hello

does anyone know of a dye stain that is really black or do they all have a green/blue/red tint to them.

I am trying to spray a subtle black dye under my wiping stain but spraying lightly gives a reddish tone.

I use mohawk black.

I have ordered the JET black and will see if it is...blacker even when applied lightly.

the only way I can get them really black is spraying them up to almost opaque black but them when topcoatd is gets all metallic.

spraying green toner is not really a slution since it only makes it brown rather than black.

How do you guy do it? or do you know of a dye that is a real black. (I know about india ink and ebonizing methos but would rather use a commercial product purposely made for wood)

maybe spraying a dark marine blue dye then applying the black wiping stain will get me there.

thanks for any sugestion

There's certainly something special about the colors & materials that go into making Steinway pianos black. The lacquer company wouldn't tell me, but he did share this key factoid: you don't really have to stir or shake a can of black Steinway lacquer, the color will "never" settle out. To me, that's a strong hint that the Steinway lacquer isn't a vehicle in which the colorants are suspended. Pigments are in suspension and they do settle.

Dyes go into solution, and in general you don't have to be so concerned about stirring, even though you must always stir and there are dyes that definitely need stirring (ML Campbell's Microton black, absolutely needs stirring).

I've only come across one other black lacquer product that nothing ever "fell out of suspension" and that was Star Chemical's Color Concentrate in black.

Yes, I think that the Steinway black lacquer is a dye based product. And there's nothing more black than Steinway black, everything else looks gray(ish) next to it, especially anything that is lamp black (like Mohawk's #0224 lamp black).

Steinway black lacquer is a hot spray lacquer which would need a lot of thinning with MAK (methyl amyl ketone) for regular spraying. Better than that approach, it's better to get Steinway black as a regular lacquer and get the accompanying lacquer thinner for it for your best flow out advantages. You get a choice of a more soft "instrument" lacquer or something more brittle in its final cure.

I think that this lacquer could help you way better than trying to search out for years the holy grail of jet black dye. By the way, if you get every black dye that Lockwood Dyes (New York City) sells, perhaps one of those will work for you. They have a dye that lets down in vinyl acetate that's very black, and not red black, and not brown black.

I've never tried or sampled the other Mohawk black that you mentioned, but I hope that you will write in what it does & what it doesn't do for you.

Yamaha, Maison & Hamlin, or Steinway would share with me their secrets of a nice jet black. I know that in the piano sense we're talking about something that's completely opaque, no transparency, no translucent qualities, completely like a paint. So thin it out, and the coating loses its ability to hide the grain. In the case of polyester, if you thin out a black gel coat you don't get a transparent or translucent black, you get gray.

I find black aniline water based dye, applied by brush, followed by an oil based ebony stain (even minwax) makes a very rich black.