Joel's Blog

Dye Young - Stain Pretty

01/13/2011

To be perfectly frank the entire reason for this blog entry is that once the headline popped into my head I could not pass it up. So I've had the headline sitting in my draft blog topics folder for three years waiting for a subject to write about.
In the past months I have written a bit about fancy furniture and when we were developing our new veneer saw we had to cut a lot of veneer. So this gave us a chance to try out some new (old) ideas.
Veneers are pretty thin so you have the opportunity to use all sort of exotic woods. However being lazy and economical it made almost no sense for us to buy exotic veneers just to test a veneer saw. By the same token if we didn't have a lot of different woods to play with the result would be pretty monochromatic. So we decided to re-implement an old new idea. You see a lot of that old furniture with plain veneer in museums used to be brightly dyed - only the color has faded over the centuries. Just as a test we took some fairly plain oak veneer and dyed it yellow and purple.

The real technical challenge was using an alcohol based dye so that the dye would not run under the hide glue - as it would if we used a water based dye. But we still have to use a top coat. We could use either a water based poly or lacquer with no danger of the color leaching into the finish but Tim wants to French polish the top and he thinks a thin coat or two should dry before leaching out color so we should be OK. We will see.

It's a pretty simple pattern - really a test of the veneer saw and a chance to practice hammer veneering with hide glue. What we are really excited about is the new veneer saw. When I last wrote about the saw we were making handles by hand but now for the past few weeks we have been in full production and the handle bottleneck is long over. We have gotten a lot of great private comments on the saw and I hope with the new year we will start seeing reviews. There are a lot of cool new features in the saw such as interchangeable blades with different saw tooth patterns, a heavy steel plate that makes for a very rigid assembly and gives a nice weight to the saw, and of course the blades are all hand sharpened, beveled, and shipped ready to use. You can read more about the saw here.

Join the conversation

01/13/2011 Sean

I haven't done much veneering yet, but hope to. In the mean time, your saw looks great for it's purpose. I have kind of an off the wall question. I've heard of using veneer saws similar to this to cut raised fields for beveled panels (the bevels are cut with planes, of course) in frame and panel doors and the like. Do you think your design would be suitable for the task as far as having a sufficient registration area to ride the edge of straight guide board and would it effectively limit depth of cut (i.e., would the holder stop further cutting when the blade's projection had been used up)? It looks like it would work, but hard to know without having it in your hand, or better yet, trying it out.

Thanks!

01/13/2011 abi

Hats off to you for the play on words! Debbie Harry and Chris Stein would be proud.

Comments are closed.

Last

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the blog's author and guests and in no way reflect the views of Tools for Working Wood.

Newer Entries...
	How to Quickly Center A Mortise Or Find The Center Of A Board Without Gadgetry - 02/22/2011
	A New Blog - Introducting Ben Seltzer - 02/17/2011
	A Toolbox is Missing!! - 02/15/2011
	Bench-on-Bench - 02/10/2011
	Ron Hock Is Laughing At Me Right Now - 02/08/2011
	A Desk I Would Like To Make - 02/03/2011
	How To Camber A Plane Iron (And Why It Works) - 01/26/2011
	Cheater Pastrami and Getting Stuff Done - 01/20/2011
	Winding Sticks - 01/18/2011
	Dye Young - Stain Pretty - 01/13/2011
	Where the Factory Was - 01/11/2011
	New for 2011 - 12/30/2010
	Truer Grit - 12/25/2010
	The Traditional Tail Vise - Followup - 12/21/2010
	The Argument for a Traditional Tail Vise - 12/16/2010
	Some Tips on Using Our Gramercy Holdfasts - 12/14/2010
	New Book: The Boy Joiner and Model Maker - 12/09/2010
	Coursework - Books that You Can Learn From - 12/07/2010
	Introducing The Gramercy Tools Veneer Saw - 12/02/2010
	Wood - In the Rough or What? - 11/30/2010
Older Entries...

Hours: M-F 9:00-5:00, closed Sat,Sun
Our Guarantee & Return Policy
Shipping and Sales Tax Info
Privacy Policy
Holiday Calendar

Contact Us: Email: support@toolsforworkingwood.com
Phone: 800-426-4613 or 718-499-5877
Visit Us in Brooklyn: Directions to Our Showroom
© 1999-2019 toolsforworkingwood.com
Powered by 01 Inc. Coded entirely in NYC