Aquafortis gone bad?

[Lock Nut]

(I decided to start a new post on this situation as others might not have read as to what happened in a previous post)

Well I finally got around to finishing my "pride and joy" and decided to try out some aquafortis instead of using stain. I'm using the Wahkon bay stuff and I tried it out on several scrap pieces of curly maple. So far so good. As you know when you apply it to the stock it is an yellow-green color and when you apply heat it turns it red-brown. So I put this stuff on my stock and proceeded to apply the heat and it just turned it a dark olive green. I'm using a heat gun which worked just fine on the scrap pieces. Some suggested I didn't get it hot enough but I almost scorched the wood in a few spots and it still stayed green. I used a fresh bottle of aquafortis on the test scrap piece and a 10yr old bottle on the same piece and you can see in the pic a slight difference between the two. The fluorescent lighting does cast a slight green on the unfinished piece. The stock has 100% curl which seemed to disappear instead of being highlighted. It has the same curl type as the scrap piece below it.

What happened???

 

[Keb]

I've noticed it blushes pink when hit with heat. I don't see much pink in your wood.

Applying the linseed oil is what brought out the sweet honey color and making the curl pop after the heating. This has been my experience, anyway.

 

[alex efremenko]

Different batches,old and new,different results.
you get what you get with AF.

 

[Lock Nut]

Well the problem now is what to do about it. So before I start sanding away and start over I decided to try a coat of the old stuff over the now green stock. What do I got to loose? So after a coat of that, I was able to get the stock to brown a little after the heat. This time I did it in small sections at a time and noticed were I over lapped, it was getting a nice red brown. So I hit the whole stock one more time and things were looking better. I gave it a few wipe downs with ammonia to neutralize it and it was looking great when wet. Thinking I'm out of the woods, I figured it was time for oil. But with all that wiping down I needed to whisker the stock again.
When I did that, That ugly green came back to haunt me again.

Anyone have this happen before? What a nightmare.

 

[Lock Nut]

Before and after whiskering. The brown came off almost effortlessly.

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[Lock Nut]

After coming to the conclusion that I'm stuck with a green stock with AF, I started whipping down the stock with some red and nut brown stain diluted in alcohol and whiskering with OOOO steel in between coats until I was able to kill off the green. The stock is a lot darker and with less figure than I wanted but I think I was able to salvage it. It has one coat of tru finish so far.

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[Zonie]

I'm sure you already know but some might not, the only time the stained wood will look like it will when an oil is applied is if it is wet.

Water, alcohol or oil will always make the color much darker than it looks when it is just dry, stained wood.

The subject of neutralizing came up before and I forgot to mention one of the best is lye water.

Lye water will bring out the tannin in the wood in varying degrees depending on the grain.

On a curly wood it will bring out the contrast between the waves in the woods grain.
You might want to try it but beware, lye water eats skin, hair and eyeballs.

Pure lye can sometimes be found in the plumbing sections of hardware stores. It is also available at the same stores as a "Stump Remover".

 

[Eric Krewson]

Most of the stump remover I see in the big box stores is 100% potassium nitrate, salt peter.

The idea is to turn your stump into a huge fuse, light a charcoal fire on top of it and burn it down to the roots. I tried it, didn't work at all.

 

[Zonie]

Your right. Brain fade I guess.
The stump remover is salt peter which is not the same as lye.

Some digging on the web says a product called ROEBIC Crystal Drain Cleaner is 100 percent Sodium Hydroxide (lye). Lowes home improvement may carry it.
http://candleandsoap.about.com/gi/...=31&zu=http://www.roebic.com/catalog/clog.htm
http://www.roebic.com/pdf/msds/HD-Crystal-Drain-MSDS.pdf

 

[mikemeteor]

Your right. Brain fade I guess.
The stump remover is salt peter which is not the same as lye.

Well I'll be danged, Zonie. I've been reading your answers and advice for 5 years; you are always on target and never seen a mis-step. You are my annual winner of "best answers with no attitude", for 5 years runnin'. And now ya got the chemistry of stump remover wrong.
This changes everything....

Just kiddin, you're still battin' .999 - that'll get ya in the Hall of Fame in any league. :hatsoff:
/mike

 

[Swamp Rat]

I was in my Ace hardware store and asked if they had pure Lye for drain cleaning. Answer was "Sure how much you need". So it is available pretty easily appearently at real(not Box) Hardware stores.

 

[Birddog6]

Must not have any Meth heads in that area. Allot of places won't carry Lye because druggies can use it for making methamphetamine's. In allot of areas now, you can't get lye based drain cleaner, same way with fuel for a Coleman gas lantern or gas stove. Lots of places will not carry it now. A friend of mine owns a Ace Hardware & he told me he quit stocking both just to keep the meth heads from coming to the store.

Keith Lisle

 

[Zonie]

I suppose it only takes a few turds to spoil the punch but it's too bad that the 99.999 percent of us have to do double backflips to be able to buy normal, useful things.

Tell your friend I said so.

After thinking about it for a few minutes might I suggest that you also tell your friend to start carrying both of those products while adding a new "store policy".

The policy?
Anyone buying over a pound of lye or a gallon of fuel must show their drivers license and the owners name and address will be copied and kept by the store.

Anyone buying large quantities of meth related substances to produce the drug will object while most of us 99+ percenters will just grumble until the store explains why the policy exists.

I'm pretty sure that most of us would thank the store for helping to squelch the druggies.

 

[frogwalking]

I guess you have fixed the problem by now, but not too long ago, I had the same situation. I put the af on a piece of scrap maple to see if I could reproduce the puke green color, and true enough, it did. I heated it to no affect. I put another coat on and heated it. Pretty red brown. I swallowed hard and coated the entire stock again, heated, and I like the result; although it did not improve my carving any.

:rotf:

 

[stude 283]

So it's normal for AF to turn the stock green,but subsequent coats will make it disappear?

 

[frogwalking]

It was on after two coats on the one above, however, as you can see, it got dark. That is what I wanted here. I think you should try several coats on another piece of wood to verify that you are going to get the same kind of outcome. It takes too much work to get to this point to guess.

 

[DEWB]

I have only used AF one time on my last build so I am no expert. But I noticed after I put it on the stock and heated it with the heat gun it had a green color that I didn't want. So I hit it again with the heat gun and it got darker and the green went away. I then gave it a water and baking soda wash to nuetralize it and then hit it with somes 400 or 600 grit to git rid of the whiskers. It was still kinda dull until I rubbed in a coat of blo to pop the curl and then waa laa, there it was. I don't think I got it hot enough the first time but then again you don't want to get it so hot as to char it either. As always your mileage may very. Dew

 

[mikemeteor]

So it's normal for AF to turn the stock green,but subsequent coats will make it disappear?

not sure there's a "normal" for AF application, but yes, the color before heat-blushing can be somewhat alarming.
In my experience, additional coats seem to deepen and even out the coloration, but not change the actual color.

this is after one coat of ferric nitrate crytals dissolved in denatured alcohol:



after blushing with a paint-stripper heat gun:




and after final finishing with Permalyn sealer and Chambers oil. I added a few drops of Feibings brown leather dye to the sealer.



so, generally, if you can keep your lunch down after that first green thing happens, and stay with it through the wetting/oil finish process, it comes out OK.
/mike millard

 

[Old40Rod]

In my experience (3 stocks using Ferric Nitrate crystal/denatured alcohol mix), I got green when I didn't let the stock dry well enough before hitting it with the heat gun. The last stock I did I let dry for about 1 hour after application of the solution before hitting it with the heat -- no green. Some parts of the stock just take a little more time to dry than others.