alternative to varathane wood conditioner?

I'm chasing some ideas for an acquaintance on alternatives to varathane wood conditioner. The msds says it is mainly white spirits, xylene and a proprietary alkyd resin and is used to seal wood, BUT IMPORTANTLY, oil stains may be used over it. It helps eliminate blotchiness of the stain. Anyone have ideas on an alternative product available in Australia?

Cheers
Michael


I found this site:
http://www.popularwoodworking.com/ar...ner_Confusion/
which pretty much answers most of my questions.

Why do you want to use oil stain? Anyway, you can make a pre-stain conditioner for oil stain by diluting a spoonful of oil-based varnish in a litre of turps or white spirit. You may want to give any end grain two coats.

Thanks WW, your home brew is mentioned in that second link I editd into my post, although they have a more concentrated dilution (50:50) than yours.
The friend is wanting to match a particular effect that a published woodcarver gets with this method and that carver uses oil stain.

Cheers
Michael

Be careful not to make the oil stain conditioner too strong or it will seal the wood entirely. That article you linked to says their conditioner "... is just varnish thinned with two parts mineral spirits". That's a 30% mixture, not 50%. I would have thought that was on the strong side too, but they say it works OK.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Woodwould

Be careful not to make the oil stain conditioner too strong or it will seal the wood entirely. That article you linked to says their conditioner "... is just varnish thinned with two parts mineral spirits". That's a 30% mixture, not 50%. I would have thought that was on the strong side too, but they say it works OK.

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:doh: misread that dilution, thanks. I'll tell him to try more dilute first.

Cheers
Michael