Staing color of Curly Maple?

[wisconsinteacher]

What is the best color to get the nice dark wood grains out of culry maple?

[sulphur]

anything made by transtint does great.  mix it with alcohol.  lots of colors to choose from.  i use it on curly maple in my fiberglass bows.  you can find it at woodcraft.

[Scott Roush]

I'm getting ready to stain some curly maple too.  I'm trying to find out how my alcohol based Fiebings medium brown leather dye will work.  If you google it, most cabinet makers recommend the water soluble dyes... aniline dyes I believe.  Maybe some of the more experienced folk will pipe in...

[Jeremy]

I posted this elsewhere, but here it is again:

If you really want to make curly maple pop, there's a 5-6 step finishing cycle. Something similar was described in 'Finewoodworking' a year or two ago (love that magazine)

1. Dye it with a DARK dye - black or dark brown. When dry, sand most of it off, leaving just the stripes dark.

2. Dye it with a mid-tone dye. I like a colonial maple concentrated dye used straight. Then sand some of that out. Ends up giving all the curls more depth and character and a reddish hue.

3. Finish the dye steps with a light dye. An amber or honey color looks good. It tones the maple down and lets the darker shades you put in play first fiddle.

4. Oil the snot out of it with Watco Danish oil to make it all shimmer

5. Seal everything in with a washcoat of dewaxed shellac

6. Finish off with a few topcoats of your favorite hard finish. Poly, or my current favorite, hand-rubbed epoxy.

The process takes forever, but looks fantastic and is durable.

[Ragnarok Forge]

Burn it.  Put steel wool in 3 to 1 water / muriatic acid till it dissolves.  Put two coats of the mix on the handle.  It will turn an ugly yellow color.  Heat the handle surface with a torch or heat gun until it turns dark brown / blackish.  You will be hating me about this time.  It is really ugly.  Use 200 grit sandpaper and slowly sand off dark surface.  As you cut down into the wood a hair it will start to reveal the grain.  Once you get it roughly where you want to the color to be.  Switch and lightly sand with 400 to get out the scratches.  then convert to wet / dry 600 grit and sand in 3 coats of clear Danish oil.  Let the last coat dry for 6 hours and buff firmly.  The Chatoyance in the wood will amaze you.

[Scott Roush]

Clay... you are a savior.  I'm just about to use some muriatic to darken some of the polished areas on my blade right now and was worrying (don't worry be happy) about what it would do to the wood. Your suggestion might kill two birds with one stone.

[Running Buck]

You can use a product called aquafortis which is nitric acid. This is what I use to color curly maple gun stocks on black powder rifles. Basiclly the same procedure that Clay was talking about but the nitric acid will turn the wood a nasty green color till you hit it with a heat gun then the colors start to come out. I buy aquafortis from a place on line called Trackofthewolf.com

Denis