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marc:today, it's all about dyes. (boppy music) now, in preparation for this video, i went back into allmy old finishing books and looked specifically at how they covered the world of dyes. some get more technical,like jewett and flexner, and some stay more general like dresdner. but the deeper i dug into the topic,
the more i realized howfrustrating and confusing this would be to someonewho just wants to know what a particular bottle of dye is going to do on the wood. getting bogged down inthe heavy terminology and the chemistry is exactlythe thing that may stop someone from using dyesin the first place, and that would be a real shame. i'm going to do my best to give you
a digestible chunk of information while empowering you topick up any bottle of dye and know what to expect simply by looking at its ingredients. what is dye anyway? dyes are really just verysmall particles of color. they dissolve in solvents like water, mineral spirits, andalcohol; and don't require a binder of any typeto adhere to the wood.
really, all you need isthe dye and a solvent and you can make your own dye mixture. why use dye in the first place? dyes absorb deeply into the wood and they provide a very clean, clear and vivid color withoutdistorting or hiding the grain in any way at all. because the dye usuallydoesn't have a binder in the mix, it doesn't seal off the wood,
so you can apply layer afterlayer of different colors making for a reallydeep, rich color effect. you can also combine the dyes to make an infinite number of color shades. you can even add themto your topcoat to add just that little bit ofextra color to your projects. now, dyes comes in 3 basic forms. first, there's powder. these are usually eitherwater, alcohol or oil soluble.
next, there's ready-to-use liquids. typically these are labeledngrs or non-grain raising. this one happens to not be. we'll talk about that one later. they also come in theform of a concentrate like a transtint here. this can be diluted tomake a really nice stain, or it can be added directly to a topcoat and you can use that for a toning.
(fast jazzy music) the terminology canget a little confusing, so i'll try to explain a few things that you'll want toknow so you can pick up just about any bottle of dye and know exactly how it's going to behave just by reading theingredients list or the msds. an msds is a material safety data sheet. that's something youshould get comfortable
reading as a finisher. not only does it give youimportant safety info, it can also tell you exactlywhat's in the product, even if the outside label doesn't. our job as finishers is always to be smarter than the marketers. i mentioned ngrs, or non-grainraising dyes, earlier. many of the premixedliquid dyes that we buy will be labeled as ngrs.
why do we need these at all? because water-based dyeshave a very annoying flaw. the water in a dye mixture causes the wood to become all rough and fuzzy, which is really not a good thing for a surface that we're trying to finish. in order to avoid this, wehave to pre-raise the grain by wetting the wood ahead of time, letting it dry andsanding it one more time
to knock down all those little fuzzies. since the wood generallyonly raises its grain once, you can then apply the water-based dye with little to no grain raising. but wouldn't it begreat if you didn't have to pre-raise the grain at all? that's where the ngrs come in. these are usually aspecial mixture of the dye with some kind of solvent that contains
little to no water, like alcohol. as a result, it doesn't raise the grain. technically, you can just take an alcohol or oil soluble powder dye and mix your own non-grain raising dye,but the products sold as ngrs typically have a littlemore going on chemically. let's talk about some of the stuff that you might see on an msds and what it means to you.
some of the pre-mixedliquid dyes and concentrates will have glycol etherslisted on the msds. don't be intimidated by a chemical name. this is just the name for a family of very special solvents. i'll give you a few examples, and it should help you understand how this stuff works. for instance, water soluble dye powder
will not dissolve in mineral spirits. it just makes sense. but it will dissolve in glycol ether. the cool part is that theglycol ether dye solution is now compatible with anumber of other solvents including the mineralspirits that wouldn't dissolve the original dye. this is actually howconcentrated dyes work. if you read the labelyou'll see that it dissolves
in just about anything,and the glycol ether is the primary reason why this works. another example that really has nothing to do with dyes, but youmight find interesting, involves waterborne finishes. polyurethane and acrylicresins don't dissolve in water, but they do dissolve in glycol ethers; and the glycol ethers can then be put into a water solution and thewater serves as a carrier.
that's why the term is "waterborne." remember that just because it's waterborne doesn't mean that it's solvent-free. you still need to protect yourself. another thing to look outfor on an msds is a binder, something like linseedoil for oil-based dyes or acrylic for water-based dyes. basically, it'll be acomponent that you might normally see in a topcoat finish.
some premixed dye stainswill have a binder in it, and you need to know how this is going to affect your work. think of the binder as a glueor some kind of a sealer. it serves to lock thatcolor into the wood, and at least partially seals the surface. normally, a water-baseddye will reactivate when you rub it with a wet paper towel, but if there is a binder in the mix,
much less of that coloris going to come up. let me show you an example. this is just a straight powderdye that i used on here. if i spray it with water,it was a water-based dye, i will spray this guy with some water, and that water will startto reactivate the dye, which means when i rub itwith a clean paper towel, i'm going to get lot of color transfer onto the paper towel.
i could also, i meanthis could come in handy. if the color's too dark after dying, i could put some fresh water on it, rub it down and get the color to look a little bit lighter,so it's not too late. sometimes you stain or paint a surface, once it's on there it's on there. that's regular dye. this is a general finishes dye stain
which does have a littlebit of binder in it; not a lot so we couldstill pull some color up, but it's not going tobe nearly as much color. okay, so we got a little bit there, but really not a lot. so the binder servesto lock that color in. there are a lot of greatdye products out there. while i don't want to tellyou what products to use, i will tell you what products i rely on
time and time again. if i want to use a powdered dye, i usually reach for this transfast stuff. it's pretty widely available,relatively inexpensive, and they come in agreat variety of colors. i have both the water-soluble and the alcohol-soluble versions, but most often i wind upusing the water-soluble. in the liquid concentrate category,
i like to use transtint. the product information and msds tell us that it contains a metal acid dye, which means it's a littlebit more light-fast than other dyes, and italso contains glycol ethers. that means it dissolves in just about anything we put it in. i use this stuff primarily for toning. just a few drops into a can of lacquer,
water-based poly or shellac, and i've got a great way to add subtle color to any project. finally, in the ready-to-use category, i have my new favorite,general finishes dye stains. these stains are incrediblyeasy to work with and they come in a variety of colors. you can mix and match the colors to achieve a completely custom look.
you can even add this stuff to just about any water-based topcoat. looking at the msds we seethat it not only contains a glycol ether, it also contains an acrylic polymer and water. the glycol ether was used to dissolve the acrylic and thedye, and the concentrate was then diluted with water. the acrylic in the mixdoes act as a binder,
but they've managed toadd the perfect amount so that the color sticks to the surface but it still allowssubsequent coats of dyes to penetrate in caseyou want to layer color. it's interesting tonote that if this stuff were in its concentratedform and it didn't contain so much water, we'd have something very similar to transtint,which is a universal dye concentrate that's compatible
with just about any finish. since so much water hasbeen added to this product, it's pretty much committedto the world of water. honestly, that's perfectly fine with me. if you're applying the finish by hand, i recommend sticking withthe water-based dyes. they give you a decentamount of working time, unlike an alcohol-based dye, which can streak pretty easily.
keep in mind, the water-basedstuff can streak too. let's apply dye to a few test panels and i'll show you how i like to do it. the first step is to pre-wet the surface because we're going touse a water-based dye. whether you mix your own water-based like from powder here, of ifyou use this pre-mix stuff, you're still going toget some grain raising. this material doesn't raise the grain
quite as much as just usingstandard dye and water, but it still does, so just to be safe, i like to get the entiresurface nice and wet. some distilled water in a spraybottle's perfect for this. let it soak in. just kind of rub it into the surface. don't have to go crazy. just make sure it's for the most part wet in every single part of the board.
if you missed a few spots, you go over it a second time. i'm going to let thatdry for about an hour. the great thing about this step is this really does, eventhough it's just water, it really does highlight some of the flaws that might be in thesurface, so if you've missed something, this is whereyou're going to see it. it's been about 45 minutes.
the surface feels nice and dry. it certainly has raised the grain. a piece of 320-grit sandpaper, a very light sanding willknock that grain down, and get us ready for the dye. what i'm actually doinghere is a test board for my aurora table,the one that i learned to make with darrell peart. his mixture is 7 parts ofgeneral finishes orange
and 4 parts of generalfinishes medium brown. that's what i haveright here all mixed up. these things are perfectly compatible with one another, so you just mix them up and you're good to go. i'll be doing a fewdifferent experiments here, but i'll show you thedifferent application methods using this as i make my test boards. you can apply pretty easilywith a foam brush like this,
and then just wipe off the excess. that's certainly one way. you could also just dip the rag right into the mix and wipe it on, but i think i prefer the sponge more than anything else. here's another option. you could put the dyeinto a simple spray bottle and spritz it all over the surface.
that's great for covering large areas in a very short amount of time. of course, you couldalways use an hvlp system, traditional finishing system, to spread the color on evenly. you don't necessarilyeven have to wipe it off at that point because it spreads it so nice and even over the surface. let's start by flooding the surface
with a sponge brush. i like to get the surface good and wet. you'll see the wood is very thirsty. it pulls in that water very aggressively and pulls in the color as well. the idea here is to flood the surface. let the wood pick up as much as it wants to pick up in terms of color. if you do that, you can actually get
much more consistent results because you can vary theintensity of your color by changing your formula,but not necessarily by your application method. that's just another variable you throw in the mix. i keep it nice and wet likethis for a couple seconds. let it take as much as it wants in. get a nice clean cotton rag.
wipe off the excess with the grain. wow, let me tell you. darrell's recommendation is spot on, because that is gorgeous. if you notice that the wood starts taking up the finish alittle bit too aggressively and starts pulling in that color, one trick that you can do, this isn't a bad ideafor larger work surfaces,
is to spritz the surface with water first. let that soak in. basically, the really,really thirsty grain is going to pull in the clear water instead of pulling in all that color. with a pre-wet surface, we can now go back to wiping on the dye. if you have a good spray bottle, you can actually use thatto spritz the dye on.
i just realized, i don't normally use a spray bottle to do this, and i just borrowed this one from the house, and i realized it has noreally fine mist setting. it only has the stream setting. so let's use our imaginations and pretend that this is a gentle fine mist. what i'm spraying hereis a slight variation of darrell's color mix.
what i've done is added 1 part yellow. that little tiny bit ofyellow could very well just add a little bit of a fiery glow. we've already got the orange in there. the yellow will tend to brighten things up a little bit and kind ofgo on the opposite end of the spectrum from the medium brown. i'm just doing it as an experiment. if i like it, i'll useit on the actual piece.
just for fun, we'regoing to make our own dye from some water-soluble powder. the instructions on this transfast dye says to use 2 quartsof hot distilled water and 1 ounce of dye. one ounce of dye is basically,well, this whole thing. i really don't want to do that. i'm just going to do a small sample here just to give you an ideaof what you can expect.
do your best not to disturb too much of this powder dust and get it in the air because you do not want to breathe it. get a good mix. keep in mind, when you mixyour own stuff from powder, you do want to be a lotmore careful than i'm being. you want to keep track of exactly how much powder you put into how much water because you're going to want to reproduce
this result in the future, especially for a larger project. you need a lot more of this stuff than you think you do sometimes. it's pretty well mixed. i'm going to use the little sponge, sponge brush to put it on the surface and we'll see how well it applies. just going to flood iton like we did before.
this is all water, so you can see it's going to reallydrink it up really fast. doesn't give you a whole lot of time to come back and wipe off the excess. you can see how on a larger surface, that could be a bit of a problem because your start and stop points are going to become really visible. obviously, i wouldnormally use a larger brush
to do this so i can covermore surface area faster. notice, this is a birch plywood, which is notoriously very splotchy. there is no shortage ofuneven absorption here, so even dyes suffer fromthat problem as well. while our test panel dries, let's talk a little bit about the topcoat. when it comes to dye, youhave to be very careful about what you chooseand how you apply it.
if this were just the simple powder dye that we mixed with waterand applied to the surface, we'd have to be really careful. if we just hit it witha water-based topcoat, the water in this material could very well reactivate that dye andlift it into the finish. it just makes things lookmurky and not very good. we want to make sure thedye that's on that surface stays on the surface.
really, if you think about, the simplest dye is literallyjust the dye particle and some sort of solvent. once that solvent evaporates, all your left with is the dye particles that are on the wood grain. you want to make sure thatyou lock that stuff down. what i recommend doing is locking it in with some dewaxed shellac.
sealcoat is a great example of that. you still can pull some of the color off with the shellac, so youhave to be very careful about how you apply it. if you could spray it, perfect. then you could just lay a light mist down on the surface thatlocks everything down. if you can't spray, you'regoing to have to wipe it on. what i recommend doingis using very quick,
light strokes and justput a nice little coat on there, almost like avery quick french polish. you want to just touch down to the surface and come right off the end, and then lock that grain down. if you can get someshellac in a spray can, just for the purposeof this first sealcoat, probably not a bad idea. after that point, you canhit it with as many coats
as thick as you want of whatever type of finish youwant, and it's not going to disturb the color. also, if you don't havethe shellac on hand and all you really have is your topcoat, you can get away with that. just make sure that your first coat is just very light, and be careful, don't apply too thick of a coat,
because that will have a tendancy to reactive that dye. all that being said, that's exactly why i like this general finishes stuff, because it does have alittle bit of binder in it, which means it's going tohave less of a tendancy to pull up into the topcoatthat we choose to use, even if you go with justa water-based topcoat. i find that these are alittle bit more flexible
and wind up requiring less of me in terms of extra steps to make sure that the color stays on the surface. with the dye completelydried at this point, this is where you haveto be really careful. i'm going to use a little bit of shellac and see if i could justuse a really light touch and apply just a nice light coat that will lock everything down.
obviously, again, spraying in all of this, if you have an hvlp, a turbine system, spraying is always going to be easier. but, i like to approach this assuming that you don't have a sprayer. a little bit of sealcoat,which if i recall is approximately 2-pound cut. i just realized onething i need to do here is get a secondary container. duh.
obviously, dipping the rag with dye on it back into the originalcontainer is not a good idea. the powdered materialthat we made ourselves is actually holding up pretty well to this alcohol and shellac mixture. this is a real goodsign, a promising result. i'm actually rubbing about the same as i would on a raw piece of wood, and that's not too bad.
there's really not much on there. once this dries, you're pretty much ready to put on any topcoat that you want. here's our test board that we used the general finishes dye stains on. i expect that to hold up just as well. even if you get a little bit of color on your pad, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing any serious damage.
what you need to look at is the surface of the wood to see ifyou're actually pulling a significant amount of color up and changing the way it looks. in this case, it looks pretty good to me. not bad. as you an see, the worldof dyes is pretty cool. you could do a lot with it. you have bright vivid colors.
the newer formulationsare pretty light fast you still want to becareful about uv exposure. you don't want these thingsbeing in direct sunlight because they will fade. you have to be realistic. but, at the same time, allthose things satisfied, you can get some really impressive looking pieces just by using a little bit of dye. keep in mind i onlyreviewed what i consider
to be the stuff thatthe average woodworker is going to confront in our travels as we go through finishing. there's a lot of differentvarieties out there. there are some exceptions to the rules that we've talked about. i won't pretend to have used all of them. i just, at this point, usewhat i'm very comfortable with and what has given megreat results in the past
and i think it'll work for you, too. on your next project whenyou need to color something, think about using some dye. it's a great product.