How to Stabilize Wood and Why Should You do it?

Jake here today we're gonna find out why and how to stabilize wood first thing when you talked about is what is stabilizing stabilizing is taking all the air out of a piece of wood and replacing it with resin that you make hard later so just an example this is a piece of maple burl and the thing that surprised me the most about when I first got these was how light they are there's it's it's almost like they're a sponge and that's a good way to think of this as a big sponge and this is not stabilized right now I have to pin links right here that are stabilized and they're heavy and they're they're really hard and you can almost I mean they're you can kind of hear that they're hard and I listen to this burl it almost sounds Hollow and it's because it's full of air it's really light and that's what stabilizing is gonna do is remove all of this air and we're gonna replace it with cactus juice resin is what we're gonna do so now we need to ask ourselves why do we need to stabilize well there's two reasons for me in my needs one this is so light that I'm sure if I cut out a square of this and put it on lay that probably blow apart so that's one thing and the other thing is if you try to cast with resin epoxy whatever you want to call it with this it's gonna be cloudy and dirty and nasty because all the airs gonna try to come out of this while you're while you're the pressure pot while you're casting it so two reasons one it's it's gonna heavy this up it's gonna make it way stable and nice and solid and it's gonna work well with your epoxy so there's just two basic reasons for me I'm sure there's more go ahead and comment below and tell everybody what it is but those for me those are the important things that I'm gonna do it for so it's solid and it works well with resin there are several pieces of equipment that you're going to need to get into a stabilization process and sure you notice some of the things back here we're going to go over each one individually and tell you why you need them and what's going on I have links to them all below so you can check them out pry some of you buy them if you want to course that'll help me out but I'm just gonna give you an idea of what it takes to get into this and as far as hobbies go it's really not that bad because you can you know you can spend more on a bowling ball so we're gonna go over all these and let's do it this right here is the cactus juice resin I was talking about it is a stabilizer resin this is what your noir you're normally going to see when you're think about resin Part A Part B and this you know you mix it together and it gets hard that's this is for the casting and that's not what we're talking about so we're talking about this this right here has a shelf life of a few years this is my understanding of it and this little stuff right here is the catalyst that you put in there so when you get ready to use this you mix this whole bottle with this and you shake it up and now it has a shelf life of months instead of years but it's ready to use so instead of the two part here after you mix this together you're gonna it's going to go into the wood and then the second part of this is going to be heat so heat activates this and that's what turns it hard so that's what we need to know right now that we got to use this to make this work and it reduces the shelf life and but if it'll have a way long shelf life if we don't add this in so I'm not if I'm not ready to to do some stabilizing right now just don't mix this with this the next thing I have right here is a scale I use it for my regular casting stuff but on this stuff you're gonna need it to measure the wood at certain different times and we're gonna go over that so you need some kind of a scale to measure wood one of them is gonna be - we're gonna that's how we're going to know if the wood is all the way dry is why we're going to work in a way it of course you need some wood to stabilize so I have all these different burls things like that so we have plenty of stuff to stabilize I'm just going to do one for this demonstration today just to get our feet wet and but this is the kind of that you're gonna see get stabilized around here the next thing you're going to need is a vacuum chamber now you can make them or you can just buy them you can buy them as a kit now I bought this separate than the vacuum pump so I'll have a link to this one and I have a link to cheaper one I'm not really sure I needed this this is a little bit more expensive than then I think I need I got some advice for some pretty smart people later that said I probably didn't need this expensive one so I'll have a link to this one and I have a link to the lesser expensive one but you need a chamber and I wanted a big chamber because I normally do bigger castings so you need your vacuum chamber you need a vacuum pump and then you need a source of heat so a cheap toaster oven is fine but if you get a cheap toaster oven they're cheap for a reason is these numbers over here that say what the temperature is it's not going to be accurate to what's actually going on in there so another thing you need to get is going to be these little thermometers so I bought two of them about two of them while I was buying them I'll have links to these but they're not that expensive and they you need to be pretty precise when you do this stuff so I'll have one set on this side and I'll have one set on this side and I'll make sure and if they're a little bit different so I'll just take the average of the two and I'll set it to that but I already know I already messed with this a little bit and I already know that if I want it at 220 it's the this doubt needs to be passed to 50 so if you're gonna do this stuff get you a cheap toaster oven but make sure you get the thermometers first thing I need to do is select a piece of wood that I want to stabilize and this is spalted maple burl should be pretty neat for I think I'm gonna make a mallet out of this but this is what I chose now we need to I'm gonna check it with a moisture meter just for fun six point three is six point four so that's our starting point and now we're going to wait what we got there 382 grams so the first process we're gonna do is we're gonna put this in the oven and we're gonna leave it in there at about 220 degrees for 24 hours I'm going to leave it there overnight and that's where the weight comes in so I'm gonna put it in there overnight and I'm gonna wait again tomorrow and then after that I'll put it back in the oven for another hour or so and then see if it gets any lighter than that if it doesn't get any lighter that means all the moistures out of this and the reason that we put it at 220 degrees because that's above boiling so if there's moisture inside of there we want it to steam out it's pretty much my understanding of it so as far as 10-fold goes some people do some people don't there's videos out there that some people use it some people don't I'm not going to use it and we'll see what happens so once again if you have a different opinion about using 10 fold go ahead and put in the comments below but I'm gonna put this in the oven I'm gonna put it in there for 220 degrees for 24 hours and then we'll come back and we're gonna wait so it's been about 24 hours and I saw I'm going to take this out I'm gonna let it cool off for a couple minutes that's one thing you need to keep in mind as even though it's not that high of a temperature it's still hot enough to burn so I got a couple of rags to grab it with I'm gonna sit it here for a couple minutes let it let it cool off a minute I'm gonna weigh it check the moisture in it and I'm gonna put it back in here for another hour just to see if it changes after that so here we go I'm gonna go ahead and wait and see what the difference is now remember we started at 382 so we lost about 40 grams so moisture has gone out of it and I'm even having trouble getting the moisture reader to even read moisture in it I'm gonna put it in there for another hour and see how much weight we lose after that okay it's been an hour so I'm gonna take it back out of the oven and we're gonna weigh it this moisture meter starts working at 5% so that's why it won't read that because it's below 5% which is a good thing so we're gonna weigh it and see if we need to dry it any more 340 4.6 and it was three forty four point nine I think before so we only lost three tenths of a gram so I'm gonna call that pretty good I'm gonna call that good now if you want to make if you want to make it to where there's no loss at all then go ahead but I think this is gonna be pretty good it's under 5% it didn't lose very much in an hour so I'm gonna get the vacuum chamber ready and we're gonna go from there I had to go get a bucket for the vacuum chamber to fit the wood in so I ended up leaving it in the oven for another hour and I'm gonna show you what the way it is 340 4.6 and that's exactly what I had that's exactly what I had an hour ago so now we know this thing is it's exactly dry now we're gonna come over here look at the vacuum chamber and cactus juice so here's our vacuum chamber I could put the cactus juice directly in this but they don't have to clean it up it just so happens that a five gallon bucket will fit right inside so so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna mix this up you have to put the catalyst in here this cactus juice comes with very specific instructions so so I watch videos from heat knuckles Zach Higgins Casey Martin I watched those three and they tell you beyond this stuff so but this is pretty clear pretty precise it tells me exactly he's kind of put in here what the problem problems are or whatever but this is very clear very precise what to do so one of the things is we need to put the catalyst in here and then our wood we're gonna put our wood in here and you need to overfill it obviously I need to put something on there to weight it down first but we need to overfill it because once you release the vacuum and the cactus juice goes into that wood your levels going to come down if your lover goes down below the the wood then you just did all that for nothing you have to redo it so I'm gonna purposely overfill this and I'm gonna draw a line on here that we can see so we'll be able to see how much the fluid goes down this is a pretty big piece of wood so it should be noticeable so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna mix these and I'm gonna wipe this down and fill it up and then we'll go from there now I just overfilled it by a lot because I don't want to be I don't want to be too short in a you know soak up air instead of cactus juice so what I'm gonna do is I overfilled it and now when I mark where it's at so that we'll be able to see later how much they love one way down I'm going to show you real quick there's already air bubbles coming out just by being in the cactus juice so I have my camera set up over here so we'll be able to see it before I start I'm gonna explain what I'm doing the vacuum pumps gonna get loud so what I'm gonna do is I'll turn this on and I'm going to close this exhaust valve and right at first that what's gonna be so full of air it's gonna wanna over bubble and get all frothy and be weird so I can control that by this valve over here so what you're gonna see is this is gonna try to come up on me and I'm gonna I'm gonna control the vacuum with this over here so we're gonna do it and then whenever it stops bubbling or digging there stops bubbling then we're gonna let it soak for 24 hours after that so let's get this vacuum on and let's get going so we'll come back when it's almost done bubbling and then we're gonna play put your scene right here is only after about 10 minutes this is all the way open the vacuums all the ways maxed out and this is what we got so it's not gonna over bubble and I could pretty much leave it alone for a while and come back to it later this is about four hours in and it's still bubbling so it's about 9:30 at night so I'll probably come out here in a couple hours and it's not done then I'll just let it go overnight so here this is right now it's 5 o'clock in the morning so that's been here 12 hours I messed around with sleep though but I figured it was gonna be bubbling anyway now very few bubbles I don't think that's probably ever gonna change so I'm gonna stop right now and release the vacuum and let this thing soak for 24 hours hopefully we can see how much level the fluid has gone down it's hard to see in there right now so after 24 hours I'll pull it out so we can see the lines that we made before and catch up with you in a day so here we are it's been soaking for 24 hours about 26 hours actually so I'm gonna go ahead and take that bucket out of here we're gonna see how much the level went down and we'll see the importance of overall the fill of things so now hopefully you can see the importance of overfill in this thing if this was a smaller container you know I'd probably go down significantly more and you would probably if you didn't overfill it enough it would get into the wood you're in you're wasting your time so we're going to get this out of here I'm gonna dry it off all this was that you saw on top of there was just some pieces man I got a socket in a piece of metal just to hold it down but that's all that was in case you were wondering and the other thing is let me get the camera again before we started this whole process that thing would float like an ass why I had to have these two weights on there sort of float now it's not even trying to come up so obviously we did something I'm gonna go ahead and let that sit in the kind of drip drive for a minute then we'll wipe it off and we'll get it in the oven so now this cactus juice here we have all this left well just because we used it one time doesn't mean we can't keep using it I'm about to go get some more wood I'm gonna put it in here and I'm gonna keep reusing this stuff and that's the cool thing about it's a little bit expensive but just imagine how many pieces of what I'm be able to stabilize with this so we've went through this whole process so far I've kind of got the excess off of here I'm about to put it in the oven now 200 degrees is what we're shooting at under 200 degrees it's not gonna activate this cactus juice over 200 degrees it's gonna make the cactus juice seep out of here and then get hard and then you have a ton to clean up and then you didn't stable I just stabilized it as well as you could have so 200 degrees and then the thing about the 200 degrees is you can't overdo it so if I leave it in here for 10 hours it's fine you can't overcook it but you can undercook it so I'm gonna put it in here and then leave it at 200 degrees and then I'll tell you how many hours it took to get this thing to where it was done and then we'll wait after that and give you my thoughts afterwards once again with the tin foil if I wrap this up with tin foil and then some of this Texas Jew seeps out and it will when you have a tin foil on it I don't have anywhere to go so then I'm gonna end up having to clean up all of this with with the pic or whatever so somebody pretty smart told me don't use that don't use the tin full have it sitting on there and let this drip off into the drip tray and we're gonna do that and if I change my mind later there I'll let you know but for right now that's what we'll come back when it's done cooking it's been about four hours and we're gonna take a look at it right now you can see where this cactus juice is seeped out a little bit this was on the tray right here so it was sitting like that and so now I just have to clean up that I don't have really any in here I have to clean which that's what I was aiming for here's what was on the top and I think could it be the best to try to clean it off right now I'm gonna clean this up and then we're gonna wait after that so stick around I was putting some denatured alcohol on it I'll clean this up just sanded it real quick and ahead look at it it's pretty cool and I'm pretty happy with this stuff and uh I'm gonna go ahead and I'm about to weigh this let's go ahead and wait proof is in the pudding we were at three forty four point six and now we're at nine twenty six point three that is amazing I thought this was gonna be cool but it turned out to be really cool I know if you can hear that it hurts my hand to hit it this is incredibly hard now you need gain 580 1.7 grams I mean it's ridiculously heavy I mean it's gonna make one heck of a mallet I went over a lot of stuff today if there's any questions go over in the comments and we'll have a discussion down there give the big thanks to Heath knuckles Casey Martin Zach Higgins I soaked up all the information I can from those guys and I'm here to show you that you can do it too it takes a little bit of equipment which it's really not that big of an investment to get into this stuff and it turns out that's pretty fun so just about all I got in the future I'm gonna be building the resin room I'm gonna be doing pretty cool resident casting stuff out of here so follow along if you've made it this far if you haven't subscribed yet I don't know what your problem is just to subscribe and let's go and we'll see you next time and y'all be good [Music]

Channel: Jake Thompson

Views: 96,555

Rating: 4.8983665 out of 5

Keywords: How to Stabilize Wood and Why Should You do it?, How to Stabilize Wood, why should you stabilize wood, stabilizing wood with cactus juice, stabilizing wood, cactus juice stabilizing resin, cactus juice, resin impregnated wood, vacuum stabilizing wood, vacuum stabilization chamber, vacuum chamber, worthless wood, what is stabilizing wood, what is stabilization, vacuum pump for stabilizing wood, stabilizing resin, resin, resin casting, resin art, stabilizing wood for turning

Id: s7EoPC1Nlb4

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019