# Wood for dying



## thoffen (Jun 21, 2019)

Hoping to get some advice in picking a wood to dye to make veneers/inlay material for pool cues. Typically people buy sycamore veneers from a few sources that are died a standard set of colors. I want to make my own for a few reasons. One is to customize colors. Another is simply fun and the joy of doing things myself. Another is to cut them with a different grain orientation. This is because the veneers are actually oriented differently in the cue construction -- points are done by making a v-groove at an angle so the veneer will actually be cut at 45 degrees to the face grain. More importantly, it will be cut at an angle across the end grain which can lead to some fuzziness from exposed pores. In butterfly-style points, this is particularly pronounced. I think by cutting my veneers at a different angle I can get a higher quality finished product. I also have some ideas which require me cutting pieces which are not flat. Because the wood gets turned and is constructed at an angle, the dye needs to penetrate and color the wood evenly.

So...ideally I'd like a wood with little color, open pore structure to absorb the dye but with relatively small pores, medium-high density to avoid fuzziness, indistinct grain (some figure, ray flecks, etc. is OK, just not contrasty grain), high stability.

Obviously there are tradeoffs.

Candidates I'm considering trying:
sycamore
maple species
birch species
boxwood species
basswood
hornbeam

I've never tried to dye wood before other than applying a surface stain. I'd probably set it up under a vacuum and see. But I want to get some opinions of what woods to try out first. Any ideas?


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## Mike1950 (Jun 21, 2019)

They dye big leaf maple and elder a lot. Seems to work well.


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## Echoashtoreth (Jun 21, 2019)

Cottonwood dyes nicely and the curly pcs are darned attractive! (And its cheap!)

Reactions: Like 1


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## Karl_TN (Jun 21, 2019)

Do you have a bandsaw for cutting wood blocks into veneers so you can control the direction of cut? If so then maybe you could ask for a box of various blocks/cutoffs as testing.

As for wood suggestions... Holly & light colored birch woods have little or no discernable grain pattern. 

You might also consider enhancing a wood's existing color. For instance, I've had excellent results dying black cherry bowls using red, orange and yellow Chestnut Spirit Stains (dye stain). Here's an example of Cherry Bowl that I made for a friend.

Reactions: Like 2 | EyeCandy! 1 | Way Cool 3


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## Nature Man (Jun 21, 2019)

Karl_TN said:


> Do you have a bandsaw for cutting wood blocks into veneers so you can control the direction of cut? If so then maybe you could ask for a box of various blocks/cutoffs as testing.
> 
> As for wood suggestions... Holly & light colored birch woods have little or no discernable grain pattern.
> 
> ...


Thought lighters were supposed to be blue. Chuck

Reactions: Agree 1 | Funny 2


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## ripjack13 (Jun 21, 2019)

That's only in Canada....

Reactions: Agree 1


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## DKMD (Jun 21, 2019)

No experience doing it, but I would put holly near the top of my list for experimenting. Good density, uniform grain, and very little color.

Reactions: Informative 1


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## thoffen (Jun 21, 2019)

Holly sounds great but I've always heard wicked unstable in service.


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## frankp (Jun 25, 2019)

Maple and birch both dye very very well. Basswood is too soft and the colors "wash out" or bleed, in my experience. I'd think it would be too soft for a pool cue anyway, though. I don't have experience with your other options...


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## thoffen (Jun 27, 2019)

Karl_TN said:


> Do you have a bandsaw for cutting wood blocks into veneers so you can control the direction of cut? If so then maybe you could ask for a box of various blocks/cutoffs as testing.
> 
> As for wood suggestions... Holly & light colored birch woods have little or no discernable grain pattern.
> 
> ...



Thanks! Just a hobby and I haven't actually gotten things up and running at this point. I probably will experiment with dying other woods for this purpose. Usually the veneers on points are so thin there isn't a lot of room to try and showcase the qualities of a wood. But sometimes that's not so. Really the common technique is to cut a v groove with a router on the lathe. Then to glue in squares of your point wood. Then to cut new v grooves on top of the existing points (recut). To show off the figure of the first point wood you usually make the recuts thicker than you would veneers. Really if I'm cutting my own "veneers" I can salvage a lot more of the wood. Certainly if I'm going to use the same piece of wood and keep a v groove in the "veneer" instead of joining flat veneers with a miter cut, a bandsaw won't work. Right now I'm drawing up plans for a table-saw jig, but I might actually try and see if I can use a magnetic guide and get better results hand-sawing it. Anyway, I do have access to a bandsaw which is the most obvious tool for the thin flat veneers (essentially a resaw), but I'm not sure it's the best tool. For controlling the direction of the cut, really all I need to do use a table-saw tapering jig to get whatever angle I need once I have a square blank to start cutting veneers from it. I'm not going to be doing a lot of these, so quality is way more important than cost (+waste) and effort.



frankp said:


> Maple and birch both dye very very well. Basswood is too soft and the colors "wash out" or bleed, in my experience. I'd think it would be too soft for a pool cue anyway, though. I don't have experience with your other options...



Thanks for the suggestion. Don't know how much a softer wood would affect things in the hit of a cue since it will be such thin sections and many of the cues would be cored anyway after making the points, but if it bleeds and won't show detail well, it's not a good choice. Honestly maple is such a standard wood for just about everything else in a cue, it might be the best choice.


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## Karl_TN (Jun 27, 2019)

Todd, I'm not a pool cue maker so I can't wrap my head around what you're describing. Can you post a pic or two? 

No hurry... Just curious is all...


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## thoffen (Jun 27, 2019)

If you're curious, YouTube is probably best. 




Here's a good example of why I want to do my own veneers. Here is a really high quality cue:





Look at the butterfly splices (curved points) on the closer up picture. Basically the way you construct that if you use a veneer oriented straight along the end grain, when you actually turn it round you're going to expose a lot of end grain of the veneer and you get a lot of fuzziness. For such an awesome cue, incredible precision overall, perfect finish, well respected maker, that detail just jumps off the page to me, but since everyone uses the same old veneers and techniques they all end up looking that way. Well, if I pick a wood that shows finer details better and cut the veneer to have the grain orientation not expose the end grain when turned, I think I can get a much better result.

Reactions: EyeCandy! 2 | Informative 1 | Creative 1


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## barry richardson (Jun 27, 2019)

Maple takes dye great, either hard or soft, seems like it would be good pool cue material too, better than sycamore IMO.....


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