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Anyone ever use baking soda solution to dye mahogany? Just curious as to what your process was


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I have used lye to age cherry a number of times. I think it's the same process. I understand baking soda works too. In that case, I applied it and let it sit 15-20 min. Then wipe on vinegar to neutralize it. Rinse with water.

I don't know how it will effect mahogany.

Fair bit on the net about this. I believe it works with mahogany , but can depend on the individual piece,

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I have used lye to dye cherry, and experimented with it to dye mahogany. Since I had some lye solution mixed up, I thought I'd try a quick comparison with sodium bicarbonate.

The lye solution is 1 tsp of lye crystals in 8 oz of water. I didn't measure the bicarb solution, but it's a big pinch semi-dissolved in a capful of water. On a scrap of Swietenia macrophylla, I dyed oval areas with each solution and let them dry overnight. I drew a pencil line around each area. This morning I swabbed a little shellac on the left side of each oval, and some white vinegar on the right side of each oval. As I expected, the shellac saturated the color a bit, and the vinegar seemed to reverse the reaction and restored most of the wood's original color.

The color you see will depend somewhat on my camera, your monitor, etc., but what I am seeing is that both of the chemicals turned the wood a shade of reddish brown; the sodium bicarbonate treated area has a purplish-gray cast and the sodium hydroxide treated area has a richer, more amber color. The shellac seems to reduce but not eliminate the color differences.

The effects you would get would depend on your wood, solution strength, finish, phase of the moon, and so on and so on. Personally, on the basis of this brief test I prefer the color produced by lye.

A useful article about dying wood and mahogany with either potassium dichromate or sodium hydroxide is here: https://docplayer.net/24528795-Chemical ... dlock.html

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."