If you have a soft, pours, sap wood harvested, with little oil content it is going to need conditioning. Point being it is really not, the specific wood, it is the characteristics of the wood, mainly hardness, porousness, sapling harvest or heartwood harvest and oiliness. It does not need pre-stain conditioning because it is a harder pine, and it was mostly harvested from old growth forests. We have a pine here called slash pine that is similar in properties to your pine, but it is virtually extinct. You only need a conditioner if you are staining a soft, sap wood such as American yellow pine. You can make your own wood conditioner by mixing 70% varnish with 30% mineral spirits or a 60/40 of Denatured alcohol and shellac. Wood dye and wood stain are different in the US, here is a good article on the differences:

, which makes no mention of pre-stain conditioner, and I've had very good results with it so far.

In the UK our pine is typically a different variety, and so therefore has a different composition, and our terminology is different here too wood stain in the UK is, I think, 'wood dye' in the USA? Please correct me if you know better :)įor reference I use this stain.

Everyone online is insistent that you need it, and you can just about buy it here (it's expensive), but it turns out it's pretty irrelevant. You will find constant references to something called 'pre-stain conditioner' online this basically doesn't exist in the UK. If, like me, you're in the UK and looking for vaguely specific details regarding woodwork online, you're going to find an awful lot of American content and very little local stuff (a blog opportunity there perhaps).Ī good recent example of this effect for me was when I was looking up pine stains. Nothing against the Americans/Canadians etc, but this is one area where regional differences make a pretty huge difference in terms of wood and products available.

Has anyone found any good non-American-continent woodworking YouTube channels?

Sketchup steve ramsey