Rotten Wood to Brass Hammer Handle - Resin Stabilizing

so resin stabilizing turning blanks is something I wanted to try for a long time just never really came up because I don't really turn like ever so I guess I could make some turning blanks and then just look at them but I have a interesting opportunity here my friend Dima makes these brass hammers and they have a resin stabilized handle so we'll be able to make some blanks for him to turn a handle for one of his hammers and I have a hammer head here it's a really nice little piece of brass it's made of hex stock that we cut here in my shop he gets to be like giant 12 foot long sections of hex brass we cut them up into individual blanks so this is how I kind of start out looking this a little off cut from one of the brass rods we cut so he adds a nice round over effect on the end and also breaks the edges a little bit and puts a hole in them to receive a stud that's gonna connect the handle to the head so in the past used to be stabilized wood using this stuff penetrating epoxy I use that on the gentleman's delay box where I stabilized the panels because they were super mushy and pretty much rotten so we're gonna do something very similar to this today except we're going to use a slightly different product and process I'll be using this stuff which is very popular among Turner's this stuff cures using a heat source whereas this just cures under normal chemical reaction like you see with epoxy so this stuff will not start to cure until you heat it above the curing temperature which is really powerful and really helpful for this because it allows you to have as much time as you need to get the wood to absorb as much of this product as possible thereby infusing that piece of wood with as much resin as it could possibly handle so you can imagine if you're able to infuse a piece of wood it becomes way more dense and way more structurally sound so I have a couple examples of infused things here in the shop so Dima made me these two mallets I think this foam was like three or four years ago and this form was like two years ago or something like that they are well different sizes you can see the head on this one is bigger than the head on this one but this guy here is much heavier than this one is the other thing here is that the resident fuse head this one happens to be cherry is much more durable so I actually use this when I was building my band sawmill so you can see all of the little bit of damage here on the end that's just from me hammering out bolts and pieces of Steel and transfer punches with a wooden mallet and this thing is held up pretty ridiculously well if a lot of abuse I've given to it something that's not infused like that especially a cherry would never hold up that well so another example here is this turning mallet the head is a cherry burl burl of course since the grain is going in all different directions this would be probably a bad choice from mallet because that grain be pretty weak but since it's infused with resin that allows it to be really solid and structurally sound and you can actually use this as a male without having to worry about like a chunk of it coming out as you're smacking on your carving tools or something the other thing here is the brass hammer so this is an earlier version probably one of those Pro type ones of the hammers and this is a boxed elder burl and that's also stabilized as well so it almost has a stone appearance because the old to put such a high polish on it because it's a lot harder than it normally would just left us wood so if you want to fully infuse a piece of wood resin we need to essentially replace all of the air inside a piece of wood with resin wood is very porous it has a lot of open space inside of it so there's a lot of air in here and there is also a lot of space for resin to go which is why you'll see their weight of these things increase so much as leaves or resin so the easiest way to do that is to use a vacuum chamber we can put the about the blanks or blocks of wood in the resin put it in the vacuum chamber the chamber is going to pull all of the air out of the wood allowing the the resin to flow down into the wood they soaked in all the way and just fill all the pores all the voice everything is filled with resin and since we're using a stabilizing product that does not cure until it's heated we can leave it in a vacuum chamber for as long as we need to to sure that that piece of wood has absorbed as much resin as it's ever going to so for these handle blanks I have this chunk of spalted maple it is very light it should not be this light it is is pretty far gone so we are going to totally stabilize this make a structurally sound and make some pretty awesome handles out of it we're gonna sit and really come to life there's a lot of interest in color and if this works out pretty well I have a lot more of this also have some stuff with quilted maple this actually all used to be quilted maple before it rotted but I got this piece as well as a bunch of the chunks that I've been sitting on for a long time from Neillsville Wisconsin every time I go visit my in-laws there they have the local yard waste dump like a not that far from their house I always go there and see if there's any interesting logs or trees out there and about six years ago I picked up this stuff so we'll see how this goes summer I start getting this thing cut up into blanks for the handles and those blanks are going to be inch and 3/4 square by three and a half inches long I'm gonna try and get the most number of handles I can of this block wood and hopefully we'll have a few cashews from so I think some of these are gonna make some really interesting handle blanks there's a lot of really interesting spalting going on in here before we move on I do want to get a starting wait on these just because I'm curious to see how much weight we're gonna add to these guys so currently there's about two and a half ounces for a blank three on that one two and a half 2.6 it's a night to get this resin right to go this comes with an activator because this is heat sensitive it won't cure as a single part until you mix it in the activator that way you can store this thing at whatever temperature you need to but once I add this it has to be stored below a certain temperature 85 degrees so I'll probably post inside after this sometimes it gets hotter than 85 out here in the shop even here in Minnesota let's give these guys arranged in the bucket here now I do have a decent dead space in there if I was smart to what I've got some like marbles or something to take up the space but this stuff is reusable and I'm hoping that I'll be able to voice merge these otherwise I'll to find something to displace some of the resin but I'll probably dump those entire container in here alright so you see this right the float so I have my little weights somewhere and I put you can raise see how the resin is pushing the air out of the piece of the wood so that's pretty cool I've got some more resin of top it off some more because it is going down already so this has been sitting for about eight minutes now the bubbling is slowing down and level has dropped quite a bit I'm kind of curious to see what does actually look like they looks I can't help myself no that's it's gonna be pretty cool okay put that back down in there so I'll just pop this back off and then we can get this thing into the vacuum chamber I'll put a lot in here I can always put it back in the container when I'm done looks like making soup or something I'm gonna pop on the lid and then start up the vacuum really soupy so as I'm doing this I got to watch it to make sure that the foam doesn't overflow into the chamber so I left the back can come up a little bit I'll release the vacuum get the full knock down and I kind of repeat that process until the heavy bubbling stops I don't want to speak too soon but this is that full vacuum now and it doesn't seem like the fullness and getting that high so I might be fine just sit here and watch it I'm still having to worry about it overflowing so the pumps are running for 15 minutes now I'm just gonna go ahead and shut the pump off and just leave this sitting here under vacuum and we'll just see how long it takes to stop bubbling it's also been sitting for three and a half hours now and there's not a whole lot of bubbles coming up anymore I'm gonna give it a little shake to dislodge anything that could be under there that seemed to dislodge some more I'll probably to sit for another half hour to an hour or so and check back on it again there about five hours just got the kids put to bed you can't want to shake on this thing and it looks like it's not bubbling anymore so should be good to go at this point so the instructions for this product is to leave it sitting in the resin for at least twice as long as it was under vacuum so that means I love to sit out here for 10 hours in the liquid after I release the vacuum so I'll do that real quick here to start letting some air back in so it's about 10 o'clock at night right now which is kind of nice I got ice we'll leave the side here overnight and then tomorrow we're completing sell the resin get them in the oven and get them baked and cured so these have been soaking for quite a long time for about 18 hours that's just how life goes sometimes no more air bubbles or anything coming out of these things so time to get these things out of here wrapped up and stick them in the oven so I picked up a cheap toaster oven and I also got a oven temperature gauge thing in here so I can make sure the temperature is actually accurate based on the readings over here and mine is off so this is set like a 175 which actually produces 200 degrees which is what this stuff action needs to cure so this stuff needs to go in the oven for about two hours so to set these in here and two hours there should be cured what's up buddy what you doing making um I don't know like wood baked potatoes you're on the shop so I kind of changed things up a little bit as you can see I have kind of two batches going on the oven right now as I got that first one in there it just seemed like there was just too much in there and they're sitting too close to the heating element it just looks like they're gonna get too hot so hopefully these are all right stuff that we'd open these up and take a look and see how they look you can see how cool that looks not too bad huh so I did already go ahead and unwrap one and just clean up a little bit skim off the excess resin and this is what the blank looks like that's just looking pretty incredible and really I'm really excited about these these should be some really really awesome handles and just a good idea where we're at as far as weight goes five point six so double issue is pretty much double the weight is before it is really ridiculously hard so I got them all unwrapped and cleaned up and looks like I have four pretty decent blanks this one's kind of a maybe it's got some pretty big Boyd's in here still this might need some actual epoxy to go in there to fill those up if forest gets used but I'll get a prepped and we'll see so I'm gonna get these things ready to go for turning the next thing on here is going to be drilling for and installing a threaded rod which will connect the handle to the head so I'll cut some throat of rod down the size drill the hole in the top of the blank then epoxy that thread rod into the blank alright so I'm here in demas shop and he's going to turn one of these blanks into hopefully a viable handle we'll see six of them so hopefully one will work out I'm looking forward to seeing this in person because every single time I hear you talk about how faster with this kind of scares me I'll slow down for the video [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] so pretty cool we went from something super punky super soft and pretty much unusable to something that actually is usable functional and absolutely just beautiful so I'm really happy with the way this one here turned out I ended up making six blanks for the hammer handles five of those six worked out so I have one here the other four already have found homes and then number six didn't quite work out that well I'm also drilled the hole for the stud off center because it's not at the right diameter down here and it's full of voids anyway so this as well as the ones I didn't think we're gonna work out that well anyway so no huge loss there now this is really just scratching the surface of what's possible with this whole process and for instance you could do different colors as well so if you want to add a die or another colouring agent to the resin as you're doing the casting you can impart color into your blanks that's another thing you can do with this again this is just like the basics I guess and it doesn't have to be super soft or punk you you can of course infuse resin into something that's totally solid and fill up all of these voids or just air space in the sell piece of wood that's not soft and rotten and make it much stronger and much more dense and it's a whole nother thing I think this well try next I have a lot more of this resin so as you can see this can really go a long way I used about a quarter of this jug and this stuff is super soft and absorbed a lot of resins so if you're doing something that's not like rotten like this what's the power last you for a decent amount of time or release a decent amount of blanks so I do want to say a big thank you to Dima for helped me out this video and making that turning look ridiculously easy and simple but I know if I was doing it it would never go that quickly or that smoothly that's for sure so thanks so much Dima for and Mallett to add to my collection if you want to check out demon stuff i will leave his links down low description and if you want to purchase one of his hammers they'll be a link to that as well so thing is all for this one thank you as always for watching I agree ly appreciate it if you've any questions or comments about these stabilising or anything here in my shop please feel free to leave me a comment also be happy any questions you might have and until next time happy woodworking

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 86,177

Rating: 4.9523644 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, matt cremona, matthew cremona, fine woodworking, period furniture

Id: gmJZlduLYHI

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 17 2018