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I shaped at 120 grit and then soaked in black fieblings alcohol based die.
Sanding off with 220 I am to this stage and wondering if the little pixels of die in the red circle are imperfect sanding or just imperfect grain.

keep going with 220 or stain again and move on to 320?

It is really difficult to tell with the picture. Try putting the base coat at a higher grit. 120 is way to low to put stain on.

Yeah sand to 400-600 then stain.

I tend to stain between grits so I can find all scratches, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

clickklick wrote:I tend to stain between grits so I can find all scratches, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

This is what I was doing....

I normally stain at 400 but was doing a little sanding experiment here. But I see this routinely...pixels of stain that don't necessarily follow a perfect linear grain line. Wondering if its a problem with technique....

clickklick wrote:I tend to stain between grits so I can find all scratches, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

You can do that, it's a good way of finding them, but it also means the stain you're putting on is supposed to come off completely before you move on to the next grit, thus it's not a base coat

I found that staining a pipe very early is a big mistake and does more damage than good. With grits like 60-180 you basically have a surface full of deep ridges torn out by the grains of abrasive. If you apply stain on that surface the capillary action coupled with the rough surface will make the stain travel very deep (even several times the depth of cut of that grit) and set in some weird places. This basically means that you are introducing stain in such a way that it might be very difficult to remove it unless you cut away a very substantial amount of material. To put it simply, if you have a porous piece of briar and you stain it after 120 grit you might never be able to get a "virgin briar" kind of color from that pipe and you will have spots of stain sort of "outside" the grain. Just stain it later on and you'll be fine.

W.Pastuch wrote:I found that staining a pipe very early is a big mistake and does more damage than good. With grits like 60-180 you basically have a surface full of deep ridges torn out by the grains of abrasive. If you apply stain on that surface the capillary action coupled with the rough surface will make the stain travel very deep (even several times the depth of cut of that grit) and set in some weird places. This basically means that you are introducing stain in such a way that it might be very difficult to remove it unless you cut away a very substantial amount of material. To put it simply, if you have a porous piece of briar and you stain it after 120 grit you might never be able to get a "virgin briar" kind of color from that pipe and you will have spots of stain sort of "outside" the grain. Just stain it later on and you'll be fine.

I personally never thought of it this way, but it makes a lot of sense. I don't use stain any more to help me find sanding marks, but I did when I was first learning. After awhile, you just get a feel for how much you need to sand at each grit.

That is a good point. I'll keep that in mind as I get better and better at finish sanding. For now I will continue to stain to find all of the scratches until I cam confident in my ability to do it by "feel".