Question on staining maple

Bruceter

Bruceter

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May 19, 2000
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Greetings all,

I have some maple scales that I am putting on a blade blank I was given. Wiping the scales with alcohol or water shows a nice bit of tiger-stripe to it.
Will some light stain help bring out the striping? Or, is something like tru-oil enough?

TIA

Bruceter
 
Greetings,
I use leather dye (Fiebing - Permanent spirit-based dye) from Tandy and mix with 99% isopropyl alcohol to get the color you want. I have a small vacuum and pressure vessel that I use. I pull vacuum for a couple days and pressure for a week. It takes a couple weeks for the wood to dry again. Caution, some of the big stabilize companies will not stabilize pre dyed wood. I stabilize my wood so this does not matter to me.
 
The old way of doing this is to use Aqua Fortis. You can buy it from Track of the Wolf. It's a reagent, put it on, it turns it green, hold it over your electric range burner to turn it a brown. It reacts with the sugar in the wood, so I have been told. Or you can use leather dye!
 
Thanks for the help! I have some leather dye, I'll give that a try.

Bruceter
 
staining will change the colour, oiling will show the tiger stripe. One doesn't exclude the other
 
Mandt_B08_01-ww.jpg
This is one that I did back in 2008 or so using the spirit dye method. Buy the light or medium brown dye. You can go as light or dark as you want and you can actually lighten it up by sanding. The dye does not penetrate very deeply unless you do like Dennis says. You still need to do an oil fish or something similar once yo dye the wood.
 
Figured maple with a little stain or dye and a nice hand-rubbed oil finish makes one of the most classic and good-looking handles ever, as well as being reasonably durable, fairly easy to maintain and feeling very "warm" and comfortable in hand.

There are many ways to accomplish it. Start googling and you will find enough recipes and techniques to keep you reading all afternoon, and many of them are really quite simple to make with stuff you probably all ready have around the house. One of the best resources for this is the guys who build muzzle-loading rifles.
 
I have some boiled linseed oil that I was going to put on as a final finish. I found some sample packets of Minwax stain (look like a ketchup packet). The colonial maple looked pretty good on the piece of scrap that I tried it on.

Thanks again for all the help.

Bruceter
 
Ive done just about every way including muriatic acid..Aqua fortis works best, hands down though you'll have to order it from TOTW or Muzzleloaders supply..There is a way to make your own but its getting harder and harder to find the ingrediants.
 
As best as I can tell, aqua fortis is nothing more than a 10% solution of nitric acid.
Kentucky said:
Ive done just about every way including muriatic acid..Aqua fortis works best, hands down though you'll have to order it from TOTW or Muzzleloaders supply..There is a way to make your own but its getting harder and harder to find the ingrediants.
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jdm61 said:
As best as I can tell, aqua fortis is nothing more than a 10% solution of nitric acid.
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That and iron filings or rusty nails..We just cant get nitric acid around here anymore..A lot of the old timers who made don't even know what the internet is :D
 
LOL. I have also heard of people using steel wool that has been degreased. Does the iron content allow it to darken the wood without having to "bake" it?
Kentucky said:
That and iron filings or rusty nails..We just cant get nitric acid around here anymore..A lot of the old timers who made don't even know what the internet is :D
Click to expand...
 
jdm61 said:
LOL. I have also heard of people using steel wool that has been degreased. Does the iron content allow it to darken the wood without having to "bake" it?
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It still has to be heated, Ive made one batch with steel wool and it came out different? Blackish instead of the normal reddish color?(probably something I did wrong) Ive always been told that rusty wrought iron makes the best but I have no conformation of that..When I try to make another batch Im going to use some old wagon rim wrought to see how it works.
 
Using stain on figured maple tends to look pretty blotchy.
I believe that is because of the size of the pigments that are suspended in the finish.
Using dye seems to give a much nicer look. After the dye is dry then you will want to apply a finish for a protective layer. I like danish oil.
I have used aniline dyes for surface dying figured woods that turned out very nice and even.
I have seen handles dyed with Feibings Oil Base Leather dye that turned out really good too.

Or you could do the vinageroon trick. Dissolve steel wool into vinegar and then soak the wood in that.
Sure, the handle will smell like pickles, but everyone likes pickles.
 
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this one was finished with super glue gel or epoxy one I cant remember which I put on it for sure.
 
Phillip, I have heard that you get the black color after "toasting" with some mixtures, but I can't remember what you do to get rid of that dark layer. It may just require a light going over with OOOO steel wool. The reason that I use the Fiebings sprit it dye is because Bill Moran told me that he had switched from the old school methods late in his career. The interesting thing about the Fiebings stuff that is brown, tan, etc, is that those colts are just variations on the same red-yellow mix, so that you can actually get dark brown using light or medium brown just buy slathering it on. I originally bought every shade form yellow to dark mahogany, but when I bought a big bottle, i just got medium brown. Of course, for leather if if you want jet black, you need Navy blue first, then black over that. But for wood, brown works great. You might also want a smaller bottle of one of the really light yellowish-brown color like British tan if you want to do a two tone patterns like you see Jay Hendrickson do sometimes. He will do the lighter color inside of a "window" border of silver wire inlay and then a much darker color on the outside and it looks boss bitchin'!!! :D
 
Burl Source said:
Using stain on figured maple tends to look pretty blotchy.
I believe that is because of the size of the pigments that are suspended in the finish.
Using dye seems to give a much nicer look. After the dye is dry then you will want to apply a finish for a protective layer. I like danish oil.
I have used aniline dyes for surface dying figured woods that turned out very nice and even.
I have seen handles dyed with Feibings Oil Base Leather dye that turned out really good too.

Or you could do the vinageroon trick. Dissolve steel wool into vinegar and then soak the wood in that.
Sure, the handle will smell like pickles, but everyone likes pickles.
Click to expand...
Mark, the undisolved pigment" solids" in the spirit dye tend to collect on the surface. I think that is why you get kind of a very light abrasive polishing effect when you dye stag with the stuff and then rub the excess off with a cloth.
 
I have tried muriatic acid and fiebings dye before and it worked very well but the muriatic has to be neutralized..Another is chromium trioxide but a lot of very well known and exp'd gunmakers have told me that it tends to turn maple "green" after about 15 years..
 
I appreciated all the help, I ended up finding a can of Minwax colonial maple stain in my shop. Thought you may like to see how it turned out.

It is a Green River patch knife blade that I cold blued, a couple coats of stain and a 50/50 carnauba (sp?) and bees wax mix for the finish.
Here is is next to one I finished a while back.


Bruceter
 
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