Your presentation offers a very good comparison of alcohol based stains to Ferric Nitrate Jim and Katherine. What would have been interesting would be the effect that burnishing down the two LMF stained areas with the same vigor that you applied to the FN area. I submit that you would likely have removed almost all of the colour from the stock, whereas the FN stained area simply got better. My experience with LMF stains, or leather dye stains is that they leach out simply from the sweat of one's hands, and weather is very hard on them. And they are not colour fast in any way. UV bleaches the alcohol stains to the point that your gun will require refinishing within a few years, if you use it outdoors. So far, my experience with Ferric Nitrate especially when it follows tannic acid treatment first, is that no amount of rubbing with ScotchBrite or steel wool will remove the colour to the point where you'd be disappointed in the result. In short, commercially available alcohol based stains seem to be "on the wood" as opposed to "in the wood", as is FN and tannic acid.
