Photo finish: my solution!

[earlyfilm]

Originally Posted by miniman82

A second thought: perhaps the reddish stuff was photo sensitive, and they simply exposed it to a negative which had the wood pattern on it after it was applied to the cabinet? ..

If they had used that method, the wood would have absorbed both the developer and fixer and washing them out would have been next to impossible. The finish would have quickly turned an ugly yellowish brown from the remaining chemicals and destroyed the image.

Most fake grain during the 30's to 80's were printed. If you look very closely at it, you will see the half-tone grid used in the printing process.

An alternate process was simply applying a lighter base coat and sliding a rotating roughlty groved roller coated with a darker color to fake the grain. This method looks too crude for most TV's, but for large wall panels, it works.

Jas.