On Mar 15, 7:35 pm, "Abe" wrote:
On Mar 14, 7:29 pm, (J T) wrote:

Tue, Mar 13, 2007, 6:46am (EDT-3) (Abe) doth
proclaim:
I'm refinishing a solid cedar chest that is probably 90 years old. I've
stripped the original finish and have sanded the entire thing a couple
times. snip

Well, I guess you finished any collector value it might have had.

I'd get a scrap piece of cedar and test on it. Well, not actually,
I doubt I'd want to stain cedar.

...

It wasn't worth much beforehand. It's a nice chest, but the old
finish was black. I tried to just clean and rejuvenate, but it was
too far gone.

Plenty of antique furniture has a finish (typically linseed oil based
I think) that has gone black and looks like crap. Sometimes
careful refinishing will reveal burl or curly figure with a gorgeous
patina.

But it still destroys the value. It sucks that the furniture was
worth more when it looked like crap.

Given that cedar has sort of a blotchy appearance to it, you might
consider using a stain only on part of the lid to hide the watermarks.
Staining the whole think would probably just make it look like
stained watermarks.

--

FF