Leather dyes for wood???????????/

[Brad Patch]

Was doing an errand at Tandy Leather and noted they carry a wide variety of water based dyes intended to color leather. Got me to wondering if anyone had ever tried these dyes on wood.

Brad

[Mike Leonardo]

I have used Tandy alcohol based dyes on walnut gun stocks. I really like the results I got. I was very disappointed when they went to water based although I think the alcohol dyes are still available online. These were old military stocks that tended to have oil in the wood. The alcohol dye worked even on the oily wood (after surface cleaning). I doubt the water based would do that.

I have bought a couple of colors of their water based dyes but have not tried them on wood. I can't see why they would not work on clean wood but they are probably not a cost effective alternative. You can makes gallons of water based stain from $8 worth of powder.

[Ryan Mooney]

They can work sometimes, or sometimes not. Leather is a protein based substrate and wood is cellulose, so they tend to have somewhat different dye uptake and binding characteristics. The alanine based dyes tend to work reasonably well for ~everything~ (which is why they're so popular). Some of the other types of dye will take up well on protein (leather, wool, silk) but not as much on cellulose (wood, cotton, linen) - generally cellulose is a bit harder to get the dye to bond to well than protein.

Edit: its probably also worth noting that some of them may work as "stains" where they leave pigment behind on the wood but don't bond to it like a proper dye would. Depending on the topcoat this can also be an ok result.