Vinegar stain again

[Runner]

I have been scraping down a nice peice if scrap every day and finishing it with the vinegar stain to track how it works and how long it takes to get good results.
In the beginning, it would turn maple gray. It now produces a pretty nice soft brown with some gray highlights in the curl here and there. It pops the curl very well. 5 coats of vinegar and two coats of oil produce a beautiful show quality finish. It is still too soft a brown for my tastes, but it gets better every day. My batch needs a touch of red that it does not have. If you add a touch of Walnut oil stain into the clear oil finish, the warm honey tone over the soft brown of the vinegar produces a stunning finish. I can sand this down, apply five coats of vinegar, two coats of oil, and produce the same stunning results every time. Anyone with time should play with this stuff for a while just to see. I would post pics but my camera seems to have trouble picking up in the curl.

I have to figure out how to get good pictures of curl in wood yet!

 

[bob1961]

take some pictures in the sunlight....i finished my vinegar stain with 8 coats stain then 8 coats BLO oil :v .............bob

 

I still see a lot of grey in the wood. Is that what you were aiming for? You can see the same thing in the no.1 sample in Buffalo's post. I've been watching the posts on vinegar staining and wondering why no one mentioned that vinegar stain is normally used on woods that contain tanin such as cherry, at least that is what my references on wood finishing say. Maple is specifically mentioned as turning grey with vinegar stain. I guess if you put enough layers of linseed or tung oil it will cover it up tho.

 

[Runner]

First, I am making no attempts to clean up that piece of wood except for the test area. There are gray areas outside what I am shooting that are from early applications when it would turn the wood gray.
The only gray left is from one direction in the curl, and it adds to the effect. The curl is different colors from different directions.

This is from the direction that the gray shows from.

This is from the other direction.

The stock will change from a tea brown to almost white depending on the angle of the light. The curl and change is extremely lively and very pleasing. If I add a dash of walnut stain to the oil, it picks up a warm glow that makes it even better. A stock finished the way this scrap is looking would draw a lot of comment at a gathering!

 

Runner,

How long has the concoction been sitting in your stain pot and what kind of metal did you use? I got good results from using rusty old barbed wire and letting it set about 4-6 weeks before I used it. Its a slow reaction and takes that long to really saturate the solution with FE ions. If your stain's been talking to itself that long and you're still getting those results, I'd say you used some sort of alloy in it with Manganese or something. If not, try adding a little bit more vinegar the night before you use it. It might give you a bit more red.

Sean

 

[bob1961]

the color you will get will be different from tree to tree....your maple stock will be a different color then my maple stock from the same type of maple tree from two different trees....don't know why, but if yer looking fer a single color fer yer gun stock use pieces of wood from the cut off from yer stock....i asked the place that sold me my stock to send all cut offs from the wood they cut fer my stock....that way i kinda know what the color might look like when done :v ..............bob

 

My reference on wood finishing says that aging vinegar stain accomplishes nothing. I suspect that any darkening of maple, comes from rust suspended in the solution. At least when I experimented with a piece of maple plank that is what happened. As I applied more stain it became obvious that the color was iron oxide.

 

[Runner]

Mine has a hand full of rusty nails and about a cup of scale rust in it. I added a drop of detergent and a little red food coloring. It is only about two weeks old now and is still changing day to day. It will dye beech to chocolate brown if you wish, but it is a cold dead brown. On straight grained beech it should provide good color strength and good penetration. You would have to experiment to find the color you wanted. On maple it would still take too many coats to get a dark color other than the grain with my batch. It does pop the grain better than anything else I have used, but I have never used Aquafortis. Two things have impressed me so far. I can strip this stock back down and redo the finish with exactly the same results time after time. Other then getting a little darker, it remains the same. The other thing is that it seems to be compatible with my oil stains. In fact, it seems to prep the surface to take another stain quite well. Using it alone, when you put on the first coat of oil finish, it completely soaks in. It takes several coats to get a good surface, but it makes for a great oil finish.

 

[bioprof]

If you want to end up with a warmer tone, try using an overcoat of LMF maple. The vinegar stain will make the curl "pop" and the LMF stain will give you the color you want. The important thing is to experiment on a piece of the same wood as the stock. I tried vinegar stain on the first rifle that I built and then experimented with aqua fortis. I think I'm done with the AF for now and am going to go back to the vinegar stain. The vinegar stain is much easier to control.

 

Yer all missing a couple of points here. First if you are using relatively new manufacture nails, they are plated, and have a lot of alloy in them, or are coated with anticorrosive. It's not so much the rust, as the pure iron in the solution. You are trying to create ferric nitrate, or cloride, in order to get the reaction in the wood. Both which makes them poor canidates for the vinegar stain. Second the vinegar stain is a mild form of Aqua-Fortis. A certian amount of heat is required to make it work. You need to apply the stain, let it dry completely, then apply heat from a propane torch, stovetop, or heat gun to activate the iron oxide in the mixture. This will give you the darker color you are looking for. Adding dye and other junk really won't hep that much. Another stain that works well, and is old timey is plug tobacco that is soaked in ammonia. aftersoaking for a couple weeks strain the mixture thru cheesecloth and apply. You need to leave the container open to let it bleed off the ammonia. Lastly the Vinegar stain need a goo six weeks to be much good

Bill

Aspire to Inspire before you Expire

Bill

 

[Runner]

The heat gun makes no difference in the color. The nails were some sixty year old or better rusty nails out of an estate sale box. I will try other mixes before I am done, but for now I am happy with this first batch. I may cut some chinese cast iron up tomorrow and start a new batch to see how that works out. I have a broken bracket that should provide lots of material very quickly using the band saw. I am ordering a replacement stock in the morning, so I want to find a very good color batch to use in a month or so! If nothing else, I am having fun experimenting, and the price is right!
I gotta say this tho. If I had a stock that looked like my test patch all over, I think I would be afraid to go hunting with it! If the next batch is better, I will be very pleased.

 

Runner,

I wouldn't bother with the detergent as its a base and will just offset the acid of your vinegar and slow the reaction. No clue what the red food coloring will do in this if anything. The red color you will get is from the ferrous and ferric ions (iron) in the solution. That's also why its important not to use alloyed stuff. My gut feeling is that it needs to sit a couple more weeks, then try it out on some maple scrap instead of a stock.

Sean

 

[Vaino]

Due to the many posts concerning vinegar stain, I've come to the conclusion that achieving a "good" color is more difficult and erratic than using other stains and dyes. I have a bottle of vinegar stain that has been "brewing" for 6 mos. and it continually changes color from reddish brown to gray and I continually feed it "high quality", old, very rusted barbed wire and additional vinegar. So far from what I've observed, I'm not even thinking of using this stuff on a stock, especially when there are so many fairly "predictable" stains and dyes available. Perhaps the batch I'm presently "brewing" will settle down and become useable..I hope so because some have achieved excellent results......Fred

 

Fred,

I'm inclined to agree with you. There is definitely a lot of variability in it. You can get good results with it, but its kind of a pain. I've used it on a couple of hickory longbows and been happy, but I think I'm ordering some ferric nitrate crystals from Kyantec or some other source and going with aqua fortis in the future.

Sean

 

[Runner]

Well, with all of the discussion about the correct kind of metal, I decided to find out. I took a cast iron tool support from my wood lathe that is broken and cut it in to slices. I took the big parts and turned them in the lathe creating about half a cup of very fine iron particles. I put half of that in my mix and half in fresh vinegar. The fresh vinegar jar started to bubble and froth. You could see the particles rising to the surface and then falling again. Heavy acid odor. The other batch did not react as drastic as that one did. I have my red tones now, and the stain is too strong for maple as it stands. It would need to be cut before using it. It no longer has a problem with being too brown either since I mixed the two together after the reaction slowed in the first jar. I heated the first jar while it was cooking to speed the process. Anyway, it now produces a very pleasing color, but it over powers the curl a little.
For those of you experimenting, you really have to see what happens when you put powdered cast iron in the jar! I will be starting a jar with nothing but the cast cuttings in it tomorrow. Big difference!

 

Runner,

You just sped up the reaction by maximizing the surface area of the iron, and you took a few other variables out of the equations.

Sean

 

[Old40Rod]

Due to the many posts concerning vinegar stain, I've come to the conclusion that achieving a "good" color is more difficult and erratic than using other stains and dyes.

Probably true enough, but a good part of the BP adventure is figuring out another way to skin the cat. Runner seems to be enjoying himself experimenting so keep the updates coming as they are appreciated and useful... even if all they do is make you decide to steer clear of mixing your own stain brew.

:thumbsup:

 

[Runner]

I am enjoying myself a lot! I am still pretty much limited on what I can do by the patch of skin that is growing back on my belly. I am futzing with things I have planned to do for a long time. The iron based stain is completely different than my original batch as far as results. The earlier report of rust being the colorant is completely wrong according to my experiments. That is the assumption I started with also, but today's results pretty conclusively prove that rust has nothing to do with it. There will be no rust in the new batch at all. Iron filings react differently than steel filings do by several orders of magnitude. The iron filings form a crust on top of the liquid and the color is black. The liquid shows very little color. The stained color is brown.

 

[bioprof]

This may have been addressed before, but has anyone tried making vinegar stain using balsamic vinegar? It has a nice deep reddish-brown color. I put some on a piece of maple, and it did nothing. I added some iron shavings to it and I'm going to see what happens.

 

[Runner]

I used distilled myself.

Ok, here it is and it is hard to believe. I can not get a picture that even begins to show this one right.

Best part. One coat of stain, let dry, rub smooth, rub oil on twice. Show quality finish in 20 minutes for an area the size of a hawken forearm. It is honey tones that dance and play as the wood is moved! Real cast iron is the key!