Removing sticker stain in hard maple bench top

[Gary Viggers]

I am in the process of building a workbench out of hard maple. The top has two instances of sticker stain (pic 1: light stain on the left side, pic 2: worse stain in the center, pic 3: the whole top). I do not want to sand it down any more; I started with 16/4 boards and have had to mill it down to 3-1/2" due to slight twists in the boards and attempts at sanding out the stains on a wide belt sander. I do not want to lose any more thickness. I can not use the bottom as the top. I am planning on putting a Marples 146 holdfast in the center which may provide a little distraction from the stain, but I would like to remove/lessen it if possible.

How can I remove/lessen it?

Would oxalic acid be useful? Another type of bleach?

Obviously I want to avoid making the fix stand out worse than the stains I am trying to remove. I would do a test spot on the back of the bench top before attacking the problem on the show side. Any constructive help would be appreciated.

FYI: the top is 3-1/2 x 28 x 72 glued up from 3 boards. Crack filled with epoxy dyed with india ink.

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[John TenEyck]

Most workbenches are edge glued, like that other slab in the last photo. The sticker stains would not have been an issue. You could try oxalic acid, and then laundry bleach. If they don't remove it then a peroxide wood bleach might do it, but those will typically change the surrounding wood so you would might have to do the entire top to get an even color.

Personally, that stain wouldn't bother me, and would be the least of the stains on my bench after a couple of years of use.

John

[glenn bradley]

I'm with John. Beautiful bench tops are beautiful. But, after day-one in my shop the stain would be irrelevant. I'm not a slob but, a workbench is going to be worked on, not just looked at.

[Chris Fournier]

Unless you bleach the entire top you'll simply trade sticker stain for discolouration. I'd agree with the others, let the stain be a part of your bench top.

[Gary Viggers]

I'm well aware how most benches are glued up; I've helped glue-up several of them with John Nyquist's guillotine press. And they aren't "edge-glued"; they are glued on the faces (laminated) - the edges are now on the top/bottom. I am making a Roubo-style bench with elements from Chris Schwarz's 18th century bench with big slabs for the top. 16/4 was the thickest I could find. MY top is edge-glued.

My question was not "Should you care about stains on your bench?" or "Should you break in your bench on Day 1 with an intentional blow delivered by a 1-1/2" chisel?"... how long until "that guy" chimes in? Start another thread or poll, please. I understand the line of thinking that a bench is just another tool. I should have written in my OP that I wasn't soliciting opinions on whether or not I should attempt to remove the stains.

Thanks for the peroxide wood bleach idea.

[Pat Barry]

I know you don't want to sand it anymore but I don't think there is another way to be totally rid of the stain. If you want to experiment though I would try to thoroughly soak the spot in water and then vacuum it to suck the stain out. It may work. If the vacuum doesn't work then try the same thing but use a dry white towel and a hot clothes iron to draw stain out of the wood with the water.

[Gary Viggers]

You're right about the sanding, Pat. If I knew I could get rid of it with a couple/three passes, I'd probably do it, but it's impossible to tell how deep it is. Your water-drawing ideas are interesting.

[Andy Pratt]

For what it is worth, the guys telling you not to worry about it probably weren't trying to criticize you for worrying about it, they were probably trying to make you feel better about the mistake because there is no easy way to fix it.

Getting to your question: It seems like these stains on hard maple only go away completely by removing the wood, which as someone else said can go deeper than you may want to risk going. In my experience the minor ones are less noticeable after finishing (assume clear finish) and the major ones are just as noticeable after as before, maybe more. If it was my bench, the bad stain out of the two would drive me crazy permanently and I know I wouldn't end up noticing the other one by the time I was done. So, I would look at it like you have one problem: what to do to make the worst stain less noticeable. Here are some options in order of what I would do first, some of them address the other stain as well:

1) Stain the entire top if it fits in your plans for the piece. I doubt you want to do this but it is worth mentioning since it is the easiest fix for the problem, the darker the better but I'll bet just about anything that colors it hides it good enough.

2) Hide the offending area: The bad one is close to your bench center, maybe you can do some sort of high quality inlay or other solid-wood addition there that is strong and durable but completely masks that area in a way that looks deliberate. For example if you had a large shop logo or inlayed your family name into the top, that kind of thing.

3) Remove the top 1/4 or 1/8" of that center board right to the glue joints of the adjacent boards, using a router or maybe a dado blade on the TS if you have helpers. Replace that section with a matching board of that thickness. You'll only be able to notice the repair from the ends and probably not even that if you match grain nicely or incorporate an edge profile the right way.

4) Rip away the entire center board along the glue lines and either flip it over if the other side is ok or replace it with a matching board.

5) Wide belt it down (listing this last because you didn't want to do it) until the stains are gone and if you feel the top is too thin at that point, alter your bench structure to give it more support underneath. Even a 3" top makes a fine bench if you handle the underside correctly.

If all else fails you know what to do: paint a red dot in the upper right hand corner of the bench, everyone will ask what it is for and no one will notice the sticker stain. You could put the red dot over the sticker stain, but that would be cheating.

I hope something in here was helpful, best of luck with it.
Andy

[David Weaver]

I would be added to the group of folks who wouldn't worry about it. You should see my bench top. I scrape it with a card scraper every few months just to get most of the smootz off of it. The best bench top is one that's flat but not visually perfect, so that you don't waste your time worrying about whether or not you might drop a tool on it and dent it or overcut with a chisel and put a mark in it, etc.