Old cabin door has yellowed varnish finish, how do I match that up?
The interior of my 65 year old cabin has knotty pine with I believe a varnish finish that has oxydized over the years and turned yellowish . I need to repair parts. How can I match that up?
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The color you might be able to do with stain.........
the "finish", the look against the older pcs in daylight or manmade light is a tough one. Sometimes you need to coat the whole wall to produce the same sheen.
If it's only the door you need to 'match', this will be easier. You can sand the old finish and re coat after matching the color repairs.
Mixing shellac and using it as a base coat.
I'd recommend that you blend blond, amber and garnet shellac to get a close match. You should be able to get fairly close if you have a good eye for color. Being color blind I'm kind of dependant on others to figure out how to blend them. But the brothers and most importantly SWMBO, (whose opinion is the one that really matters), can blend them to get close to most aged finishes.
The advantage of the shellac over other tinting methods such as stains is that you can take an alcohol soaked rag and wipe some off, if you get too dark, and wipe off almost all of it if you need to and start again. With stains you're stuck.
Light cuts of shellac dry almost instantly, so you can build quite a few coats quickly and adjust the color as you go. The cut of shellac refers to how many pounds of shellac are disolved in a gallon of alcohol. A three pound cut has three pounds of shellac dissolved in a gallon of alcohol. If you buy a comercial premixed shelac it will be about a three pound cut.
For matching an aged finish, I would thin a commercial that at least by half with denatured alcohol, (making a 1-1/2-pound cut), if not by two thirds, (making a one pound cut), so I could apply really thin fast drying coats, and sneek up to the tone you want.