Purpleheart color modification and preservation (Part 1)

hey everyone welcome back to another exciting episode of this Necker show my name is Ben and I'm your host today as I am with every other episode just so you know the snicker show is now the number two home-improvement channel on YouTube just behind this old house and many other fine channels thank you for your support today we're going to take a look at Purple Heart which is a very heavy very dense exotic wood from Central and South America this is not stained it's not dyed it's not painted this is the actual color of the wood it's called Purple Heart because it's purple so first I don't know a Purple Heart board you're going to notice something a little bit disappointing it's actually brown on the inside it's gonna look like this on the outside and look like that on the inside and that's because the natural color of purple art is in fact Rama but over time either from I'm not sure if it's from the oxygen and the air or from UV rays I think it's more from the air than anything else because I've kept stuff in a box and the color has changed but anyway over time this brown wood will turn more purple and then after it turns purple it starts to slowly decline and it turns brown again so this this edge right here this has been sitting out probably for four or five years as I cut it this has probably been several years longer so this side is starting to turn brown and then you see another piece here this is actually purple art on that side of this pencil holder but this is so old that it's lost a lot of its color now there are different ways to mitigate this and what a lot of people do is they use some kind of a UV blocker like a spar urethane or some exterior deck finishes will have a UV blocker in them and that's fine for a lot of projects but if you're working on something that's going to use in the kitchen you know have food contact or if you just feel like using a spar urethane like for example I use water locks on most of my stuff or if you want to use a water-based finish that's a limited options for UV stuff basically you gotta find a way to deal with that purple color dissipating over time so what we're going to do today is look at a couple examples first of different pieces of purple art and then we're going to put it in the oven because I found that with thermally modifying the wood just pop it in your oven for a little bit of time it will get deeper colored deeper purple color and that color will go all the way through the board and it seems to stick this is this is at least a year old it's been the same color for the whole time as an even as a lightened it just stayed purple and when I cut into the end it's the exact same color on the inside here I have another piece you can compare these to the Purple Heart and this board is probably it's probably sitting around my shop for ten years I might do something with it eventually but this one that I put in the oven is a much deeper color and then a few other examples here here's some Purple Heart and cherry that was the sign of a box even remember who has of this box no this is a little leftover piece that's still got a little bit of purple in it here is some purple and ash this was again this Purple Heart was put in the oven so it's got a darker color I think I put it in for a little bit too long so I want to explain that to see what the right amount of time is this still has some some reasonably purple colour I think I've cleaned this down a year or two ago and I have a small piece of thermally modified Purple Heart with some plum wood on the outside and here is one of the pieces from my first thermally modified would experiment videos you can go back and watch that if you want to I did a just a whole bunch of samples of different kinds of wood and just cook them until they caught on fire this is one of the pieces left over from that experiment and here again we have a small piece of purple art in the center it's lost almost all of its colour this thing is really old and you can't even tell here but that's Purple Heart in the middle this is probably going to be turned into a ring or something it's got veneer on the outside so what we're gonna do is since I already baked these ones and this is to so I'm going to take this beautiful piece of wood and reluctantly cut it up into smaller pieces and it'll leave some of the outside so you see what the current color is and then whatever I cut on the inside will be the fresh start and I'll mark both sides so we know what we're dealing with and then I'll pop it in the oven and set it for a consistent temperature and just start removing pieces every maybe 15 minutes maybe every 30 minutes just to see how they change over time so I guess let's get started [Music] okie-dokie I think there should be enough pretty good collection here you can see that that's the inside it's lighter and a little bit browner these actually aren't really as distinct as they are sometimes sometimes the inside is really brown like significantly different in the outside gets a deeper purple I think that depends on the tree but that's what it looks like for comparison here's a piece of thermally modified it's a little bit more deep purple certainly a big difference between these two so what I'm gonna do is I'll pop these in the oven and I won't waste your time watching the whole thing cook but I'll put this side up so that it's getting exposed to the air and I'll hold onto a control piece and then after we're done we'll lay everything out with some kind of a chart and see what the results were well that was a fun experiment but now I really just want to do more experimentation I've got some answers and I got some more questions this is the results of the the baking experiment I have here in the first row baked at 250 degrees for 30 minutes 60 minutes 90 minutes and under 20 minutes and that's 350 200 250 degrees Fahrenheit and then on the next row bumped it up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 60 90 and 120 you really don't see anything in the first row I think 250 is out that's not not enough to really darken the wood any after a couple hours at 300 you start to see a bit of purple ization and then the wood and then when you get up to 350 degrees I would say that after 30 minutes at 350 degrees is where I saw the temperature or the color of the wood turn out the way I like it and I did another one just to be sure and it came out exactly the same so it looks like for purple art I would go with 350 degrees for one hour 60 minutes and if you want to go darker you can but I think after this point after 90 minutes it really just especially a hundred twenty minutes looks a little too dark in my opinion and you lose some of that purple so the part that I thought was interesting is it I was saying you know this is a way to make the color last and that's been my experience so far is that the color will last a long time after its modified in the oven and it goes all the way through so that the wood is darkened all the way through so if you sanded or cut it you don't lose that purple color however I was noticing this old spoon that is actually a piece of thermally modified purple artist's been sitting in the kitchen for a while I think it's been through the dishwasher once or twice which definitely rubbed it up but this thing is turned almost kind of white gray and I also had this cutting board here which had some thermally modified purple horror on the edges and that's still a it still has a little bit of purple color but it's I think this piece was pretty dark when I started though so it's lost a little bit with time but otherwise held up pretty well but it's not quite the same as this so I got curious and as far as what actually makes the wood get darker or get more purple with time as I mentioned in the beginning some people say it's exposure to light and others say it's exposure to actually I just hear people say is exposure to light and that may or may not be true and I really haven't done any kind of controlled testing to verify that but what I have noticed is if I put purple heart in the box it's it's gonna change color and if I have you know a couple pieces that are sitting on top of each other like that when I remove one later you're going to see a purple outline and then a lighter area where where it was shielded from the the light to the air or whatever I really don't think that it has thing to do with the UV rays because I have some older projects that have water-based finishes on them and that aren't UV resistant and they look great and then I have newer projects with well I think it's the oil that's inside the wood that is what's changing color and when you bake it that it's a little bit darker that would also explain why this spoon has lost some of its color especially after going through the dishwasher I think the oil that provides the purple color may have been washed down and I'm not positive not positive but here's one of the reasons that a servicer confirmed my suspicions that's a jar of lacquer thinner no it was clear lacquer thinner a little bit of an amber color but right after I took the other 350 degree 60 minute pieces out of the oven I dropped it inside this jar with lacquer thinner first I tried it with water and that didn't do anything but water isn't gonna dissolve oil so try it with some kind of a solvent put it in there with lacquer thinner and after a couple of minutes of shaking it up with the wood in there the water turned pink I guess would be the color there so it looks like it it took some of the oil out of the wood and that appears to be the challenge you can darken the wood up so if you're in a an on wet non soapy non-solvent condition the wood will probably stay that color but if you are in any kind of conditions where or that the oil is going to get attacked by solvent then it's likely to change and become Brown that's what I got out of this one hopefully there are some answers for you there at least you know that you can go 350 for 60 minutes and that'll give you a nice purple color all the way through and I'll pull up my control piece real thick as well just uh I was supposed to have it on the table when I had a control piece and this one I wrapped it up to block the light and I wrapped it up to block the air so that was double verification that so that's what we started with right there you can see it's really not much different from the one that was baked at two 250 for 30 minutes definitely quite a difference between these two here so that was the original starter piece and the last thing that I'm gonna do just out of curiosity I was wondering if this thing was still going to be purple on the inside since it was baked in the oven before I think this piece was overcooked a little bit so it's probably gonna be darker like that but if I cut this thing open this is one of my wife's favorite spoons so I might get in trouble for doing this but to mitigate how much trouble I get into I made her a new one today out of plum wood that is very similar in design so I'm hoping to do the Ola for copyright reasons I can't do the Indiana Jones Raiders lost lost art thing but I'm gonna try to do you know one up one of these items and just put that in her kitchen and see if she's happy with it cuz it's new and then I'm going to run this one through the bandsaw and see what it looks like on the inside all right well there we go it's still purple on the inside so it looks like this the the white chalky type color was mostly just on the outside probably from exposure to soap and a little bit of use and abrasion on the inside that's really not yeah it's almost closer to the original piece so point is that wasn't all the way through that was just on the outside so maybe maybe if you have an old Purple Heart project that's lost one of its color you might be able to give it a little bit of sanding to get down to the good stuff but I'm gonna say that if you had baked it in the oven first you'll have a pretty good color in there too to get back to so that's it I hope there's something that was useful in there I'm really curious about this I might put that piece back in there and let it soak for awhile and maybe maybe to see if my theory is right about the purple washing off I will glue all of these together into a cutting board and that way I can track over time how the color changes and each one of these pieces when it's exposed to the elements I don't know if this ever happens to anybody else but sometimes I get started working on something and then I get distracted with other projects for a while you should check out my Instagram page and then I never finished the project that I was working on so trying to get back to this video that I started a month ago this has been sitting in the shop getting moved around a little bit here and there for a comparison let's go back to our control piece here that was wrapped up and sealed to protect it from air and light and you can tell what these look like in the beginnings that's uh that's a bit of a difference that's more Brown and that's more purple really a big difference next to the 350 degree piece anywho we remember this guy right here as well this is one of the the pieces that was not baked put it in the in lacquer thinner and it's soaked out the oil and gave us that pink color and let's introduce that one now this was one of the pieces that was baked at 350 degrees and that resulted in a deeper color in the solvent I let both of these soak for about 12 hours just overnight and it kind of confirms my suspicions that the the reason that the kitchen utensils and cutting boards were turning a little bit white and chalky on the surface was from the oil that provides the color to the wood being washed out with soap and especially if you happen to put it in the dishwasher the dishwasher soap is a lot harsher so that'll wash that old oil right out of there so I'm not really sure what to do with that either the bacon wood in the oven does though as far as the Purple Heart goes does seem to leave a relatively permanent finish on there unless you use it in the kitchen and then you lose some of the color so I'm not sure how to stop that from happening if anybody has any good ideas I'm sure everybody watching it would be interested to hear what you have to say just post it down in the comments and maybe we'll do some more experimentation later and if I get around to gluing this up into a cutting board I'll post an update in a couple years or something so thanks for watching and have fun

Channel: The Snekker Show

Views: 40,117

Keywords: purpleheart, amaranth, thermally modified wood, madera, purpleheartwood, purple heart wood, purple heart

Id: Zlh4fWFpGbo

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019