Hardwood Floors June/July 2018

AT THE SITE

By Johannes Boonstra

With the increasing demand and desire for trendy colors in today’s interior décor, wood flooring professionals need to understand how to provide customers with looks that are often different from the natural color of the wood species used for the installation of the wood floor. Most of us have used and are familiar with traditional stains to alter the color of wood, and are reasonably comfortable with those processes, but perhaps are not always familiar with the actual makeup and limitations of a stain.

STAINS AND COLORANTS Used on Wood Floors

resin to hold on to the pigment deposited on the substrate. The binder in oil- based stain may be linseed oil, an alkyd/urethane resin, or a combination of both. Oil-based stains are available in higher VOC versions and low VOC versions. While the environmental benefits of a low VOC stain are obvious, the consequence with low VOC formulated oil-based stain is that typically less solvent/carrier is used in the formulation with a higher binder/resin load. This makes the product by its own nature

The binder is a resin, whose sole purpose is to bind the pigments to the wood fibers/ cellulose where the pigment particle has penetrated/ is laying on/in the woods substrate, at the same time the small amount of binder/ resin also seals the stained wood. Without the binder, the pigment would easily rub off or lift off with manual finish applications once dry. A typical wood floor stain is formulated to penetrate and meant to be only applied in one application, as with multiple applications there is simply not enough binder/

manufactured pigment particle (like iron oxides or TIO 2 ), generally pigments are fairly lightfast (some are less lightfast and may fade a bit). Depending on the pigment grind and color and/ or pigment load, a stain color may be light or dark and may be transparent, semi- transparent, or semi-solid (more opaque or “muddy” in appearance). Pigment does not dissolve in the solvent but is suspended in the liquid, so it may settle due to its weight (may require periodic stirring during use).

You may have heard of dyes, reactive stains, and the terminology “shading or glazing.” So, let’s take a closer look what we may use on a site-finished job when adding color to the wood floor is required. STAIN A stain is basically simple in its makeup, the ingredients used for manufacturing a stain are: pigment, binder, solvent (aka carrier) and additives. The pigment used may be organic (earth pigments) or sometimes a synthetic

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