Bottlehead Forum
Bottlehead Kits => Stereomour II => Topic started by: brightcity on December 24, 2017, 02:49:20 AM
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Hello, I am about to embark on a staining process for my Stereomour wooden base. It involves soaking the base in a water and Copper Sulfate solution. I plan to do this in a Home Depot 5 Gallon plastic bucket which is non reactive to copper sulfate.
The concept draws from a principle in chemistry where if one metal or metal salt is of lower energy than another metal salt, the lower metal salt will exchange the metals.
As the metal in the wood is primarily the tannic salt of iron, the copper will be precipitated and the salt will convert to Iron Sulfate. This Iron can be washed out later. Iron is a ferromagnetic material and can be magnetized, primarily in closed loops, thus becomes an inductive material to pick up magnetic interference. As the individual kernels of iron are magnetic as well, they can also pick up the perpendicular electric field in a capacitive manner.
The hard step of this process will be ensuring that the soak does not go for long enough to warp the wood beyond its use as a base. Also, hopefully the copper tannate will be of low solubility to help short the sides of the base to a single point aperture, thus acting as a shield to EMI. Also the copper tannate may not form if the Tannic Acid digests the wood to create a sugar salt which is what I have seen in prior experiments.
I will be posting photos as I go along. Copper Sulfate is safe and has been most widely used as Bordeaux Solution in the winery industry.
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Very interesting. Please keep us updated.
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Thanks, I will post photos and progress here as I go along.
Also I believe carbon tubes will be formed from the digestion of the wood to carbon. The tube structure will form as the structure of the wood is in fibers.
The new concept is to soak the wood in a few inches of solution to avoid warping. Hopefully this will prevent warping and create a cool fade look.
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Photos of the dye bucket, will show photos of the dried wood soon when I get back.
Used lake water to avoid salt contaminants, did about a 18 hour soak rotating the wood twice through the process.
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intriguing