Marco, it is never easy to guarantee a good result when you stain a blade.
One blade that I made myself took me days to stain well. Truly days. I did it again and again and again until I was satisfied. When I took this blade to Solo to have a wrongko made for it, I received some very, very extravagant compliments on the quality of the stain, which was pretty gratifying, but the time involved in getting this result was unbelieveable.
There is a difference between a "good result", and a "great result".
If you see a keris that has been stained really well, there is depth to the colour, and the whole thing seems alive, it lifts, it sparkles, even if its an old blade with ,say, Pajajaran pamor, it still seems to have life. A "good job" will give you the contrast , but it fails to "fly". Most commercial stainers do the stain by soaking, and in the right weather conditions this method gives a fairly consistent OK result, but it is never great. Its cheap, its affordable, its OK, but its not great.
Probably the biggest single flaw in any stain job is the failure to prepare the blade properly:- it must be really, really clean. If it is not, it is virtually certain that you will find small areas of discolouration under the black; you can find these by inspecting the blade at an angle in strong, direct sunlight.
You can certainly get some sort of a result under almost any conditions---inside, outside , early morning, midnight---whenever.You can also get some sort of a result with a number of different substances. For instance, Marco, you mention "lemon juice". If you are using true lemons, and not Tahitian limes, then although you will get a result, you will not get the best result possible.
In extremely cold conditions you can get quite good results, simply by using much less of the suspension on the blade, and working it constantly. I work it by pinching, but it can also be worked by continual brushing. However, its as I say:- although you will get a result, it will not be the best result possible.
In general, old blades are much, much easier to stain than new blades. At times I have soaked an old blade in pineapple juice to clean it, and when the cleaning has been completed, all it needed was a once over brush with lime juice to bring the stain back to acceptable---not really good, but good enough.
It takes a long time to gain the experience needed to get consistently good results from staining, not only do you need to understand the process, but you need to understand tangguh, so that you will know the colour that is most likely to be achieved with a good stain job. It is a pointless exercise to try to extract the colours of a Surakarta blade from a Tuban blade.
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