How to best show off Cherry wood?

Tom Baugues

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Lafayette, Indiana
A friend of mine is about to retire and I thought I would turn him a pen as a small gift. He recently gave me a cherry log from his woods. I have the log cut up and I made myself a few pen blanks from it. Is there a "best" way to enhance the color of cherry wood? I usually use a CA finish on my pens but this will be the first pen with cherry. I want the wood to really stand out if possible. I had thought about trying some light red dye.......or would that ruin it? The blank does have some grain to it so maybe CA will be the best I can get.
 
The cherry will darken nicely on its own, so I personally wouldn't add any color. If you want to pop the grain a bit, BLO would help. I've not done it, but I know some turners use a drop or two of BLO when they apply the CA finish. Hopefully someone here will be able to chime in with specifics.


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You have this one Tom...I would sand it out a little more though, some cherry can hold sanding marks through 600...YMMV. CA is a great finish, won't change the character of the wood and cure hard as a rock.
 
I've heard that you can fume cherry with ammonia to darken it, like you might with oak for traditional mission furniture (ala Gustav Stickley). I haven't tried it, though.


--dave
 
The cherry I used for a pen darkened on it's own to more of a mellow brown character.

I don't know much about dyeing wood, but it sounds like an opportunity for an experiment. I know for my pens I have always bought extra tubes for the kits I've gotten. Seems like everynow and then I'd either mess up something, or the blank would blow apart. Just kind of cheap insurance. If you do have extra tubes, it might be interesting to turn a couple of blanks, and dye one and see how it turns out. The red might add some interesting character to it.

Just thinking out loud.
 
Cherry takes dye well, but I have always regretted doing it - the wood matures well on it's own. I would add a layer of solvent shellac or BLO after sanding, under the finish, to bring out the grain while maintaining the "natural" cherry color.
 
Well, got this one done. It didnt turn out too bad. The CA finish did darken the wood a bit. I'm happy with it. I need to set up a photo booth for pens but until then this is just with my iphone.
Cherry crop (Small).jpg
 
Well I like it, that has some real nice figure; but I'm a serious sucker for cherry so take that with whatever size grain of salt you want :thumb:

I would expect it to darken up some with age but I'm not sure how fast, some CA glue apparently has some UV protection (at least from reading some arbitrary internet sites) so it would certainly be interesting to see how it changes over time.
 
Set it in the sun for a day. It will get dark real quick. The draywallers at the last job moved our trim to in front of the windows and when we got back their the next week we had some cherry that was dark and the bottom stuff was still pink.
 
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