Bleaching wood?

At Chris Pye's web page I just saw that the bleached one of his pieces I guess to make it become white or to uniformize ( don't know if this word exists) the colour.

Has anyone tried/used it? when and what for if I may ask?

I have done it successfully with holly. No scientific proportions of bleach and water. I just put a slosh in a jar with some water and it worked.

Frank Fusco said:

I have done it successfully with holly. No scientific proportions of bleach and water. I just put a slosh in a jar with some water and it worked.

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Thanks Frank.
The result was getting a whiter wood? What happened with the darker lines of the grain?

Toni Ciuraneta said:

Thanks Frank.
The result was getting a whiter wood? What happened with the darker lines of the grain?

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Hi. The wood was already pretty grain free. Holly is a fairly white wood to begin with but varies with the tree and season. What I bleached was more of a yellowish-white than pure. I left it in the solution about two days then rinsed and allowed to dry naturally. It came out very nice.

Laundry bleach works. Swimming pool chlorine works better (double strength of the laundry stuff).

Oxalic Acid works very well.

The two part - peroxide and (?) - wprks best of all. You van even take all the color out of walnut with that stuff! (Not that I can think of any reason to do that, BTW)

And yes, Toni, the darker grain doesn't lighten as much, so there's still some grain contrast, even after bleaching.

I have use Industrial strength Hydrogen Per Oxide... My daughter is a beatisian and she can buy the strong stuff... Not the Drugstore product. Pretty toxic and does a great job whitening wood. (especially Holly) I screwed up and let my Holly log turn gray...

In the olden day they called it Pickling, Often oak and Ash was bleached with an oxygen bleach (not Chlorene Bleach) to make a white ashen color, Was all the rage in '50's A little wash of super thin white paint in the first phase of finishing sort of evened out the color.

Do some research on Pickling wood, and see if it shows a method.