Woodturning - Wet and Wild Black Walnut Live Edge (An experiment in drying)

what's going on guys welcome to the wood pile so a couple weeks back um we had a huge storm uh took out the power for a couple days this guy came down electric company had it all diced up and uh tossed to the side of the road went with my stepsons and we picked up a bunch of this stuff so what we're going to be doing this week is we're going to run a little experiment we're going to go from about as green as it gets we're going to do some shaping some vacuum drying and seeing how it goes i've done plenty of vacuum drying in the past but never from something that was absolutely freshly green so we're gonna just uh you know take some notes measure the amount of water we get out of this and have some fun doing it so i'm gonna get a piece picked get it up over here get her sliced and diced she's a begging [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] all right as you can see good and green wet to the touch as a matter of fact so uh hot heavy and in a hurry let's get this uh guy cut up corners uh mounted up shaped up into the vacuum chamber [Music] all right so we got the piece up here on the lathe bed just going to go ahead and mark out a happy diameter thinking that's gonna work all right that'll give me a little indication i'm gonna get the corners chopped off here on the bandsaw [Music] all right so we're re-fixtured rubbing the motor plate a little bit this design sucks um anyway uh so uh yeah let's get this guy rounded out like we were originally trying to do and go from there [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] all right i'm gonna get some heat on this we will check it out in the morning see where we're at all right guys so it's been about 12 hours one little overnight session as you can see a lot of condensation build up on the lid um i'm gonna get this pulled out and see what we got in the bottom if anything uh and just start trying my best to collect this water up so we can measure it at the end now obviously i'm not going to be able to get it all but we'll do our best all right guys so we're mounted back up on the lathe i went ahead and i pulled up a chart which should be displaying here now [Music] uh it was a study done by the u.s forestry service using resistance across two terminals using multimeter legacies they were measuring resistance and calculating moisture content so i'm gonna be using that list and we're gonna see where we're at um we're going to be measuring off of an inch and a quarter spread and that's their standard somewhere around there [Music] now this is only going to give us dryness or moisture content of the absolute outside i don't want to go throwing holes in this guy just yet so or really at all so i'm going to call it 3.2 so that sounds good to me for now all right now let's see if we can get the mars cut into this thing get this flipped around keep moving on [Music] forward [Music] [Music] all right so i got the piece flipped around i'm liking the patterning we're getting out of this really liking the dip on this side although we do have a little bit of tear out in this bark layer so we might end up having to drop the outside diameter a little bit just to match this up because i don't know if you can see in here it gets a little deep we might have to go in like a 16th or so um so before i get into any hollowing i'm just going to go around here uh fill the bark connection and as much of the bark as i can with some of the thin star bond and uh we're going to be doing the same thing on the inside once we start opening up for hollowing i just want to make sure we don't lose any of this or you know lose any chunks so just gonna go through and get this all filled up and then we will pick up once i get this all done all right so i was a little upset to find out that there was actually a chunk of bark missing and i went hunting around the shop for about a half an hour oh we found it i got that glued back in just gonna get all this top edge i got a lot of it gone you can see she's smoking off as she cares it's just what happens when you're using a bunch of this stuff you get a lot of curing all at once but uh i'm going through and i'm just sealing up the whole inside inch trying to capture in some of this uh fungal growth we got some moth just trying to keep it as natural as we can make sure that it's nice and firm so that we don't get anything flying off and we can keep as much of this as possible [Music] all right like nothing ever happened i don't care about the mess that we're making on here we're gonna have to scrape this down uh until we get underneath all of our tear out here where there's only one bad section right here and it's just in the intermediate bark layer so yeah you know comes with that territory uh so anyway yeah i'm just gonna keep filling this bark and then we're gonna pick up uh from the inside i'm gonna core out uh we're gonna go i don't know one inch two inch maybe three then we're gonna take another reading with our multimeter and see if that is a an actual viable method of testing using against this this chart from the forest service i don't know i never did any of the multi-meter stuff before like i said i usually just use vacuum drying for stuff that's been in the collection for a year plus you know just to be sure extra safety measure but i know it works let's start hollowing i'm not going to be going to our finished wall thickness probably just going to take out i don't know 75 percent of the inside and we're going to use this back in the vacuum chamber and hopefully start drying inside towards the middle of the wall [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right well while we're here all right so here we're getting just round to 400 so that's 400 kilo ohms so i'm gonna go ahead continue uh removing material until we have about a one inch wall we're going to get this guy back into the vacuum chamber under heat and then drive from both sides to the center we'll check our resistance on the inside i don't know how accurate the actual numbers are but we have some data and we can see the difference between the outside and the inside and that's what we want [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right i think i'm going to call it there for tonight we're about halfway in i'm just going to restart the drying process i don't want to go too fast i do not want to initiate any uh cracking um especially now as i'm finding that we got a not running through uh the center of our piece getting a little grabby so uh yeah we're just gonna go ahead and reset the vacuum chamber and start fresh tomorrow [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys so it is a day later another day's worth of drying i did notice we developed this one crack here [Music] a couple of little guys here i'm just going to go ahead and run our resistance check across the inside here see where we're at so one five one six so it's definitely drying out so i'm just gonna go ahead and do a little more hollowing see if we can't get closer to our finished wall thickness and uh just keep on going um i did notice a little bit of shrinkage here in this bark line too so until we get to um our finished uh dry point we're just gonna leave the and stay away just slightly from our uh finish inside and out but just want to keep removing material keep on drying it out this is just a test [Music] [Applause] [Music] so all right guys um we just got pretty much down to our final wall thickness i wanted to leave it a little bit thicker on this one just to leave some of this cool bark character um i'm gonna go ahead now this is probably gonna be as dry as we get it before finish i might leave it overnight depending on what our test is saying so got the meter out i'm just going to measure out our inch and a quarter spread so this is what day three of trying to dry this guy test i'm not too worried about marking it because we're gonna scrape this down a bunch yet so and i'm gonna repeat myself i'm not saying that this is like the way to do it but we are getting data from checking it this way all right so i think we're safe and calling that around 40 one ish now looking over here at our chart for black walnut 41 puts us at a 14 moisture content which isn't necessarily perfect but sure not bad um all right cool so we got that data point now we did end up with one crack one that's worth noting um which is unfortunate because i really think this thing's gonna turn out real nice now these cracks we had when we cut into this piece i don't know it could have been from when the tree came down but uh you can see that there was some water that got in there along the way actually looks pretty neat it's kind of like some lightning so uh before we go cutting this down i'm gonna get whatever cracks filled um probably get some of these little guys with clear i'll do this with the brown star bond i'm thinking if we had a little better temperature control probably could have eliminated that but yeah no this is the first of this type of experiment that we're doing i'm sure there'll be more to come and i'm sure different woods will react in a different way i'll have to see if i can get some kind of a better temperature control system set up we're learning [Music] [Music] [Music] all right we're all scraped up i'm going to get on with some sand and start out with some 80 grit work all the way through to 320 and we'll catch up back then [Music] so [Music] all right guys we are sanded out to 320. um on this piece i decided i'm gonna do a little something different with the sanding sealer i'm going to be using this omega-3 uh vita fusion no wrong no no it's just some clear lacquer uh i cut it 50-50 with dinner just wanted to sink out i'm trying to preserve this big color contrast and i want to keep this as light as possible um so yeah that's what we're going to do let's see what it does see if it works gee all right i'm gonna get the inside then i get another coat on the whole piece and we'll pick up somewhere around our [Music] all right guys so today is tomorrow uh we got our lacquer sanding sealer on here just taking a look at the piece pretty cool got some really nice shine especially on the inside so yeah looking pretty good to this point um my apologies that my energy has been a bit low to this point i've been running on e for a little while but i am feeling recharged and refreshed and ready to get back into this um and i think i'm gonna switch gears a little bit uh for what i had planned uh for finishing this um i'm thinking this is more of an art piece anyway especially because of all this uh really cool looking but fragile bark so i think i'm just gonna finish this one out uh with the clear lacquer i'm gonna put a couple more coats on here and then i think we're just gonna polish it out with a micro mesh and see what we come up with with that i haven't really done a lacquer finish but i'm thinking this is going to come out real nice real nice uh shine and gloss so that's what i'm gonna do um i am gonna knock down some of the high spots on here just try and keep it even throughout but uh i think that's the direction that we're gonna go [Music] all right so here's what happened going along sanding out the outside knocking down my brush strokes working down all the little shiny spots down down down down it out finally get to the end of the outside i'm pretty happy with it i think yeah it's pretty good so i'm gonna move on to the inside but yeah this uh paper i've been using is a little dull a little clogged just uh run over and grab another piece oh well i need another sheet so i went over to the cabinet grabbed me a new sheet of sandpaper got to work on the inside didn't really think much of it for the first i don't know five or six seconds but then i got to thinking this feels like it's cutting a little heavier well didn't i go and grab a sheet of 150 and cut right through my finish [Music] so then i walk back to the same cabinet and i went and i found this here nice lacquer spray i'm gonna put a few coats of that on there i'm thinking to myself we're looking pretty good to start on the micro mesh now so happy mistake boneheaded move you know stuff that happens in the workshop all right moving forward gonna get on with the micro mesh get this all polished out whoopsie onward with the micro mesh uh 1500 to 12 000. [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys we are through the micro mesh i'm gonna get this all cleaned up and we're gonna take a look and see what we got what's going on chicken taters it's done you want to check it out oh man all right here she is um this was ultimately an experiment uh i'm pretty happy with the result though i'm loving the live edge look i really like the way the finish came out although i do feel like i could probably get a better polish on this [Music] but yeah it's got some beautiful beautiful coloration as you can see we uh preserved some of the fungal growth there not too much of a moss stood out it pretty much just gave us a little bit of texture but i love the patterning that happens in black walnut bark you just can't beat that it's amazing in itself it's it's like almost beyond wood grain all right anywho we gotta do that hard part where i have to think off the top of my head of uh things to say so uh yeah slow rollers at the end um this week's series of videos there uh is one uh prior to this and it's just about how we happen to acquire this year black walnut so if you haven't seen that go check it out um but the boys uh are really missing uh being home here so this uh series of videos is in homage to them miss you guys um i hope you like this stuff and just seeing what we can make out of the stuff that we collected um i don't know guys we're almost at 6k 6 000 subscribers in a little over five months i think we're at like five and a half months that statement in itself is humbling um i know there's there's a lot of youtubers out there that spend a lot more time grinding to get to where we are now so i i couldn't even begin to thank you guys enough um and as a matter of fact with all of your support we got a new tool coming into the shop we just ordered up a d way 5 8 inch bowl gouge and that's because you guys um in the near future i am going to be rolling out a frequently asked questions video i think i'm gonna add in a little bit of just kind of like about how all this started happening um we have a post up in the community section if you would like to uh ask a question head on over to that community section and post your question on the post uh in relation to our frequently asked question uh video i actually really look forward to doing that and uh because you guys give me so much lava like i feel like i have all these new amazing friends and uh spend so much darn time just grinding and i want to give something back to you guys i am rambling again that's a thing i do so uh yeah some of the well the products that we used here it's pretty much just the uh the star bond stuff and lacquer uh i i think the finish came out great um much more to come guys this is this is this is what i do now so this is all about you your support is and has been amazing uh like the video subscribe to the channel share it with your friends share it with the world i love you guys i will see you next week [Music] do [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Duka Heritage

Views: 13,956

Rating: 4.9223299 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 3sufDL7ySG0

Length: 36min 26sec (2186 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020