Friends,
We had a little mishap with a special order we were building and it looked to be pretty catastrophic.
Konut ordered his Minis with Ipe (Brazilian Walnut) for the front, top and bottom panels. OK... no big deal, right? Just find a source and order some - easy enough. We got it in and all seemed to be fine. We built the enclosures and then began to finish them... that's where the trouble began. One enclosure's wood had a distinctly more "olive" looking set of bands in the figuring than the other one had. You couldn't really tell until the first coat of finish was applied though. Boy... that really made the olive color jump right out. Now what were we going to do? The two enclosures simply did not match. Each looked nice in it's own right but together...night & day.
Well, I spoke to Konut about it and said we might be able to do a little color matching to even them up. We tried using a walnut stain but it just wasn't the right type of material and we had nothing but trouble so we abandoned it. The only thing we had in-house were some dyes that we had tried several years ago. The stuff is in powder form so it lasts virtually forever. OK, so we mixed some up and tried it on some scraps. Hmmm... looks pretty good. We adjusted the colors to get the nicest look and this is what we ended up with:
(Sorry for the lousy pic, cheap camera and no skills. 
The pic looks a little more "red" than under normal light because I took it outdoors in direct sunlight.)Turns out the dyes are a lot easier to use than we had expected, so now...we all (YOU guys) have options. aa The dyes are available in all of the colors of the rainbow and you can mix to achieve almost anything you can think of. My kitchen cabinets are unfinished oak and I'm going to use a little walnut stain to darken it (especially in the grain pattern pores) and then use the dyes to achieve a nice Mahogany look. I'm looking for a color that is a little more orange than the color of Konut's Minis, but it will be pretty much the same otherwise - just a little less red dye mixed in with the yellow is all.
So... do you have a certain "look" that you like or piece of furniture you'd like to match? If we can get a good picture (or a real sample is better) - no problem-O!!!
The good part is that we can substitute less expensive domestic woods which are cheaper and far more abundant, while still achieving a look that is extremely similar to the real thing. This may not be possible in all cases as there's just no way you can copy certain exotics (like Crotch Mahogany, Zebrawood, Macassar Ebony, etc.), but others are possible to emulate. Just let us know and we'll see what we can do.
-Bob
PS. Konut... you like? - or should I offer them to somebody else?
