How to Stabilize Wood and What is Stabilization

hey y'all i'm james wright and welcome to my shop recently I did a video on making mallets for Tallyho and that brought up a lot of questions because I used some stabilization in there why do I do that how is it done what is it for a lot of questions came up about that so I figured I'd take a video and answer them so let's take a look so the most often used for stabilizing is turning Turner's like to use these beautiful spalted woods they have the grain and the color and they end up being absolutely gorgeous when you turn them the problem is anytime you get that spalting you start to get a little bit of funkiness the wood gets a bit soft and that makes it fairly poor for most projects but if you stabilize them you'll fill the grain you'll fill everything and it becomes just as hard as the rest of the wood so that you can work with these really beautiful pieces stabilization is not intended for filling voids so if you've a void like this fill it with epoxy that will do much better stabilization will work into the wood but it won't actually fill the void stabilization also has several other benefits number one stabilizing the hood and that's where it gets the term would naturally will expand and contract throughout the year as it absorbs moisture and temperature changes but with the stabilization in there it's not going to absorb the wood because all the pores have already been filled with the stabilization resin then they're not going to expand and contract throughout the year so it makes the wood a far more stable substance so if you're worried about the expansion contraction that may fix it so let's take a look at what actually stabilizes the wood this is the most common substance it's called cactus juice I'll leave a link to this and all the other products and tools down below in the description and cactus juice is heat activated so you actually have to heat this up for it to harden it's just a one part resin it's not an epoxy where you have to mix the two together this will sit by itself and absorb into the wood it's also a low viscosity almost like water so it will get all the way into the pores of the wood and this is great for stabilizing large blocks and getting things deep inside the wood and even like in the mallet I had a cactus juice was thin enough to be sucked all the way through the block of wood even though it was a very large block this is the one most often used for turns it also ends up being a little bit softer than epoxies so it's a little bit more workable once it's done so a lot of people like that but it has its drawbacks another option I've used a few times is using a penetrating epoxy this is one from total boat and this is a much thinner epoxy so most epoxies are kind of thick and gloopy this is actually really low viscosity epoxy and when you mix this in it's designed to just sit on top of a wood and kind of absorb into the wood much like an oil finish so this will naturally leak into the wood but if you put it under a vacuum you can suck it even farther into the wood now it's a little higher viscosity than the cactus juice so it's not going to go quite as far in but it will penetrate in a good ways with the vacuum chamber one of the big benefits of using epoxy is it's much faster this will cure a matter of thirty minutes or so whereas the cactus juice takes a long time in the oven and you're probably not going to want to work on it until the next day when the downsides do a penetrating epoxy is that it will cure well it's under vacuum so you don't just want to pour it into your vacuum chamber otherwise it'll glue the blocks of wood into the vacuum chamber so you need to create a little container to hold this that the epoxy can then sit in and it can all cure inside that container now let's look at some of the equipment this is a vacuum pump and I bought this one on Amazon for about 50 bucks it's just a single-stage vacuum pump it's not amazing it's designed for working with air conditioners and sucking the lines dry on that but for this application it works very well I have thought about reversing a bike pump so that I could draw the vacuum by hand but this is just easier next up you need a vacuum chamber and this is one that I bought on Amazon I thought about making my own and there's a bunch of different designs you can do it but most of the time they end up being about the same price as buying the vacuum chamber because you have to have a nice solid lid on top you need to have the gauge and you'd have the ball valves you need at the hosing and once you get all that other stuff in there they end up being about the same price to make them as to buy them so I'll leave a link to this one down below it's a fairly quick and easy system and the flow valves on this are much easier to operate than something you could make yourself I also made this long chamber for anything I'm doing long this is just a piece of four-inch PVC pipe with a cap on the end and it says not for pressure so yes you could have problems with that but your actual putting a little bit of pressure on this you're only putting atmospheric pressure it's not really you know pumping up to hundreds of psi on the end the first time I used it I put silicone around there and then put a piece of wax paper on top it so it sucks it down nice and flat and now the silicone creates a nice gasket running all the way around that will hold the top on and I just use the top from another one to sit on there and it sucks it right down in place so I can use the same system and all the expensive parts for this container to use it on this one which cost me all of like 20 bucks to make so let's actually show it in use I'm going to stabilize a funeral small blocks wood I'll put them down here on the bottom and it's not gonna take a whole lot of fluid to fill that up enough to cover them over now the first problem you're automatically going to see is that they start floating you need to have a way of holding them down into the pot so what I like to do is get a few shims break them off until it fits a pot then that shim will hold the block down under the water some people will use nuts and bolts and other weights to hold the things down works perfectly fine so whatever you want so the next thing we're gonna do is turn the vacuum pump and suck it all out so once it gets up and going I'm just going to turn off this valve and see how the pressure immediately starts to rise I'm gonna take it up as far as it'll go and you'll start to see it bubbling inside once the pressure stops changing its down to about its bottom I'm going to turn off the valve and then let this whole thing sit and let it sit for about 20-30 minutes until all the air pulls out of those pieces of wood and you'll see that kneel rise a little bit as the air comes out of the wood so you can still see there are some bubbles coming out of there I'm still gonna leave it the longer I can leave it the deeper the resin will get into the wood and if the bubbles are still pouring out of there I'm gonna leave it until they slow it down a good bit then we'll do one more cycle once the bubbling is basically stopped I'm gonna let the air back in and cycle it one more time so we can release the pressure and when you release that pressure that resin will then soak into the wood and fill in all the gaps where the air used to be so now let's turn off and cycle it one more time all the way down as it gets down to the bottom you'll see that more and more bubbles start coming out again and it's almost done after this cycle after these bubbles are done I'm just going to let it line now that the bubbles have come to a stop again we can release the pressure and do the next step and remove our blocks take off a little bit of the excess material put it onto a piece of tin foil and wrap it up tin foil to help keep the way so it doesn't all drip away and it won't then drip down into your oven next I'm going to use one of these quick ovens save it in here now you do want to make sure that you get the temperature up to about 200 and it's got to have to bake all the way through so on mine I actually have to set the temperature to 300 to make sure that actually gets up to 200 inside and I'm going to be testing it with a thermometer and set it in here and see what the actual temperature is inside now you want it to get to 200 degrees in the core of the block so you'll probably have to leave it in there for a while usually I have it at 200 for about two hours let them bake completely and then pull them out then after they've been cooking long enough just pull it out unwrap them and they're ready to go just like that you have a wood that is stable much harder denser and even the punky wood that was there before is now just as hard as the rest of the wood ready for turning or whatever you have in mind one of the nice things about the juice is whatever you don't use you can just pour back in the container and use next time and tell you heat-treated it's good to go on top of that everything is water cleanup so just a little bit of soap warm water and you can clean out this pot and be ready for the next load now to answer a couple questions that I had from the mount video particularly a lot of people said do I really need to stabilize my mallets and most of the time no I actually those are the first mallets that I've ever stabilized because most the time you choose the wood by the hardness you're looking for if you want a softer wood for your finishing mallets or a harder wood for really moving things around you can choose it by that adding the stabilization to it will make it a little bit harder will make the wood heavier and sometimes those are things you like to have in a mallet but in particular I wanted to use that wood that was a little bit more it was the offcuts from the boat as opposed to using the good stuff which is going into the boat so that way I can use cheaper quality wood wood that other people may not want stabilize it and still have really good quality wood that will last for a lifetime or two so next time you're looking at a little scrap wood and thinking wow that's really not gonna be able to turn into anything there's just not enough substance there think about stabilizing you might be able to get some more life out of it and get a harder more dense piece of wood that will treat you really well so I hope you like this bit of information if you have any questions or ideas let me know down the comments below also I do want to say a huge thank you to the patrons on patreon and the new members on YouTube who have hit that joint button down below thank you for that you're helping to make this channel far better than it is today so that's about it for now until next time have a wonderful day I'm feeling a little bit deranged can you please stabilize me

Channel: Wood By Wright

Views: 118,065

Rating: 4.9529705 out of 5

Keywords: How to Stabilize Wood, What is Stabilization, Vacume stabilization, cactious, cactus juice, penetrating epoxy, staboisation, Wood By Wright, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, Total Boat, Vacuum Chamber, Vacuum pump

Id: Z2jEdjYEd1M

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018