I am getting ready to finish a farm table with turned legs. The top and aprons are soft maple, and the legs are (unfortunately) rubberwood.

For the top, I was planning to spray normal strength (1 oz to 1 quart ratio) Transtint / DNA directly on the wood sanded to 180 in very light, successive and not overly wet coats, then spray with dewaxed shellac before some other finish, maybe arm-r-seal. Doing the Transtint mixed with shellac did not work out well for me on the last table, although I probably had too much Transtint, probably did not dilute the shellac with enough DNA and probably had the sprayer putting down too much finish so that it did not dry fast enough. As mentioned in a different post, the Transtint seemed to have a surface tension that made it migrated to the dry outer edges of whatever I sprayed, creating dark lines of dye along the edges.

For the legs, I am wondering if it would be better to use glue sizing (recommended on the Transtint instruction chart, rather than 1 lb cut of shellac, when using Transtint/alcohol), before spraying.

I bought the legs pre-turned and don't have any extras or rubberwood pieces for test samples.

It seems to me that the round "bulbs" on the legs will be mostly end grain-ish and get a lot darker than the rest really quickly without some kind of wash coat.

I also wonder if, when spraying a finish on legs like this, it is better to make a bunch of short horizontal passes (with the table legs upright) rather than trying to spray one single pass along the length of the leg, as a means of getting a consistent amount of finish on elements of varying diameters on the leg. Or is there some other approach.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Unfinished farm table.jpg

The chairs look like this. To get something somewhat related in color but quite as dark as the chairs, I am going to use straight up Dark Vintage Maple Transtint and start light and get a little darker through the successive passes with the dye. It wasn't identical but looked good on a test sample.

Leg to match.jpg