I am stripping my oak kitchen table and want to change its color to the contemporary dark brown seen everywhere these days. I was looking through past topics in this forum and found a few people mentionned HC-72 from Ben Moore as the recommended color to use. I checked out that colour (along with a few others such as bittersweet chocolate) and found out that this was a paint, not a stain... Is the table supposed to be painted rather than stained in order to get the dark brown color? The salesperson at the store said that it is possible to make a stain out of paint...was this what was meant when the colour was recommended on this forum????
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I wanted the dark colour also for my headboard and I chose Onyx stain, by Minwax. It's a custom mixed colour but looks great. It's a very very dark brown, almost black. It's darker than the American Walnut.
You can see it here, the frame around the headboard (don't mind the paint colour, it was like that when I got here and haven't gotten a chance to change it yet)
are you trying to do a dark chocolate brown? you could use a minwax product. they have a colour called american walnut that is water based and the colour is premixed - you just go and pick it up. try on a hidden area or on a scrap piece of wood. just put more and more coats on until you get the desired shade.
if you are using paint - if it's a latex based paint, you want to water it down like crazy - like 1 tablespoon of paint per cup of water.
i make custom furniture for people and i've done both and i prefer the stain to paint. the paint takes a little getting used to. good luck.
erran