Your Opinion Wanted!

[Dinadan]

Honestly - to me the color and pattern on that knife are neutral. I do not look at it and think "that looks good" but neither do I look at it and think "that looks bad." If I saw a knife I like with that bone I would buy it and carry it for sure.

[RalphAlsip]

Dale, I admire the work you do on knives. Appaloosa is not something I crave. I would find the handle more attractive if it had less of the bright white in it - especially in a large contiguous section. I have no idea what is possible and what is not possible in the real world of knife making, but anything is possible in photoshop (lol). Here is an idea. My rendition is probably too consistent. I replicated color from other parts of the handle. I might also like it better if the rightmost 2/3 of the handle was more consistent with the leftmost 1/3 (i.e., the whole handle was predominantly white with specks of brown / gray).

[Colonel26]

Dale I’m with some of the other guys on the Appaloosa bone. I can tolerate it as long as it does not have too much white on it. But I’m not a fan in general. I feel the same way about stag. I don’t like fat stage at all and especially stag with lots of white showing on it. Just my humble opinion.

As to the rest of the knife, I like it. I bet it’s just as fantastic as all the rest of the work I’ve seen from you.

[TripleF]

Dale the uneven coloration and inconsistency between the two slabs reminds me of a couple of my knives that have camel bone handles. I like them so I like what you've done.

Ditto!!

[BatJak]

I think it looks beautiful.
But then I also like unstained, unvarnished furniture made from old-growth wood.
I like things that look more "natural".
If you put that bone on say and old Schrade 4" stockman I would buy it in a heartbeat... if I could afford it.

[Doc B]

I'm guessing it's difficult, to get consistency, in the dye process, from what I've read about it. I really like the middle third, of the mark side. The pattern looks great. Overall, I think it looks pretty good. I'll bet it looks and feels even better, in hand
Edit: Yeah, like Ralph did, on the photoshop...nice job Ralph...if only you could apply that computer to dye and bone

[Quick Steel]

I actually prefer the pile side. I'm not a fan of appaloosa and would not be drawn to this knife.

[KleenCut61]

I Like were Your Going With It , but I would like to see some Vein Streaks like a Piece of Quarts ? Or Some imitation Cracks , Deeper the Better , Yet Smooth , Probably would be very Popular If You could Come up with Either Of my Opinions ? K.C.

[kootenay joe]

I am one of the very few who has said i don't particularly like these handle pieces. The majority say "i like it". But no one has said: "Oh Wow ! I Love It. Fantastic".
Knife selling is a challenge. There are so many knives one could buy that only some get sold. Those that do sell often have the "Oh Wow" factor from design, blade grind and/or handles.
I think you should spend time working with handle materials that can be "Òh Wow". I have seen dyed giraffe bone that looks as good as the best mammoth and definitely is "Oh Wow". Checkered bone or ebony could be "Oh Wow", etc.
The O.P. bone i think should be put aside in favor of other bone that is able to better take on the dye, for example, giraffe.
kj

[orvet]

I certainly appreciate all of you taking the time to critique this bone dying attempt.
This really is a work in progress, I don't know that it will ever be finished but it is something I have been playing with for a year or so now. I have a bunch of pieces of bone and in various size of my shop, most smaller, that have been dyed in this process.

A year or so ago I stumbled across an old German knife that I thought had beautiful handles on it. I don't believe the original handles had been dyed, I think they may have been left just as plain white bone. But here is the knife that inspired this search, this Work-in-Progress, that keeps me coming back to this project. When I get the bone to repair this knife, I will think I did something right that day.

Once I got the pictures and enlarge them I was able to see that I had misread the tang stamp the first time. I now believe the tang stamp says:J DIRLAM & SONS/SOLINGEN GERMANY. My original thought was the tang stamp was J DERLAM.

The effect that I got dying the bone was interesting, but it was not what I was looking for.
If anyone has ideas on how to achieve this type of coloring AS on this old knife, please let me know.

I will share my dying method with your folks that you have been so good to share your time with me in critiquing these handles.

I USED some small pieces of bone and some larger ones as well, and I mixed up a solution of water and Potassium Permanganate. Roughly 4 ounces of water and a tablespoon of PP. I laid the bone carefully in a flat glass container, very similar to a butter dish, and I poured the PP & water solution carefully into the container so that the level of dying solution did not get on the surface of the bone slabs. The color you see coming through is the potassium permanganate that has worked its way through the capillary structure of the bone dying the bone as it went.I allowed the bone to lay in the dish for several hours, some I left lying there for several days, adding dye or water to the dish from time to time. Some pieces of bone absorbed a lot of dye while I watched them, while others showed very little change over a few days.

Some of the bone was far more porous than others and took a great deal of the dye and other pieces took very little dye. As someone pointed out the process is not at all controlled, it's very random in one sense because you never know how a piece of bone will take the dye, but it is rather obvious that the lighter more porous bone will absorb more of the dye than the denser bone. Obviously the more dye absorbed, the more color absorbed by the bone.

I did one experiment where I dyed the slab with PP and then afterwords soaked it in yellow shoe dye. The result was inconclusive because I need a far bigger sample, but as you might expect buying all those bone handle slabs and then dying them can be both time-consuming and expensive.

As I come back to this project from time to time an experiment more with this method of dying I will come back and update the topic. Others of you who like to experiment with dying your own bone or like to work on knives on to give this a try, please use the information I've given as a starting point and come back and tell us what you have found and what you are able to come up with.
I would love it if somebody can perfect this process of dying bone to make it look like an antique knife handle, so we can all use it.

I look forward to more comments from members and I look forward to seeing the results some of you get with various dyes and bone or stag! Don't forget to experiment with stag. I didn't use stag in this project but I have experimented with it before.

So bring it on guys let's see what you got and what you can get!

[glennbad]

I like the look of your experimental bone, although maybe with another color variation in it, possibly a light green or red? I like the appaloosa look, and on the right knife with the right color variation, I would scoop it up.

As to the bone you are trying to replicate, that almost looks like oils that have weeped into the bone over the years from handling. Have you tried mineral oil with a light dye in it on a soak? I played around with that before trying to get the "oiled bone" look, with varying results.

[Reverand]

Well I can see that I am definitely in the minority here, but I love the look of those handles!
I haven't tried dyeing bone yet, but I do want to experiment with it sometime.
Perhaps use a process similar to what you did, then follow later immersing the pieces in a brown/yellow dye mixture (think of caramel color). That might look antique.
But if that knife were on a sales table, I would be drawn to pick it up and look closer. I like the unique look.

[edge213]

Dale, I don't like the looks of it.

[orvet]

Thank you for the ideal guys, and thank you for your opinions. I can't tell you exactly what I'm going to do with everything you posted, some of it I probably won't do anything with it, others however, may change the direction I go with this.

As to the bone you are trying to replicate, that almost looks like oils that have weeped into the bone over the years from handling. Have you tried mineral oil with a light dye in it on a soak? I played around with that before trying to get the "oiled bone" look, with varying results.

I think your spot on Glenn. I have an idea that I'm going to try... I guess we will find out how it works!
I will post more on this later when I have some new results to share.

[orvet]

It is been a few days since anyone added anything more to this topic. Now I'd like to add something more for you to consider.
In the picture below you'll find two sets of bone handles, about 4 inches in length; both have been dyed with potassium permanganate as I had described earlier in the topic. The set on the left has a flat top, the set on the right has a radiused top.

The set on the left that is primarily blue-and-white, sat for a couple of days in a mixture of blue leather dye and mineral oil. A strange phenomenon occurred with that process, the bone seem to soak up on the dye in the mineral oil, leaving clear mineral oil with a few spots of blue dye in places around the dish.

The set of handles on the right first receive the potassium permanganate dye. Both sets of bone slabs and been dyed several months ago so they were good and dried.
With this set of handles I added blue leather dye, (an alcohol-based dye). Both slabs in this set were overnight in the dye, which of course dried out by morning. The lightest colored slab was put back in the dye for a second day. After the second day in the blue dye I removed the bone from the dye, washed both slabs in warm water and Dawn dish soap, scrub them with a ScotchBrite pad and let them dry for a day setting over a heater. Then I put them into a dish of red alcohol-based leather dye. The one on the right that is most colorful I removed after about two hours because it was absorbing a lot of dye, and I didn't wanted one solid color. The slab on the left seem to be much more dense and it set in the red dye for two days. At which point I took it out cleaned them and dried them. These are the results that you have with both sets of handles.

MY OBSERVATIONS:

Uniformity in this type of dying is probably not achievable, especially not on a small scale, perhaps with a vacuum chamber, a little crockpot or pressure cooker would help the dye penetrate better.
I did like the effect that the mineral oil seem to give to the bone with the blue dye.


Now, I would appeal to your generosity once again to tell me what you think of these two dye projects.
To my mind blue and red are not ideal colors for knife handles but I chose them because of the high contrast they would have with the dark color that the potassium permanganate had left from the first round of dye.

Please let me know what you think of this experiment, and please feel free to make suggestions. And if anybody wants to try his techniques at home, I'm all for that! I would just ask that you take pictures and post your results here whether they be good, bad or indifferent, so we can all learn in this process.

Thank you in advance!
Dale

What I have opportunity to sand and polish these little bit, I will post them again because I know they will look a lot different than they do now in the raw state. It may be one a couple days and before I get to that so I thought I would post these and let you comment now. Thanks again.

[Sharpnshinyknives]

Dale, So far on those two recent ones, I am not crazy about it. But once you sand and polish those down I might change my mind.
SSk

[Lansky1]

Hey Dale - as others have said, looks like a Case appaloosa bone from the 90's or early 2000's. I like that mottled look alot. What I don't like is the dime a dozen amber bone that case always does ... I don't have a single one of those in my whole Case collection - I like the "different" ones with character

[Steve Warden]

While it isn't a project I would undertake, I did find reading about how you did it very interesting. Still not crazy about appaloosa, regardless of the dominant color, but that's me.
I'll waiting to see the finished scales.