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I am new to the forum as well as to the pipe making game. I am throwing myself headfirst into the hobby so I am trying to learn as much as possible. I have finished shaping my first two pipes and have ordered some Fiebing's dyes for staining. Since I am new I do not have any spare briar. I was wondering if there are any other woods that stain comparable to briar that I could test my staining techniques on. I would hate to ruin my two creations with my experimentation. Thanks for the help everyone.

I do not have a suggestion except for, in the future, keep your scraps when shaping the briar and you will never run out of actual briar to test stains on. Specifically, the first step for many of us (other than design) is to cut some pieces off of a briar block with a bandsaw. Keep the larger ones, plus any pipes that .. er .. don't make it past quality control.

The short answer is, no.

Keep your scraps to experiment with staining. There are some burls that have a similar grain structure, but none of them are subjected to the same post-harvest processing that briar is. That bit makes all the difference.

Thanks for the help, gentlemen. I will just have to tread lightly on my first few attempts.

You can always send em and stain em again. The stain does not penetrate especially deep. So you can play a bit.

Most likely, what is going to happen is you will stain your stummels and then think "Wow, that looks horrible, I need to sand more". That STILL happens to me. Sometimes.

Okay, every time.

When buying Fiebings dye you need to be careful which one you get, they do an 'Institutional Dye' which is water based and is pretty useless at dying leather never mind briar.

And as said above staining and then sanding is a good way of spotting scratches and making sure that you sand all of the stummel.

DMI wrote:When buying Fiebings dye you need to be careful which one you get, they do an 'Institutional Dye' which is water based and is pretty useless at dying leather never mind briar.

And as said above staining and then sanding is a good way of spotting scratches and making sure that you sand all of the stummel.

The institutional dye is good to use in concert with the alcohol based dyes because one won't muddle the other. This can help create better contrast. It takes some practice to get the process down, but once you do, the institutional dye can be useful.

TJ