I have an issue with a sheet of quarter sawn oak plywood. I ordered it as white oak and after cutitng it up I realized it was red oak. I am planning on staining it a medium brown tone but I am having problems with it still looking too red. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to “remove” the red tone? I paid $130 for the sheet so unfortunately buying a new sheet is not an option.
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Peroxide bleach, a two part A/B wood bleach found at your local paint store
I'm not a finishing expert,
I'm not a finishing expert, but the only thing I can think of is using a wood bleach to take the color out, then stain it whatever you want it to be.
Unless you've already incorporated it in whatever you're building, it may be cheaper and faster to just buy a sheet of white oak ply.
This is a good question for the Knots forum. Those guys use stains all the time and they work with all sorts of wood species.
My observations from the few times I used white oak is that it seemed to have a greenish cast as compared to red oak. I have found that woods treated with chlorine bleach tend to look greenish to me, so it might be worth trying laundry bleach on a scrap and see if it takes enough of the red out for your taste.
looking at a color wheel, you'll see browns are often in the orange slice of the pie with red to one side and yellow to the other. If your stain is turning out too red, try using a stain that has more yellow in it to bring the end result closer to the brown.
wood bleaching solutions would also work to lighten the red.
If you have a detail sprayer you can also spray the stain, starting with something to cover the red. I once applied some white pickled stain to red oak to lighten things up, then a darker color over the top. It was time consuming.
Another option is to add a layer of white oak veneer over the ply. If you aren't used to veneering it's pretty easy to put a one piece paper backed sheet on, but the smaller 6" wide slices are less expensive.
Hope this helps
GREEN is the complement to red and will neutralize it. The green to use is raw umber. If you have already stained it and put a coat of finish on it, you can use a raw umber glaze to kill the red. Any decent paint store (though not necessarily a big box) can make you up a batch of it from glaze base and raw umber UTC from the paint machine.
Sorry, but adding yellow is going to get you into an orange.