneath and allows you to apply a variety of finishing materials. Finally use something like an ebonising solution to finish the surface near black before revarnishing. You could go to a faux finish and hand grain, but I suspect that if you don't want to spend any time prepping the job then that would be way out of your league in terms of time and patience

I dont want to paint over it as I wish to obtain some sort of opacity and still see the grain.

Unfortunately if you see the grain it will look absolutely nothing like wenge. To my mind dark stained pine always looks like what it is - a cheap and nasty solution masquerading as something it's not. Softwoods look nothing like hardwoods and it takes an expert finisher to disguise them effectively. Why not just accept that it is pine and treat it accordingly?

Scrit

 

[do_it_yourself]

Thanks scrit for the quick reply.

My wife has her heart set on wenge. If I go ahead with the key - french polish - revarnish scenario what kind of laquer should I go for for finishing and what exactly is an ebonising solution, and where can I get it?

Sorry but Im a novice at this.

 

[Scrit]

It's taken me a little while to find these illustrations to attempt to illustrate why pine can never be made to look like wenge. This is pine:

whilst this is wenge:

As you can clearly see wenge has distinctive large, open pores and dark growth rings forming a very distinctive pattern. It also has no knots and has a completely different grain structure. The grains of the two timbers are so different that a bit of stain will never make one look even remotely like the other. The fact that your material has already been lacquered/varnished means that the pores are now filled with a golden-coloured varnish which will be all but impossible to hide and will almost certainly show through as lighter patches.

The only way I can see to achieve the wenge look is going to be to use a faux grain effect with paint, rather like that they used for canal boats. But that will be a lot of work. If you're still interested there is an article on it here, and this is a mahogany faux finish on pine:

whilst this is the sort of effect professional Alan Kent, an acknowledged expert in the field, can achieve:

The best book on the subject used to be Parry's Graining and Marbling

Scrit