Dyeing My Nuts

sequoia

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Seriously. I'm really hating my bright white bleached bone nuts and would like to dye/stain them down a little browner. I'm thinking drop them into a strong tea, but for how long? Hours, days, weeks? I suppose it depends on the density of the bone too. Coffee might work too. Anybody have some experience?

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I just looked up some stuff on another forum..Yellow rit and achohol (whatever that is:confused:) is what Stewmac sell for the job...and they recon that strong tea works better than coffee.:)
 
I think Rit is a clothing dye. Makes sense that using alcohol instead of water as the solvent for bone would do the trick.

I've used strong tea before and it does the trick.
 
A ukulele mate of mine bought a large shin bone From the pet shop (Moo Cow I think it was)..I sawed it up into nut size pieces for him on my bandsaw....and it wasn't bleached at all...just a sort of old yellow with white blemishes.:)
 
Rit is indeed a clothing dye. I've used Tea, soaked for a full day. It works, in a fashion but it's probably best to degrease it first so that it stains evenly. I wasn't sold on the stained colour though. Probably better still is to use unbleached bone and let it Yellow naturally, which it should do fairly quickly if you expose it to UV.
 
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They have a lot of bone at Culpepper the knife handle supplier, Natural, Camel and some other critters I think. The best part is it's cheap. Just make sure you don't buy the radiused accidentally. I like the natural best. Buy it oversized because some tends to have one side right on the marrow on the really inexpensive stuff.

http://www.knifehandles.com/smooth-natural-camel-bone.html
 
I'm going to do some tea experiments... Good suggestion from Michael about antler stuff. Never thought of that... Funny, I used to like that bleached bone white pop look, but my taste has changed... I'm tellin' ya, I spend more time on these nuts than on almost anything else on these ukes builds. So important. Cutting them, filing them. chiseling them, filing them, polishing them, lowering them, and now dyeing them. I really think that a great uke can't sound good without a good nut set perfectly.
 
You forgot planing. You can plane bone and it's a lot faster than filing or sandpaper.
 
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