Finish Simulator
Pick a wood, pick a finish, and see the same board in three states side by side — off the planer, sanded, and finished — along with the sanding plan it actually needs, including the grit ceilings that hardwax oils genuinely enforce and most people find out about the hard way. Every wood here has a full write-up in the species wiki, and you can jump to it from the picker below at any point.
Read this before trusting the picture
The preview is a simulation, not a color match. The wetting is modelled with the Saunderson correction — light a finish stops from escaping gets reflected back into the wood and absorbed again, which is why finishing darkens dark woods proportionally more than pale ones — and its parameters are fitted against 153 registered before/after photo pairs from The Wood Database. That makes it a considerably better guess than eyeballing it, and still a guess: it can't know your board, your lighting, your coat count, or how a particular batch behaves, and two boards of the same species routinely finish differently. Always test your actual finish on an offcut of your actual board before committing to the real piece. The sanding and prep advice is researched from manufacturer instructions where they publish them, but their datasheet beats this page every time.
Safety, seriously: rags soaked in linseed, tung, or Danish oil generate heat as they cure and can catch fire on their own in a bin. Spread them flat outdoors to dry, or drown them in water in a sealed metal container. This is a real and regular cause of shop fires, not a theoretical one. Solvent-based finishes also need real ventilation and, for spraying, a proper respirator — a dust mask does nothing against vapor.
On the three panes: they are all the same board photo with different optics applied, not three different boards — the comparison would be meaningless otherwise. “Off the planer” is derived by running the wetting model backwards, since a rougher surface scatters more. On bare wood the difference between neighbouring fine grits is very nearly invisible, and the preview reflects that rather than inventing a difference; where grit genuinely shows up is under the finish, which is what the finished pane does when you drop below the recommended grit.
Product names are listed because they're the ones people actually use, not because anyone paid to be here. We have no affiliate relationship with any finish manufacturer.