Ammonia fuming is a standard method to stain Arts & Crafts furnishings product of oak. In a nutshell, you expose the uncooked wooden to extremely concentrated ammonia fumes, and the fumes react with the tannins within the oak to darken it. That’s how I stained this Roycroft-style taboret challenge within the April 2022 situation of Woodworker’s Journal Magazine. The impact of this chemical response is that it turns the uncooked wooden to this greenish/grey colour in about 24 to 48 hours. One potential drawback is that White oak sapwood doesn’t include a lot tannin. So, the ammonia received’t react with it and colour the wooden, prefer it does with the heartwood. In this video, we’ll exhibit a couple of methods to match the colour of the sapwood.
