When staining is part of the finishing regimen for a woodworking project, most of us pull out the same options for applying it: a brush of one kind or another, or maybe an old T-shirt or sock from the rag bag. But, while these alternatives are commonplace and cheap, they might not actually be the best choices for the task.
A couple of years ago, Jarred Brown — a longtime woodworker and DIYer — was about to finish a custom cabinet project with his dad. It was time for stain, but the choice of how to apply it suddenly seemed ironic as he reached for the family rag bag.
“I told my dad, between the two of us, we had more than 40 hours into the design and 80 hours into building the project, and we were about to stain it with my old T-shirt,” Brown recalls. “There had to be something better than that, but when he asked me what I might suggest, I had no idea.”....
