Wood Stabilization and Production of Wood/Alumilite Blanks

this is Mike Meredith the doctor of doctor's wood shop I get a lot of questions about the alumalite wood hybrid blanks that I use and I thought I'd show you how to make them today no cracks about how messy my shop is I get enough of that from my wife the first part of producing the wood alumalite resins is to stabilize the wood now the stabilization of the wood is done in a vacuum chamber like this or like this one or I actually have one that's about a 20 gallon vacuum chamber but I'm going to do the do it in this one cuz you can see the bubbles a little bit better um you need a vacuum chamber you need a vacuum pump like this one and you need something to stabilize the wood how to stabilize the wood I use the cactus juice um resin it's produced by C sebeck down there in Texas and everything in Texas has got to be a longhorn or a cactus um this is taken into the wood as the air is relieved removed from the wood and this is a heat activated polymerizing agent that hardens the wood and increases the um the ability of the aluminite to stick to it now this is the piece that we're going to make the um the bottle stopper out of and it's a piece of of maple burel that I've cut to fit into the mold it doesn't really need to be stabilized but what it does need to be is dry and in addition to drying in the oven the polymerizing resin will extract some water uh during the process now other things in here we have some very nice very Punky spalted Maple that will be um stabilized very nicely and rendered into turnable materials as opposed to the sort of bundle of newspaper that they are now so to stabilize the wood put them inside the the chamber this is a a piece of lead that's been coated with rubber that sits right down on top of everything and keeps it from floating away we then cover the wood with the cactus juice now any cactus juice that's not absorbed into the wood can be reused so we need to cover it cover the wood very nicely and then draw the vacuum um on the chamber and we got a vacuum gauge on this one on the back side of this is a valve now I will leave the valve open during the entire stabilization process but I use the valve to keep it from foaming too aggressively um during the U during the the Degas ging so we'll turn the pump [Music] on you can see the the air coming out of the wood and when it looks like it's going to foam on the top I'll I'll cut the vacuum for a moment let it settle down just kind of keep opening and closing reducing the vacuum until the bulk of the air gets out of the wood and then I can open it to the full vacuum you can see over here we're drawing oh right now just barely 20 uh Ines of mercury when I open the valve you'll see that mercury the um the vacuum move on toward the high 20s really 20 20 in of mercury is enough vacuum to uh Evacuate the woods for [Music] stabilization you can see that the vacuum gauge has gotten up to about 25 in of mercury and the valve is now completely open so we'll just let it sit about an hour is elapsed and the Bubbles as you saw um have pretty well subsided so I'll close the valve turn the pump off disconnect the vacuum line and then Evacuate the chamber do you notice how much the the level went down it dropped about 38 of an inch or so that's the the um cactus juice being sucked into the wood by the removed air next we need to uh remove the chips remove the pieces and get them ready the pieces can now be removed and place onto this rack to get the drying process started now the cactus juice is not thly dangerous although I will go wash my hands um as soon as I get this done you can see there's our little piece of big leaf maple it's going to grow go into the um um the bottle stopper you can see that the the stabilization accentuates the Grain and F figure uh very significantly now people that stabilize uh pen blanks will very often wrap each piece into a little individual sleeve of aluminum foil I don't do that I just let it drain out on this sheet of aluminum foil as it sits in my [Applause] oven which is set to about um 180° time has passed it's been about 4 hours it probably didn't take that long for the um the res to be extruded and set up but I got busy doing other things so we can see here that our our stabilized pieces now have been embedded with the cactus juice um and what I'll do with our little piece of maple Burl is I will sand off the bottom to flatten it and to get rid of the extra cactus juice clean it and then we'll be ready to actually uh cast it in the Aluma light all right now that our piece of wood is is sanded down ready to put into the mold we need to set up the mold now this is the type of mold that I've use this is um plexiglass held together with solvent and then um a gasketed end to put on held in place with screws so you can just undo the the screws on the end and slip it out first thing we have to do is is clean all the any of the dust off of our wooden piece and just a little brass brush does a pretty good job of that and finally clean off the mold clean off the the um the piece and I'm going to coat the mold with a mold release that lets the cast piece uh slip out of it now alumalite is not cheap it's about 40 cents a cubic inch so I take Pi up as much room as I'm going to need um this is a mold that's made to make three but three of the stopper blanks but this piece of wood is really only going to be for two so put that in there in place um I think I'm probably going to use a piece of tape to hold this in place um on the other side there yeah I think that's how I want it okay so now the question becomes how much alumalite do we actually need to make up well I know that the dimension of this and since I put my spacer Block in I've got this irregular space to fill up well I calculate that by using glass beads you could use rice or just about any small solid that would fit into a space you just fill that off with the glass beads pour them into a graduated cylinder measure the volume they took up and they took up about uh 165 Ms of space 165 cubic cm of space so that's sort of a a guideline for how much Alum light I need to make up now alumalite comes in all sorts of quantities I buy it by the gallon and then work uh pour into working containers from these gallon jugs it comes as an A and A B side and I use What's called the alumalite clear there are several different formulations of alumalite this is the one that uh seems to work the best for me um when we're getting ready to to cast a piece we know that we need about 170 MLS of almoite I always make more than I need in fact I'm going to make about 185 so we have half of that is B half of that is a now we need to add the color now I over the years in the lab I've learned to work from liquid stocks and that's how I started doing this I know that if I've made up a a quantity of a liquid that that produces a desirable result it's easier to handle a liquid than is to weigh out a powder every time so for these Stoppers I'm going to use what I call my standard C stopper it's a mixture of standard blue and standard green standard to me means 500 drops of the aluminite diey in 500 Ms of of part A and I know that I want a about a 1 to 60 dilution so we got 180 um 1 to 10 would be 18 Ms 18 G um 1 to 60 would be a sixth of that or about 3 G of my standard C green into uh my a stock NOW the alumalite is a very thick sticky stuffff and it doesn't pip pedal that well but it's still better than trying to weigh out small quantities even though I need about 3 G it's probably going to be best if I come up a little bit short and add more stock to uh my final mixture this is a mixing stick actually it it's from a company called Sky Geeks that makes everything in the world for airplane maintenance what it is is just a really large tongue depressor um it's Polished in sanded wood that allows me to mix very thoroughly on a wooden surface with a wooden surface just like a tongue depressor except big enough to actually do the the large volume mixing now there's my a with color now what's going to happen here is going to have is going to happen fairly quickly um I will mix these and once they're mixed you've got about 7even or 8 minutes with the alumalite clear to get it in the pressure pot so things need to move kind of fast once I start mixing things uh I need to make sure I've got my piece of tape ready to go to hold my wood in place I need to have my pressure pot open and ready to receive the mold and we'll show you that in just a little bit but let's go ahead and and mix that pour this and get ready to um Harden the alumalite resin in the pressure pot so we'll stir the B into the colored a and this stuff is is very sticky so you got to make sure you get every bit of it out and you got to make sure that you have it mixed thoroughly uh you can see the waves within the the mixture uh I have two very viscous solutions that need to be stirred together until there's no more disturbance no more um obvious mixing Lines within the glass now you can also see that there are uh a lot of bubbles coming out those bubbles are why the casting stage really needs to be done in a pressure pot at a pressure of of about 60 lb per square inch those bubbles go back into solution and you wind up with a nice clear alumalite block okay now that looks free of of the mixing waves you can still see the um the bubbles coming out of it and I think I want to put Just a Touch of Green more of green in this so I have a a standard green that I will pick up just a bit of yeah Okay the reason I use the alumalite dies is the color saturation is amazingly good plus the mixing of colors is very very reproducible um if I know the end points of a color mixture if I want something in the middle I can literally just calculate a midpoint and probably come pretty close okay let's go ahead and pour that my mold is a little bit bigger than the 1 and 1/2 in Block that I want in the stopper so there'll be a little bit at the top that sits open okay there's our blank ready to go to the pressure [Music] pot you can see my pressure pot which is really just an old painters um spray pot and put the the mold inside screw down the ears here although that 7 Minutes seems like a long time it always takes you longer to get things set up than you think it's going to so you need to have everything pretty much ready to go when you put that Alum light into the mold okay retrieve my compressor hose here and you can hear it's filling up the pot bring it up to 60 lbs let it sit and we'll be back in a couple of hours to see what the uh casting looks like once again time passes and we're ready to remove the um hopefully hardened alumalite blank from the uh pressure pot for [Music] and there it is ni and there's the uh stopper blank ready to be trimmed and prepared for turning and a quick trip to the table saw trimming these down to 1 and 1/2 by 1 and 1/2 by about 2 and A2 um our alumalite big leaf maple Burl hybrids are ready to turn you can see that more time has passed and I've spared you the detail of turning the the um bottle stopper there's another video on YouTube that shows how I do this but we're at the last stage this has been sanded using the walnut oil as a sanding lubricant up through about 7,000 grit with wet dry sandpaper um it's already got a beautiful finish on it but if you want to go a little bit further there are some things that you can do to um give it a little higher luster or better shine of course there's the the standard buffing um trip silver D white diamond and wax tripol is not a particularly fine abrasive uh if you sand it to 7,000 a a p p scale 7,000 grit you've already bypassed the ability of tripol to uh to shine white diamond is a finer abrasive and of course the wax wheel is not going to give you an abrasive treatment there are ways though to get uh higher grade abrasives into the process and that's using either pmus a fors fine or rotten Stone and the easiest way to use these is to make a paste wax of a braet carrier now I'm going to use the rotten stone for this one and it's really simple a paper towel uh a paste wax this is the doctor's wood shop walnut oil micr Crystal wax pick up some wax on the towel and Shake on just a little bit of the rotten Stone powder in this case at this it's a pmus okay we'll do another course with a rotten Stone and simply polish the surface with the wax mixture with the forif fine pmus that'll give you a grd equivalent to what would be about a 10,000 grd sandpaper we want to do the rotten Stone we pick up a little bit more of the wax shake out the rotten Stone onto the the paper towel sort of mix it up back to the piece and that's really about all it takes to finish a uh a very high gloss High luster finish on the the surface of the of the resin material um the idea of using an abrasive with a wax is nothing new there probably aren't that many original ideas in most things anyway um it was not my idea actually Bill Hall who taught the class on native american flutes that I took showed me the use of a Braes in a a liquid or a wax medium um but this works really well it's inexpensive it's fast it's very easy um trust me I really am a doctor

Channel: TheDoctorswoodshop

Views: 171,687

Keywords: woodturning, alumilite, hybrid blanks, bottle stoppers, Doctor's Woodshop, Wood (Visual Art Medium), wood stabilization

Id: ATPL2DadXp0

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 08 2014