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Thread: cherry look alike finish

  1. #1

    cherry look alike finish

    I'm making a shaker dresser for my daughter. In my area red alder and birch are less expensive that cherry.
    Question, will either take a cherry stain to match my daughters bed which has a dark cheery finish? Would someone who has used a dark cherry stain on either re alder or birch please reply?
    Thanks

  2. #2
    Join Date
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    "Cherry stain" doesn't often actually look like cherry, but yes, you can color other close-grain woods to provide a reasonable facsimile of cherry...a lot of the mass market furniture is made that way, quite honestly. If you are matching a particular color, I suggest using dye and choose the alder over the birch so you have a similar grain and pore pattern to cherry. Birch will never look like cherry in that respect. You'll need to work out things via experimentation on scrap of the same material and don't forget that as you test what steps are necessary to get the look your want, you need to do at least one coat of your intended top finish to ascertain the actual color. (Clear coating changes the color, sometimes subtly and sometimes noticeably. You may need to use a combination of dye and then either a gel stain or a toner to get things darker, too. Matching color is an "art"...
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  3. #3
    Birch heartwood and maple heartwood are often sold as a replacement for cherry... And are even sometimes sold as cherry by unscrupulous vendors. The differences - no prominent ray fleck when quartersawn, no sap pockets all over the place, and it doesn't darken with light much. Otherwise - it often looks just like cherry.

    I made a guitar out of wood sold to me as cherry that turned out to be orange birch heartwood. Not much I could do once I figured it out... I had the wood 10 years before the guitar was built. Made a nice guitar. It was nice and straight grained and took finish well.

    Maybe poke around with the sawmills and see if they have some of the dark orangey heartwood. It's generally not in demand vs the white sapwood and can be had cheap.

    On the stains - yes, there are plenty of cherry stains out there. Most of them aim for old dark red brown oxidized cherry instead of fresh orange cherry..

  4. #4
    I suspect your daughters bed may be birch or alder with a cherry stain anyway, if this was commercially produced. Can you take a pic of the bed, close up?

    I have the best luck color matching by using water soluble dyes. Places like wd Lockwood have a broad enough selection such that you can buy 5 and mix and match to get it close enough for only you to be able to tell the difference.

  5. #5
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    I made this several years ago. It is make from actual cherry (curly & figured), but was going to be placed in a room which gets no natural light (in fact, no light at all unless we are in there). We wanted it to match other, older cherry furniture so I experimented until I came up with a dye formula that gave it the color we were looking for without needing to wait for the eventual change. As others have said, you should be able to do something similar with dye on Alder.

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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2013
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    All the commercial furniture I've seen marketed as "cherry" is really "cherry (colored) finish" and is alder or another hardwood. And that dark red is what the public expects is meant by "cherry". I suspect that it would be too hard for mass production to control the color of real cherry wood which would continue to darken unevenly.
    Last edited by Stan Calow; 03-26-2017 at 9:39 AM.

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