Making a Cheap Vacuum Chamber for Stabilizing Wood

hey walter sorrells back with more tips for the knife maker today i'll make a vacuum chamber for stabilizing wood [Music] have you thought about stabilizing wood for knife handles or other woodworking projects for that matter well today i'll be making a vacuum chamber for just that purpose now if you're not familiar with wood stabilizing the basic idea is to impregnate wood with a plastic resin kind of material which will make the wood stronger harder denser less likely to move less likely to crack during atmospheric changes or mechanical stresses like painting on handle pins this stuff can be useful not only for knife handles but also for wood projects like wood turning it's particularly helpful in improving woods like burls that are notorious for cracking or blowing up during woodworking operations so the basic way you stabilize wood is to stick the wood in a bath of liquid resin then you suck the air out of the wood and you let the resin kind of get sucked back into the wood when you kill the vacuum to do that obviously you got to be able to pull a vacuum and hold it there for hours at a time so that all that air can get out that's where a vacuum chamber comes in i'll be using a section of four inch pvc pipe for the body of the chamber some aluminum for the bottom and a piece of half inch thick clear acrylic for the top it's critical to the operation of vacuum chambers that you'd be able to see inside so part of the chamber has to be see-through basically the top and bottom pieces will be pretty close to the same thing they're just round caps slightly larger than the pvc pipe with a channel milled into them that's just wide enough for the mouth of the pvc to slide into now sometimes i show really low tech ways of doing stuff this week for instance i did a video showing how to make a knife with zero power tools that ain't this i'll put this in my tormach cnc machine and mill out the slot using a quarter inch end mill if you're careful this is something you can do on a drill press but you pretty much have to drill a hole in the center of the acrylic plate you'll see some other videos on youtube that do it that way but i don't want to do that i only want one hole in this top then i'll bore a 7 16 inch hole which will be tapped for quarter inch pipe or npt thread to admit the gauge for the vacuum pressure then using an eighth inch end mill i'll contour the outer dimensions of the lid using tabs that i'll cut out afterward i've never milled acrylic before so i actually had to take a couple swipes at this during slotting operations acrylic has a tendency to bird's nest weld to the cutter and then start producing large blobs of molten plastic which absolutely ruin your material in your project super fun so after a little tinkering what i found worked best for me was to helix down into the plate in very small bites feeding about as fast as i could run the machine but not taking out much axially on each pass i'm showing at real time speed here going about 50 thou deep on each pass and moving it 135 inches a minute the max for my tormach and there we go [Applause] i'll repeat the process with an aluminum plate for the bottom you could just as easily do this with a plastic material like hdpe this builds kind of an exercise in overkill so i'm using 6061 t6 aluminum the basic process is about the same as with the acrylic lid but using slower feeds smart guy here forgot to change the code for the bottom piece so it started milling out the gauge hole too fortunately i caught it before i ruined the piece next i drilled a 7 16 hole in the pvc for the air outlet then i ran a quarter inch npt tap down into the hole some people do this in the lid but my theory here is that the less i tax that acrylic lid which is the weakest piece both geometrically and in terms of the material used the stronger the lid is plus the easier it is for me to see inside the way these chambers work is that you pull a vacuum using a vacuum pump and as the vacuum rises the wood will start to bubble in this bath of resin foaming up inside the chamber so in order to keep it from foaming all the way up to the top and getting sucked into the vacuum pump you have to bleed vacuum to sort of tame that foaming so you'll need a tee with a ball valve on the outlet side i've also put one on the inlet side so that once you've got a full vacuum you have the option of giving the vacuum pump a rest and sealing the chamber with a ball valve on the vacuum side you can't just lock it up and leave it for hours or the vacuum will eventually peter out if for no other reason then air will continue to exit the wood but it can't hurt to have this option on the vacuum pump side of the inlet valve i'll add a barb connection for the hose the vacuum gauge goes in here it's a 10 or 12 buck model that i bought off ebay quick note here you might be interested to know that i've been doing knife making videos on youtube for well over a decade now all without it costing you a cent if i were to guess and this is really not bs i've probably put somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand hours of my life into these videos i mean that's a crazy number it's just about five years of full-time work i don't know that kind of makes me question my priorities but anyway look if that's something you can get behind jump over to my patreon page and help me out so i can keep helping you for another decade link in the cards and description thanks a ton to all my patreon supporters and now back to work as you buy it pvc pipe often has little chips and burrs in it so i'll use my disc sander to put a really smooth true surface on the top and bottom of the pvc section that i'll use for the chamber hopefully this will help it get a good clean seal you'll notice that this vacuum chamber is only about 10 inches tall tall enough for handle scales but still pretty small i've reserved a second longer piece of pvc so that if warranted i can make a taller version of this chamber in a fairly short period of time but additionally my plans to work out the kinks in my stabilizing processes and then again if experience tells me it's the right approach i'll remake the whole thing in a six inch diameter size since i got the pump hardware the design cnc processes and all that pretty well dialed in it shouldn't be very hard or expensive to upsize the design basically i just have to buy the pvc and some acrylic and if experience shows any weaknesses in this design i'll fix it in version 2. now after decreasing the mating surfaces with acetone i'll fill up this channel in the base with silicone caulk and then slide the pvc pipe in a little finger action to smooth out the bead and make sure there aren't any leaks then i'll work on making a seal or gasket kind of thing for the lid we'll see how this works i use this high-tech tool right here to level the silicone it's made from a piece of plastic milk carton the idea here is that it's got a little piece that just sticks down into the channel about a sixteenth of an inch so that the silicone doesn't come all the way to the top of the channel this way it should seat more cleanly all that's left is to hook up the hose [Applause] i should mention that i'm using an el cheapo vacuum pump from harbor freight 89 bucks so let's fire it up and see what happens yeah buddy now i'll just throw some wood and some cactus juice in there and start wrestling with the ins and outs of wood stabilizing if you want to follow more of my adventures in stabilizing keep an eye out for upcoming videos as i jump into that world let's see what happens [Music] thanks for watching guys if you like what we're doing here please subscribe and make sure that you click on that bell so you get notified of all the latest videos want to buy a knife from me check out my modern blades at tacticsarmory.com digging the channel you can support our video making efforts on patreon you know i've been banging away on these videos for like 10 years so i hope you'll show some love for all that hard work link in the cards and descriptions finally if you're interested in making japanese swords check out my full line of japanese sword videos where i show how to forge japanese swords as well as how to polish them and how to make fittings handles and scabbards walter sorrelsblades.com [Music]

Channel: Walter Sorrells

Views: 35,284

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Id: _vDf6jgfFRE

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021