How To Using hydrogen peroxide to change a knife color

I just got back and have this little F-C bulldog mini trapper sitting in some 12% peroxide, surprisingly it was not hard to find at HD like I assumed it would be.
I went to the cleaning supply isle and there it was right next to the spray bottles.
 
They actually had a decent selection of RIT at my nearest Walmart so I bought a couple colors to mess around with before the stuff I ordered arrives, I bought a bordot wine color and a brown.
with the stuff i bought today I decided to try dying my grey bone half whittler and see if bleaching the dye out is necessary.
I didn't really have a plan when I attempted this, and didn't even know how much dye to use.
I just poured in some of the bordot color and a little brown, but in hindsight I probably should have tried just the brown or added a little bordot to it and not the other way around.

I don't know what I would call this, but while I don't necessarily love it I do hate it less than the original color.

It's very hard to photograph, but I guess I'd describe it as an extremely dark burgundy maybe?
If the 12% doesn't damage the bone on my test knives, I'll give this one a soak to see how well RIT dye can be bleached out.
The knife in question has always been quite stiff with bad W&T so I don't care that muc what happens to it.
 
I decided to try peroxide on the 08 I dyed yesterday and after about 30 minutes it had lightened up considerably, so I decided to then do another dye bath in just the chocolate brown color.

Now it looks much better, in person it mostly just looks like a very dark black walnut.



It looks pretty good in the right light, but I think if I had bleached the dye out of the bone and gone with just the brown alone this knife would look great.
 
Hickory n steel said:
I decided to try peroxide on the 08 I dyed yesterday and after about 30 minutes it had lightened up considerably, so I decided to then do another dye bath in just the chocolate brown color.

Now it looks much better, in person it mostly just looks like a very dark black walnut.



It looks pretty good in the right light, but I think if I had bleached the dye out of the bone and gone with just the brown alone this knife would look great.
Click to expand...
Looks good! I've been following along in hopes of learning a little bit. Will the bone need to be polished again once you get the color you like?
 
I soaked this old cheap ATCO knife I had, it was originally a dark brown.


I saw a YouTube video where a guy who had never done this before just used a bowl of boiling hot water without actually putting the knife in the pot and boiling it...etc, he also didn't add any salt and still got pretty good results.

I am going to try that on this knife, no salt, and no boiling the knife, just left in the hot Dye bath for awhile.
I will report back on what kind of results I get.
The no salt part is what I'm most curious about as it is also the part that worried me the most and I think it was responsible for the minor corrosion I got on that half 08 whittler.
 
Here's the little ATCO knife after a 10 minute soak.

The dye worked quite well without having to boil the knife or add salt...etc, just soaking in a hot bath of dye with the recommended little bit of dish soap.

I'm sure it'll depend on the knife, porosity of the bone, size, and the color of dye you're using as well as your desired effect, but I am surprised.
Based on everything I read I thought this method would yield little results, but it worked well enough in this test that I am going to try this method when I go to Dye my Barlow.
 
is red just a tricky color to bleach out or something?
This is the best I could get on a redbone Case.

It went back in and I'm hoping to get better results eventually, but if not I'll dye over it with brown hoping to achieve something like the old Case red bone.

Here is what I got from that bulldog brand, the shield came out but that's no big deal.


I'm starting to wonder if maybe jigged bone is just harder if not nearly impossible to bleach out very well for some reason, because it seems like the peroxide mostly just effects the smooth areas.
 
I am currently starting to think that jigged bone is generally more resistant to the peroxide for some reason, and I'm thinking that whatever Dye Case uses just can't be bleached out very well because I am not really seeing any results.

I took the red one out for the final time after having been in the peroxide nearly 24 hours, nothing had changed from earlier and I'm worried that soaking it much longer might harm the bone.
It certainly dissolved the glue holding the shield in place.


Something I discovered is that case bone ends up with a very tacky and chalky surface after being removed from the peroxide and the only way I've found to eliminate that is a healthy dousing in wd40.
This means a very thorough cleaning and degreasing is necessary before the dye bath.
I'm currently trying the method I experimented with earlier to dye this redbone Case without boiling, and it may not work very well with Case.
I've had it in the bath about 15-20 minutes at this point with nowhere near the results I saw with that ATCO knife almost instantly.
If this method is going to take hours to work ( if at all ) I'd much rather just boil it for 5 minutes.

I don't know what I'm going to do if I can't get the " grey " dye bleached out to start with a blank canvas, I probably will not be able to dye it the way I want and will have to settle for some kind of less desirable dark brown with hints of the original color hiding in it.
That 08 didn't turn out too bad, but that's just not what I had in mind for my barlow.
 
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Here is the mini coke bottle after I dyed over it with brown and glued the shield back in, the boiling was definitely necessary and I do believe the salt was necessary as well.


It's not terrible, but it just kind of looks like I went over an ugly faded red with brown.
In person it looks like a dirty very darkened red.
 
Hickory n steel said:
Here is the mini coke bottle after I dyed over it with brown and glued the shield back in, the boiling was definitely necessary and I do believe the salt was necessary as well.


It's not terrible, but it just kind of looks like I went over an ugly faded red with brown.
In person it looks like a dirty very darkened red.
Click to expand...
I think it looks really good. I bet the color will pop a little bit after it’s all polished up.
 
Even the 12% peroxide did basically nothing to the grey dye after sitting in it all day, so I decided to give up on bleaching the dye out.
Since that dye isn't coming out I knew that what I was planning wasn't going to work out.
With that in mind I came up with a plan to achieve something decent looking using the dye I already have ( I'll save the stuff I ordered to try on some white smooth bone sometime in the future)

1st I gave it a 10 minute bath in the simmering chocolate brown RIT dye, then polished it aggressively by hand with some green compound on a blue Scott towel, from there I torched it all over with a little butane torch lighter to give it some other tones.
Now a word of warning here, I got the bone a little too hot next to the bolster which caused the bone to peel up a bit.
I put it back in the simmering dye for 5 minutes while I thought about how I'd fix the warp, and to my surprise I got very lucky as the warp was completely gone when I took it out of the dye.
After the last dye cycle and good rinse then WD40 bath and air compressor I gave it a final less agressive hand polishing and then a vigorous buffing with some beeswax on an old wool sock.



I am quite pleased with how it turned out, I wanted a brown of some kind with definition and color variation which I achieved.
Because of the existing dye and because I think it's just an inherent issue with the RIT chocolate brown it's hard not to get subtle purplish tones, but I did the best I could to counter them.
Ideally I wish I could have replicated Case's " vintage bone ".
 
Hickory n steel said:
Even the 12% peroxide did basically nothing to the grey dye after sitting in it all day, so I decided to give up on bleaching the dye out.
Since that dye isn't coming out I knew that what I was planning wasn't going to work out.
With that in mind I came up with a plan to achieve something decent looking using the dye I already have ( I'll save the stuff I ordered to try on some white smooth bone sometime in the future)

1st I gave it a 10 minute bath in the simmering chocolate brown RIT dye, then polished it aggressively by hand with some green compound on a blue Scott towel, from there I torched it all over with a little butane torch lighter to give it some other tones.
Now a word of warning here, I got the bone a little too hot next to the bolster which caused the bone to peel up a bit.
I put it back in the simmering dye for 5 minutes while I thought about how I'd fix the warp, and to my surprise I got very lucky as the warp was completely gone when I took it out of the dye.
After the last dye cycle and good rinse then WD40 bath and air compressor I gave it a final less agressive hand polishing and then a vigorous buffing with some beeswax on an old wool sock.



I am quite pleased with how it turned out, I wanted a brown of some kind with definition and color variation which I achieved.
Because of the existing dye and because I think it's just an inherent issue with the RIT chocolate brown it's hard not to get subtle purplish tones, but I did the best I could to counter them.
Ideally I wish I could have replicated Case's " vintage bone ".
Click to expand...
That came out great!
 
Hickory n steel said:
Even the 12% peroxide did basically nothing to the grey dye after sitting in it all day, so I decided to give up on bleaching the dye out.
Since that dye isn't coming out I knew that what I was planning wasn't going to work out.
With that in mind I came up with a plan to achieve something decent looking using the dye I already have ( I'll save the stuff I ordered to try on some white smooth bone sometime in the future)

1st I gave it a 10 minute bath in the simmering chocolate brown RIT dye, then polished it aggressively by hand with some green compound on a blue Scott towel, from there I torched it all over with a little butane torch lighter to give it some other tones.
Now a word of warning here, I got the bone a little too hot next to the bolster which caused the bone to peel up a bit.
I put it back in the simmering dye for 5 minutes while I thought about how I'd fix the warp, and to my surprise I got very lucky as the warp was completely gone when I took it out of the dye.
After the last dye cycle and good rinse then WD40 bath and air compressor I gave it a final less agressive hand polishing and then a vigorous buffing with some beeswax on an old wool sock.



I am quite pleased with how it turned out, I wanted a brown of some kind with definition and color variation which I achieved.
Because of the existing dye and because I think it's just an inherent issue with the RIT chocolate brown it's hard not to get subtle purplish tones, but I did the best I could to counter them.
Ideally I wish I could have replicated Case's " vintage bone ".
Click to expand...
That looks much better than the gray bone!
 
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