I was given a piece of grapevine about 2 inches in diameter and over 4 feet long. It is totally green having been just last week. It was still oozing a clear liquid gel type sap or something from each end. My question is what should I do to it to dry it and make it into a few pen blanks? Should I cut it into blank sizes pieces and dry it in a toaster oven? Should I cut it into blanks and try to dry them naturally? After it's dried will it have to be stabelized? And will it even be worth the trouble? I've never had any dealings with grapevine so im asking the experts. Thanks for any info!
G'day,
You may want to read
this thread of mine I did some years ago about the Vine material
There is a lot of interesting information in there but, I can tell you right now, the vine will split at the pith/eye (centre of the vine), at 2 " round is a little to close to not be enough to rip it through the centre and make 1 blank from each half.
The vine will shrink a lot as it dries, if they were bigger I would say, cut the blanks at about 30mm square x 5" 1/2 long, strap then tight with some spacers and put the to dry however, at 2 " diameter you don't have a lot of material to play around, because it is green so, the only way you may get better results is to cut the vine @ 6"= long, get a roll of thin wire and wrap the vine all around with no more than 10mm of wire intervals, make sure you tie it properly so that it can get undone.
This will force the wood to stay together as it dries, you have no idea of the forces that the wood exert when in expanding/cracking, no tape is strong enough to stop it from expanding but wire, will do it.
There is no point in sealing the vine ends, it will dry faster that way. If you need some dry rather soon, you have to dry it on the microwave, wrapped with the wire and wrapped again with foil paper. Short burst in the microwave with cooling down in between is the way to go, there is a lot of information on microwave drying on our library, a simple search will give plenty to read...!
PS: You should not need stabilization, unless a large part of the vine is "dead wood"...!
Good luck,
Cheers
George
