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On Jan 31, 12:20 pm, "George" wrote:


RUBBISH! If it mixes, it merely dilutes. Water and alcohol molecules
both
find their way out to and are carried away in air. The more volatile
alcohol finds its way out at a faster rate than the less-volatile water.

And it carries no surface moisture with it? Should I surmise that
when I wash my hands with anhydrous alcohol to clean them and they
turn crusty and white that NO moisture was carried away? I doubt it.
They seem pretty dry and without surface moisture to me.


Uh, the reason they're dry is because you've removed oils. Fortunately your
body will produce more.

Take a quick look at how distillation works and you'll see what's happening.
The azeotrope is ~95/5 % with ethanol. So with as little available water
and as large a percentage of _anhydrous_ alcohol, it is what's evaporating.
That azeotrope business is what makes methanol a good denaturant.
ethanol/methanol azeotrope makes it near impossible to redistill.


In this instance, it works for me. YMMV. I know you well enough from
this venue George that there is little room or tolerance in your world
for contradiction to your own beliefs, but the alcohol testing I did
with Behlen's Solar Lux did indeed penetrate significantly more on
identical pieces of wood over the same period of time. I cut
the pieces, I put them in the dye mixes, and I cut the
cross sections on the miter saw.


You might have read before you responded. Didn't say it wouldn't penetrate
farther. Just might, given that alcohol moves freely without being bound to
the sugars like water. If the carrier has greater cohesion than adhesion,
it should.

Some way, under identical conditions with the only variable being the
alcohol, there was a much higher penetration rate of the dye. My
observations are the results of my personal experience.

Of course, as already stated, YMMV.

Alcohol mix dyes are used because they don't raise the grain as much as
water mix. The reason the grain raises with water mix is that the water
gets involved in hydrogen-bonding with the sugars, fattening them up.
The
wood boys refer to it as "bulking." Alcohols aren't as polar and prone.

Agree.

My explanation may not have suited you in so far as how the dye
penetration process works, but I believe yours to be oversimplified.
I would think of you would try a simple penetration test yourself you
would quite probably see a difference. After reading several well
researched treatises by woodturners on alcohol drying and the use of
alcohol as a carrier when dyeing or staining, there are two distinct
camps with two different sets of supporting evidence.

Obviously we don't belong to the same one.

Robert