Shasta Cabinet Wood Replacement Type

It's hard to perfectly match the old patina. I have a hundred experiment boards to prove it.

As you probably know, how the wood reacts to the finish can change from one batch of pine to another. I'm sure the wood you're dealing with is pine. Soft pine will react differently than Douglas Fur. Etc.

Notice how brown the old wood looks with just shellac? New wood doesn't end up with the same deep, brownish amber.

So you need to pick the wood by grain and experiment.

A few mixes that have worked for me:
Minwax natural stain (1 cup) with about 40-50 drops of Mixol Terra.
Then multiple coats of Amber Shellac.
Sometimes mixed in the first coat of Shellac I'll add some Terra.

Penofin Bamboo oil on the new wood
Lightly sand when dried 24 hours
Amber shellac

Colonial maple mixwax stain
Followed by a coats of Amber and Clear
(creates a rosy color)

I could go on and on but you get the idea.

A few samples on birch.


I played with Mixol Terra added to premixed Bulls Eye Amber.

The right is new wood with minwax natural stain mixed with mixol terra before shellac. Left is the 55 year old wood.


I've tried mixing Ruby shellac flakes to premixed amber. Too red for you.

If you use poplar it really looks nice with just shellac. It might match.

Buy tiny containers of stain if you don't have a closet full... like me.

Have I confused you enough?

#22 is new to me. What effect did adding Tobacco have?

nccamper msgoehring Thank you both for the experience and ideas that you shared. Turns out I found some other ideas yesterday which are right along these same lines as what you've done. I was confused at first about mixing oil-based stains and shellac so what I was looking for was something that was water soluble. I came across an article that mentioned using Rit Dye as the tinting agent in the shellac. I think my wife has a few different colors of that in the cabinet if not it's pretty cheap at Hell Mart so I might give that a shot first since I can buy it locally. I think some combination of red and brown might get me close to what I need. There are two main areas that I need to replace one is a single piece of wood on the Wardrobe cabinet which needs to match pretty closely because it's beside other similar framing. The other is the cabinet frames / bases below the front dinette . Those look pretty ratty and I think I'm going to have to replace both of them. I did a little more experimenting yesterday with other scraps of what I had sitting around the house, and I see what you mean about the variance in color even within the same type of wood.

Anyways, this all gives me a great starting point for what I need to look at. Thanks for all the great help.

"some finishes cannot be duplicated by a one step coloring process."

Excellent point. Even with multiple steps I actually had no luck at all matching the milky, yellow, aged color of my Compact. I had to sand down everything and start over. At times there is no way around it.

One other thing worth mentioning, even original panels on my campers have slightly different shades of the same color so don't go crazy. If the tint is slightly off nobody will really notice but you. And in time even you won't notice.

Hey Brian just curious about how your rit dye experiment came out. Have you tried it yet, and if so did you get what you were after? The rit dye might be helpful to other people looking to match wood colors also.

Alright. After a little testing.

I did this a couple different ways.

1. One was was to apply the stain to the wood, both using water as the solvent, and denatured alcohol. Both of these worked fine, the alcohol just dried faster. The stain seemed to get IN the grain more. I thought this was going to be good, but I made it look streaky, and the primary color (red in this case) turned out to show up in streaks in the grain.

2. I mixed the dye with the shellac --- much better.

In this case it was just a matter of choosing the right wood. In this case I found out that poplar seemed to match pretty well. I didn't think the green of the poplar would go away, but it did. Below are a couple photos.


Rit Dye test with poplar by gunguy05, on Flickr

Rit Dye test with poplar by gunguy05, on Flickr

This is a rough estimate, but to get this color I mixed about 1/2" of shellac in a 16 oz cup with 10-20 drops or red, and about 10 drops of brown. I played with this a bit, but I this is a rough estimate of how it ended up.

I applied it to the wood about 5-7 times. I just wiped it one, waited a few seconds and wiped it off. It took a bit of wiping and waiting to get the depth of color I wanted. I took this with my good camera, in daylight, so these photos are pretty close to how they look in real life.

Overall I'm the most happy with this application. I'm going to fetch some poplar and refabricate the cabinet piece and try it this way. I think it will be as close to the original as all the originals were to each other. For the final product I will probably just apply in place that way I can get a good feel how to match to that particular cabinet. Also, it will have clear on it just like the rest.