All About Pocket Knives

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.

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.

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

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.

glennbad wrote: 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.

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.

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

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

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.