davepolaschek

Wood. Food. More.

One of the things I was trying to find out about wood stabilizing when I embarked on this adventure was whether it would be possible to work the resulting pieces of wood with hand tools. I'm not completely sure of the answer yet, but I have a few observations. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

All the various pieces of wood, unwrapped and planed or sanded

The first thing you notice when unwrapping the wood from the foil is that there's excess plastic everywhere. It sticks to the foil, it sticks the foil to the wood, and it crinkles and flakes off and will be all over your shop. It's pretty easy to remove from the wood using a knife, but less so with a plane. I tried both a jack plane and a block plane, and both had trouble getting a “bite” through the plastic on the surface.

Maybe it's just that my planes aren't super sharp at the moment, but I found it a lot easier to get down to wood using a knife or sanding block. And it was a lot easier to work with wood that had been relatively smooth to begin with. Next time, I'll plane everything before stabilizing it, rather than going straight from the saw to the resin.

Here are a series of images of each wood. In some cases, I've included a before picture, but not always. I tried to get down to bare wood, which goes pretty slowly with a plane, and pretty quickly with a sanding block with 60 grit paper.

Apple:

Stabilized apple wood

Birch:

Stabilized birch wood

Butternut:

Stabilized butternut wood

Cherry:

Stabilized cherry wood

Spalted Elm:

Stabilized spalted elm

Hackberry:

Stabilized hackberry wood

Hickory:

Stabilized hickory wood

Holly:

Stabilized holly wood

Hard Maple:

Stabilized hard maple

Soft maple:

Stabilized soft maple

Pine:

Stabilized pine wood

Redwood:

Stabilized Redwood

The first thing that struck me is that every wood carved like the finest walnut and as though my tools were razor sharp. It's a little unnatural, but then I guess that's the point of stabilizing wood, isn't it? It almost entirely eliminates the difference in hardness between early wood and late wood in pine and redwood. The soft maple and spalted elm were firmed right up. And the elm, which was cut at a 45°︎ angle, such that I was working in end-grain, carved as easily as anything else.

With a plane, the elm showed little tiny tear-out when I was planing it the wrong direction, so it's not as though the wood has completely turned to plastic. There is still some effect from the grain, but it's been minimized. With sharp tools, it's hard to go wrong. But getting a shaving started with the plane is nearly impossible until you've cleared the surface of any excess resin. That's easier with sandpaper. If you do try to plane off the excess resin, be prepared for a bunch of white dust and plastic chips all over everything (you can see them on the block plane in the “birch” photo above). But you'll have a dust if you sand too. For the hand-tool woodworker, stabilized wood is just going to be a little messier.

Color-wise,it was kind of a mixed bag. Hard maple and holly both darkened up quite a bit. Birch went from fairly pale to looking like decades-old birch overnight. Butternut, cherry and hackberry hardly seemed to change color at all. Hickory also darkened up significantly, and was a pain to work, which isn't much change really. Softwoods went from uneven and requiring razor-sharp tools to easy and pleasant to work.

So what do I think? I'll almost certainly stabilize more wood. Especially for punky or spalted stuff, stabilizing makes it work like “normal” wood. And I suspected it would make softwoods easier to work, and that's definitely the case. I'll probably have more after I've had a chance to experiment more.


Contents

#woodworking #stabilizing

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When the wood came out of the resin. I used blue gloves, and wrapped the pieces in aluminum foil, with at least one layer of foil between each piece. I did the little packets of wood “flat” so they would heat more quickly.

Wood wrapped in foil

For the 24 pieces of wood, I ended up with five packets, which I piled into the toaster oven. I tried to make sure air would be able to circulate between them and turned on the convection fan in the oven.

Wood packets stacked in the oven, which is preheating

Curtis says in a hurry, you can check the wood after an hour or two, but I'm not in a huge hurry. Half-cured wood will be junk, as you can't re-bake it to finish curing it if you pull it out too early and let it cool, so I plan to give it at least 3-4 hours, which will mean resetting the oven in a couple hours.

As I was wrapping up the wood, the thing I noticed (sorry, no pictures – didn't want to risk getting resin on my phone) was how some of the wood got a lot darker (pine, butternut, redwood, maple, birch), while other looked almost untouched (holly, hickory, hackberry and the elm, which really surprised me). The real test is how it looks and works once it's cured, but I can't help speculating about how things are going to come out as I sit here waiting for the heat to do its thing.


Contents

#woodworking #stabilizing

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I've got some spalted elm left over from building my low bench plus some soft maple and other woods that are a little soft and punky. But they're very pretty, so I decided I'd give wood stabilizing a try.

I ordered a vacuum chamber and pump on eBay, plus a gallon of Cactus Juice from Turntex. Once everything arrived, I assembled the hose and tested the vacuum chamber. The pump pulled a vacuum quickly, and the chamber held it reasonably well, so I was good to go on that front.

I cut up a bunch of knife-scale-sized pieces of wood. Made two each of:

  • apple
  • birch
  • butternut
  • cherry
  • elm
  • hackberry
  • hickory
  • holly
  • soft maple
  • hard maple
  • pine
  • redwood

I set all the wood in my shop toaster oven and was going to set it for 12 hours at 220F, but the timer on that only goes to 2 hours. So I ended up using the toaster oven in the kitchen, which has a 10 hour timer. Didn't leave a bad smell or anything, and my toast tasted fine this morning, but I'll probably be upgrading the toaster oven in the shop soon.

After getting the wood dry, I put it into a two gallon ziploc bag to cool. According to Curtis' instructions drying the wood first is important, and then cooling it before putting it in the Cactus Juice is critical so you don't prematurely cure the juice.

Once it had cooled, I put the wood into the vacuum chamber and put a chunk of ¼” steel plate on top of it. That wasn't quite heavy enough to keep the wood from floating, so I threw some lead into a spare plastic tub and put that on top of the plate to weight it down.

Wood in the pot with steel plate

Then I poured in about a half-gallon of juice, which gave me about a half-inch over the top of the wood (probably should've used a little more), put the lid on the chamber and started to pull vacuum. It got to -27 inches pretty quickly (15-20 minutes), but then there was a continual small stream of bubbles from the wood, so I left it chugging.

Wood bubbling in the Cactus Juice

After 2.5 hours, the bubbles had finally stopped, so I released the vacuum and left the wood to soak while I wrote this. It's supposed to soak for 2-3 times as long as it took to get the bubbles to stop, so I'll just leave it overnight.

The next entry will covert wrapping the wood (to keep it from sticking together) and baked the wood to set the resin.


When I first wrote this, there were a number of questions people asked. Here are answers to some of them.

  • Regarding vacuum chambers – many of the cheapest vacuum chambers are not rated for stabilizing wood. This is because the resin will attack many of the cheaper plastics. According to Curtis at TurnTex, PVC is ok for the lid.
  • The wood needs to be dry before you stabilize it. Curtis recommends baking it for 24 hours at 220F, then sealing it in a plastic bag while still hot to prevent it from picking up moisture from the air. The timer on my toaster oven only goes to 10 hours, and I haven't had a problem with 10 hours at 220F, as long as I haven't tried very large pieces of wood (such as bowl blanks).
  • Stabilized wood has a few benefits. The open pores in the wood have been filled with the acrylic resin, which is then set by heat. This means that the wood will be heavier and harder. In the case of ring-porous woods, the variation in hardness between early-wood and late-wood will be lessened by the stabilization, making the wood more uniform and easier to carve. Finally, the wood will move much less due to moisture changes.
  • Yes, you can dye the wood while stabilizing it. I'll be adding a section on that later. Without dye, the stabilizing resin will darken the wood somewhat, similar to coating it in tung oil or light shellac.

Contents

#woodworking #stabilizing

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Apple wood bottle opener laying on a blue iPad case, showing a couple lines of spalting

After yesterday’s mimosa bottle opener and getting a late start this morning due to the fog, I decided I’d make another bottle opener. This one uses a piece of apple wood from a crab-apple tree that had been in my front yard in Minneapolis. I made it a bit longer and stouter than the previous one, and it feels better in big hands like mine. Plus it’s pretty wood with just enough spalting to add some visual interest.

Apple wood bottle opener on a blue iPad case

#woodworking #woodturning #project

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bottle opener, laying flat on a blue iPad case

A while back (maybe back in the summer), I ordered a few Niles Bottle Opener Kits from Penn State. This morning, after doing a glue-up on another project, and not being willing to call it a day in the shop yet, I dug one of them out and grabbed a chunk of mimosa that a buddy had sent me, and got to work.

bottle opener, standing upright on a wooden table

This is the result. For my first try with this kit, I think it came out ok. I know of a few things I’ll do better next time around, but it’s a spindle-oriented turning, and I’m getting pretty good with my skew, so any deficiencies are more a matter of not spending the time to figure out a good design than any problems in implementation.

bottle opener, standing upright on a wooden table, reverse view

Anyway, it was a fun project. Turned it, sanded from 60 up to 400 grit, used Ack’s Sanding Paste to partially finish, epoxied the opener into the wood with some five-minute epoxy, cut off the stub-tenon, sanded the end of the handle smooth by hand, and then buffed it all with the Beall Wood Buffing System to make it all pretty. About 75 minutes elapsed for a fun little project.

#woodworking #woodturning #project

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This is the story of the pair of knives I made to send to MaFe, with the plan that he would pick one of the knives for himself, and then send me a sheath for the other knife in return. As I wasn't sure of the size of his hands, I made the knives similar in size, sized more for my large hands than his, but figuring he could always remove some of the bark to make a smaller handle, which he did.

Knife blanks and brass bolsters

Two knives with partially completed stacks of birch bark

The knives start, as in the pictures above, stacking birch bark on the tang of the knife, plus a brass bolster I set on the tang. The knife blank comes from Morakniv and I like their 106 and 120 blanks. The birch bark comes from Russia, and there are a number of vendors on eBay who sell stacks of birch bark. I've found that the Russian vendors tend to have the best price (even including shipping) for prepared bark. Buying birch bark stacks from the US, I end up with a lot more waste, because the bark hasn't been scraped as well.

SPRAD comes from Mads reading my description, and noticing that the blades came from Sweden, me, from Poland, the birch-bark from Russia, and the knives moved from America to Denmark. Truly international!

Shop-made tool to compress birch bark as it is stacked

Using the shop-made tool to push down a layer of birch-bark

I punch the holes in the bark using a leather punch, making a line of one, two, or three holes, depending on which portion of the tang the piece of bark is going on. I also use a shop made tool to compress the bark as I work, making sure the layers are stacked as tightly as I can. I also thread the tail end of the tang at this point. Due to the square tang, what I usually do is thread it first with a 10-32 die, then thread it again with an 8-32. I want about a quarter inch of threads to work with. I'm sure there are metric sizes that will work well, but having the pair of dies with the same threads means I can do this as a two-step process, rather than having to anneal the last bit of tang so I could thread it in one step.

Shop-made vise to compress the layers of birch-bark

Once I have nearly enough layers on, I compress the handle further using a shop-made vise, and I put the handles into the toaster oven at 225F (105C) for a few hours. This will soften the pitch in the bark, and will somewhat “weld” the handle together. This step isn't absolutely necessary, but I've found that I get a better handle by doing it. I can also tighten the vise down a little more after the handle has been baked, further compressing the bark.

Some will put the handles into boiling water at this point, but I think that's hard on the steel. Others will compress the bark in a stack, boil it, and then drill a hole for the tang of the knife. But as with most woodworking, there's more than one way to do it.

Pommel of knife, showing washers and nut on the tang of the knife blank

After the handles have been baked, I'll add a few more layers of bark, then cap that off with a few washers, then an 8-32 nut. I try not to crank this down too tightly, and if there's room, I'll add more layers of bark to fill the space so the end of the tang barely protrudes from the nut as in the picture above. I've also used a piece of brass for a bolster, but the stack of washers is quick and easy, and looks good to my eye.

Birch bark knife handles, roughly squared

That will leave me with the very rough handle. I will rough that in using the bandsaw (very messy) or a carving knife (less messy, but slower)

Birch bark knife, showing how the bolster serves as a guide for squaring the birch-bark

Knife with handle tapered on the blade end

Then I move to the belt sander. Make sure to wear a dust mask at this point, as the birch bark may contain fungi or other things that will be bad for your lungs. I work to a square first, then add a taper as in the picture above. The rectangular bolster serves as a reference for me at this point.

Birch bark knife handle tapered on both ends

Then I octagonalize the handle, maintaining the taper. This is when I will sand down the nut and washers if I want to make them look less like they came from a hardware store. My “look” is still evolving, and I'm not sure what I like best. Then work to round the handle last. This is a fairly slow process, with lots of pauses to check my work along the way. In the case of these knives, Mads had said he preferred an octagonal handle, so I stopped without making his handle round.

Mostly-completed knives, one round, and one octagonal

And that gets us to picture 1 which is the pair of knives that I sent from America to Denmark to put the AD on the knives. There, Mads shaped the handle on his knife to suit his hands, and then made sheaths for both knives and sent my knife back to me.

Knife with sheath, and packaging material from Mads

I received the knife before we moved to Santa Fe, but after most of out stuff had been taken by the movers, so the knife became part of my “truck kit” of woodworking tools, which I used to make small repairs around the house before selling it.

Truck kit of woodworking tools

The most notable was the back entrance of the house, where the threshold had a spot worn in it from years of people going in and out of the door, which I patched one afternoon with the truck kit of tools and a scrap of wood.

Patch on the threshold of the rear door of my house in Minneapolis, post-repair

Patch on the threshold of the rear door of my house in Minneapolis, after painting

#woodworking #toolmaking #project

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Pencil Stand on a blue background

I bought an iPad with an Apple Pencil 2 quite a while back, and I’ve just been storing the pencil on my nightstand. That frustrated me fairly often because the magnets in the pencil would hook onto other things I had set on the nightstand. Keys, nail clipper, that sort of thing.

Pencil Stand holding Apple Pencil 2

This morning, I was in the shop, and I had four pieces of sycamore that I had cut off another board in order to make it round. I realized that if I stacked them up and drilled a hole of the right size, I could solve my problems with the pencil.

Pencil Stand on my nightstand, holding Apple Pencil 2

So I glued the four cutoff corners into a stack, drilled a hole (11/32” at the bottom & ⅜” at the top, then I used a 17mm countersink bit to widen it out), used the belt sander and a spokeshave to make the curves more attractive to my eye, then hand sanded it up to 400 and took it to the Beall Wood Buffing System to put a quick finish on it. I think it came out pretty good, and my sweetie thinks it’s pretty too.

#woodworking

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Closed Beercase

Open Beercase, showing inserts

Open Beercase, showing beer

For this year's BeerBBQ swap I decided to make a briefcase for holding beer or BBQ fixings or whatever. But since I had already done a BBQ Briefcase back in 2020, I wanted to make this one more beer specific, as well as upping my game a bit.

I started with some butternut I had on hand, resawing it to about 3/8 thick. When I did that, I discovered that it had some bug tracks inside, so I filled those with turquoise powder and epoxy.

Butternut with turquoise and epoxy fill

I also had some sapele from another project that I had resawed to a quarter-inch thick, and that looked like it would make a pretty top and bottom for the case.

I had a chunk of yellowheart remaining in Earl's Shorts (thanks again, Earl!) that looked like it would make a good handle, so I cut out a rough handle-shape, then turned nice smooth ends on it, and smoothed out the handle.

Yellowheart handle mounted on the lathe

Yellowheart handle spinning on the lathe

I found a scrap of granadillo I had leftover from a spokeshave a couple years back, and drilled a couple holes in that. It took two or three tries before I got a clean hole without splitting the wood with my bit, but I eventually got there by clamping the wood in the vise while drilling it.

Drilling a large hole in a piece of granadillo

With the hole drilled, I shaped the wood on the bandsaw, then the belt-sander, and then finally resawed it in half to make a matching pair of hinges for the handle.

Granadillo handle mount

Yellowheart handle and mounts

With the handle done, I dovetailed the case together and put in the top and bottom, then sawed it open.

Completed case, sawed open and held together with blue tape

Hinges and latches were next.

Installed hinges on the case

Drilling holes for the latch

Then the handle, screwing the hinges into the case from the inside.

Handle, attached to the case

With everything together, it was time to start finishing. I decided to use Tried and True Varnish Oil on this, since I had plenty of time. I ended up putting on eight coats, with each coat going on, let it soak in for a half-hour, wipe off the excess, let it cure overnight, then burnish it with 0000 steel wool before putting on the next coat. It's pretty easy, but not the most exciting finishing regimen.

The inside of the case got a couple coats of BLO. I thought about using tung oil for better waterproofing, but adding another three or four days of watching oil dry didn't seem all that exciting to me for some reason. Plus I hurt my back and was out of the shop for a while, so I wrapped it up and shipped early.

Before shipping I cut some closed-cell foam I had on hand to fit four 12-oz beer cans and two 16-oz tallboys. To make sure I got things right, I made wooden templates I'll be able to reuse down the road.

With the foam cut, I also found a cold-pack that would fit inside the case to help keep the beer cold. No point in carrying warm beer around, now is there?

Next time, maybe I'll get a handcuff with a chain to further secure the beercase to the wearer. Some things just need high security.

#woodworking #project

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Knife presentation box, closed, end view

To go with the knife I made recently I made a box to go with it.

Knife presentation box, closed, side view

The box is poplar, with torrefied curly maple top and bottom, and a bit of walnut trim to cover the imperfect joints.

Knife presentation box, open, with knife

The knife sits on a removable piece of pine, and is held down by a bit of closed-cell foam. The box is a close enough fit that the knife can’t move much, but with the removable bits, it will be able to be reused for another gift.

Knife box, insert, knife, and foam.

The finish is a coat of tung oil, followed by four of five coats of shellac, with one of the coats on the poplar being garnet shellac to offset the slight greenish tinge of the poplar.

#woodworking

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white santoku with cholla, red and green handle

Another knife that came out of the shop during the recent flurry of knife-making. This one has a handle of cholla with red and green resin which was poured by a friend of mine in Texas in exchange for me sending him a box of cholla canes. Seems like a good trade to me.

white santoku with cholla, red and green handle

The blade is a 6 inch white ceramic santoku which used to be sold by WoodCraft, but was discontinued a few years back (before we moved to New Mexico, so three or four years ago). When I saw the bright colors of the handle, I remembered I had the white blade and thought it would be a good-looking combination. There are also layers or red and brown micarta between the scales and the knife tang to build up the thickness a little. It feels pretty good in the hand to me.

white santoku with cholla, red and green handle

The handle was rough-cut on the bandsaw, then shaped with rasps and files. It was hand sanded with 80, 120, 180, 220, and 400 grit sandpaper, and a coat of tung oil applied before buffing it with the Beall Wood Buffing system. I’m pretty pleased with this one, and think I’ll be giving it to a friend as an early Christmas present.

#woodworking #KnifeMaking #project

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