These are my tests of tung oil on Southern Yellow Pine. The tung oil is from the Real Milk Paint Company. I used two kinds - Pure Tung Oil and Dark Tung Oil. For both, I cut them 50-50 with Citrus Solvent, also from the Real Milk Paint Company. Since I also wanted to test Real Milk Paint as a stain/wash, I also ordered some Sky Blue Milk Paint.

The wood is left over pieces from when we did the floors in our current house about 10 years ago. This is not ideal since the surfaces have been exposed to the air. We could not sand them as much as we'd like since our sander that had not been used for years fell apart when we tried to sand the wood. So the wood is not well sanded and has a little bit of a hardened and polished surface. Here are the pieces before any finish is applied:
















I ended up not using all the pieces, so from here out there are only four pieces of wood. Here they are after the first coat:















Here are the pieces of wood with several coats of tung oil. I applied tung oil over the milk paint as that is one way recommneded to make milk paint more water resistant for kitchen use. I also wanted to test the "antiquing" effect of the dark tung oil over the paint:



As you can see, the dark tung oil is VERY dark. I delayed posting the pictures since I meant to do a test with mixing dark and pure tung oil to lighten the overall effect, but have not had a chance to do so. The Real Milk Paint Company recommends mixing the Pure and the Dark Tung Oil to adjust the color.

I also need to take pictures of the same Southern Yellow Pine that we have on our floors to show what color they are after ten years with and without exposure to sunlight.