Using wood stains on plastic kits

David;

 You can use stain if the base is of a turpentine nature . But only twice . Anything after that will not do a thing .   Plus if you rough the surface with appropriate sized sandpaper , that will help .T.B.

I have a friend who uses stains on model ship hulls regularly.  Works fine but he had to develop the technique. I would recommend practicing on scrap material from kit- sprue material and such.

Minwax (a fine company) advertises its stain for use on metal and fiberglass as well as wood. People use it to create "wood grain" on stuff like steel doors, and the technique can be really effective.

I've never tried it on styrene, but it ought to work. Particularly if the plastic has been painted a light wood color first. 

I seem to remember that someone here recently usd wood stains on a ship.

Cog or ship Thomas? Docidle?

Anyhow, there's good reason to assume it would work like a wash.

I used a similar method on my Viking Ship, as follows.

Paint the model a final color coat including any variations, color changes etc. Solvent based enamel or acrylic. Apply a sealer coat of clear acrylic. The old standby is floor polish- "Future" being the usual one. Airbrush or hand brush, just be careful not to get runs.

After it dries well, apply your stains or washes. I use oil paint dissolved in Turpenoid, other stains might be similar. You can wait a few seconds, or a few minutes, then wipe off the excess and any runs. It's a pretty forgiving method if you go slowly and build up color.

David, you may be recalling my Mayflower WIP. I experimented with using wood stain, and I posted images. For my project, it is not the look that I am looking for but... from my testing, it worked fabulous. I used a base coat of MM wood, followed by stain. I thought it looked gorgeous. It looked just like new wood. If I was going to build a showroom new ship, I'd be looking at using stain. Just my two cents.

Steve

Yes, thats it! Got my Steves confused.

No problem, G. There are a lot of Steves on this forum.

Here is one of the examples that I posted.

Here is a link to the thread that shows the other comparisons that I did.  Hope this helps...

http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/7/t/165396.aspx?page=4

Thats it, and that is exactly the information i was looking for....

Thanks for all the replies.  Now i have a direction to at least start moving!

Cool!  Good luck, and let us know how it works out for you.

Steve