Dr. Ben’s Knotty Walnut Weathering Stain4 min read

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If you’ve checked out any of our work, you’ll see that we love to weather buildings.

Todd and myself both equally enjoy adding that old, beaten and weathered touch to our structures. It just brings a building to life and really makes them pop.So we were very excited that we were given the chance to weather or add some depth to our structures with a new (to us) product.

This is the first product that I’ve used from Dr. Ben’s so up until this point, I’ve never had a chance to try out anything from them. Which in my opinion is a good way to approach a new manufacturer and product, without any bias or favoritism toward their line.

The bias or favoritism was quickly changed though after talking with them and using their stains… I love their passion and the couple products we’ve tried thus far!

Okay… About the Knotty Walnut Weathering Stain already!

To start out, I began by applying the Knotty Walnut Weathering Stain to a scrap piece of clapboard siding in three stages. Coat one covered the whole piece of wood, coat two covered two thirds, and coat three covered only one third. This allowed me to see what the weathering stain would look like with one, two, and three coats on clapboard siding. (Photos of each test piece is below)

The next test I ran was to apply a coat of our own homemade dark india inkwash to the piece of scrap clapboard siding, then follow it up with sections of one coat, two coats, and three coats, just as we did in the first test, but instead on-top of a piece of scrap wood siding just as I did in test 1 which was purely the weathering stain alone.

The final test was to apply a base of india ink wash, then a layer of a watered down FolkArt Barnwood acrylic paint, and then again, one, two and three layers of the Knotty Walnut Weathering Stain. Photo of each test piece below:

Applying the weathering stain to a building

Once I was confident with this weathering stain, I applied it to the walls of the side building of a recent kit that I was working on. The method that I used for this side structure was the India ink wash base, with two coats of the Knotty Walnut stain. I also added a little bit of brown, black and some white chalk dust.

You can see the final result of this stain application in the photo below:

The Verdict on This Product…

I was very satisfied with the quality of this weathering stain and I found it was very easy to use and it didn’t require me to use any special tools or other materials for application.

The color is darker, even with one coat of the stain, and it only gets darker as you apply more and more, but it does create a unique color and depth to your models. The stain is also an alcohol-based product, so it dries fairly fast, allowing you to apply more coats within a shorter period of time when compared to other, non-alcohol based products.

The other great part of this product isn’t really even about the product, but the company that we got the product from. Dr. Ben’s Scale Consortium is super easy to work with, and they went out of their way to make sure we knew not just about the products and how to use them (which, by the way, is something that ALL manufacturers should do, but many fall short), but they also made sure to give us a glimpse into the passion that drives them to make great products. And that if we weren’t satisfied with anything, at all, that they wanted to know.

THIS is what you want to hear when buying any product from any business.

But when we were talking to Dr. Ben’s, they made sure to let us know that all their weathering products are handmade, labeled and hand packaged by Ben and his family. This is a company that takes great pride in their products and you can tell.