I'm about to start a osage bow. I want to use it for hunting, so I want it to be reasonably dark. What stain do you guys recommend?

Back it with snake skins or just leave it a few years and it will oxidize and darken on it's own. Tommy

do you know a way to speed up that oxidation process without harming the wood?

Leave it in the sun. It's a phototropic reaction and depends on sunlight.  Jawge

You can use bleach and it will darken.  But it's aqueous so it will also raise the grain.  Several applications will help.

I sometimes use walnut stain and it turns it the same color as 2 year old osage.  Leather or aniline dyes work nicely too.  RIT dye in alcohol, filtered through a coffee filter works great also.  Your bow is your pallette.  Play around.

i have heard of people changing the colour of oak by leaving open containers of ammonia or something underneath .   Is this true?  Would the same work with osage?

You can do this with 3 colors of stain and it's easy!


 

Come On Osage!!! Easy if you have done it but the rest of us need help, where are the instructions.

How about a build-along    

I love the look of that bow.

Get a cup of water and put a tablespoon of Drano crystals in it.  Stir it up.  Wipe it on the osage and watch it darken beautifully.   Wipe it off right away and you can control darkness.  Have done this on a lot of my selfbows.  Coach  ( use latex golves)   Try it on a scrap!

Drano will eat your skin!

Sometimes I haven't used gloves and just used a thick rag.  It makes your fingers slippery when you get it on them.  I just washed it off immediately when I was done.  No problems.  I wouldn't leave it on and not wash!

Sometimes I haven't used gloves and just used a thick rag.  It makes your fingers slippery when you get it on them.  I just washed it off immediately when I was done.  No problems.  I wouldn't leave it on and not wash!

Induced oxidation by clorine or lye, tried and tested!

I'll do a stain along this evening in another thread... it is the least I can do for the Tgang! I actualy got the idea from Horseapple's old site. Thought by now someone would have mentioed that.

Drano is basically sodium hydroxide, NaOH, better known as lye, a very strong base. It will definitely eat your skin if left on but very short term exposure probably won't do much. Different people react differently. it bothers the heck out of me. I'd avoid as much contact as possible. BTW, the slippery feel is it reacting with the esters in the oils in your skin turning them into soap, saponification 8-). Boil fats and oil in a solution of water and drano is the first step in making lye soap. Very drying.

Go into the buildalongs and read J.D. Jones building a bamboo backed recurve.

While in graduate school I needed to take large soil samples for my thesis research without contamination, so I washed a new shovel in a weak sodium hydroxide solution, the main ingredient of Drano. I didn't bother with gloves in my college-student wisdom, since it was a weak solution. I then proceeded to use said shovel, and ended up with quarter-sized blisters all over the palms of my hands. Lesson learned!