Redneck Stabilization

[jaeger]

I need to stabilize some corn cob but I don't have a pressure pot. How crazy would it be to do this.
Cut some cob a little long, drill out the hole, turn it down close to required size.
Put the pieces in a jar, weigh the pieces down and cover with Minwax wood hardener.
Now here is the gray area, put this jar in a food saver container and vacuum the container with the food saver attachment hose.

Will this give corn cob enough vacuum to stabilize?

 

[MesquiteMan]

It will give pretty good vacuum but I hate to tell you that Minwax Wood Hardener is not going to do a lot for it.

 

[David Keller]

You could try polyall... I've never used it, but I hear good things about treating punky wood. The only problem is that it sets up really fast, so you wouldn't have a lot of time to draw the vacuum.

 

[ldb2000]

Curtis is right , the wood hardner will eat the parts of the food saver pretty quickly . I use one of the hand held vacuume pumps made for the vacuume bags . I put my wood or ??? to be stablized in an old pickle jar with holes punched in the lid then put the jar into one of the 1 gallon bags and vacuume out the air . I check it once an hour and revacuume as needed and in a few hours the wood hardner has soaked all trhe way to the center of the blanks . This works great with really soft , punky woods but only soso on more dense woods . Corn cobs should only take a couple of hours , especially if you drill them out first . Check out this link , http://www.penturners.org/forum/showthread.php?t=42014&highlight=pickle+jar

 

[GColeman]

I need to stabilize some corn cob but I don't have a pressure pot. How crazy would it be to do this.

I have turned a bunch of corn cob. None were stabilized. I just saturated them with thin CA. The have held up well. I just soak the ends before I drill, saturate the hole with thin and open them back up, and glue in the tube with epoxy. I square with a disc sander and re saturate the ends with thin before mounting. I turn proud of the bushings then saturate the whole blank with thin and turn and sand till final diameter. I finish with thin and medium.

 

[OOPS]

On a related note, would this system work for tinting blanks? I had attempted to drill blanks, turn them, and then place them in the tint. Repeated attempts to tint the wood just makes them blotchy, and when I MM to get rid of the raised grain, I get more of a weather-beaten look instead of a solid color. I was thinking of purchasing a vacuum pump instead of the food saver system, but I wonder if anyone has had success with tinting using a vacuum pump. I really like some of the light colored woods, but sometimes they need a little more pizzazz, on a pen.

 

[jaeger]

Here is a picture of the pen that I made. This is not my first corn cob pen and I made this one pretty much the way I have before. This is the first one that I made with a Slim. The bottom half is Iron wood.
I did not use Minwax wood hardener or vacuum.
Thanks for all the replies!!!
This one looks a lot better than the poor photo. It is going downtown tomorrow and hopefully I will get my foot in the door for some future orders.
I will comment how they like it.

 

[Charles]

Nice looking pen! Hope you get some sales. When you said you completed this pen like the one's before did you use thin CA to fill in. If this worked why try to stabilize with minwax?

 

[jaeger]

I filled and coated all the surfaces with CA. The reason that I wanted to use Minwax is I thought it might possibly strengthen the material. The exotic woods that I have purchased that were professionally stabilized seem to work well. I am just trying to offer a superior product.

I took the pens today and the people that I needed to talk to were not there. Oh well, this will give me another week to add a couple more pens that I didn't have ready yet.
I am determined to have my pens offered for sale in at least one of the shops in town. I am going after sales this year.

 

[gallianp]

It will give pretty good vacuum but I hate to tell you that Minwax Wood Hardener is not going to do a lot for it.

Please tell me what will do a lot for it.

Is this a reference to the pump or the minwax hardener?

Any suggestion for the pump and the stabilizer solution!

Thanks

 

[jason_r]

Here's lots of information on a cheap setup for tinting most of which would also apply to stabilizing:

http://www.rziha.net/woodworking/experiments/dye_penetration/

I did these tests a couple years ago. You might be interested in test #7's results since you're not using a pressure pot.

 

[titan2]

When I've used MinWax Wood Hardener this is what I did.....

• Get the right size pot....bring water to a boil.
• Now, take it out of the kitchen (gargage preferrably).
• Put the MinWax in a 'Mason' jar and put in the blanks & weigh them down.
• Put the 'Mason' jar in the pot of water, with the canning lid on it (loose)
• Watch for the MinWax boil over (don't let it), take it out of the water until it stops, put back in and keep an eye on it.
• Once everything is warmed up, take the 'Mason' jar out of the pot and screw down the lid....as it cools, it will draw a vacuum and it will hold for quite some time.
• BE CAREFUL around open flames as MinWax has a very low flash point (that's why you take it out of the kitchen)!

Hope this helps!


Barney

 

[ttpenman]

Casting Resin

Most of you are using the MinWax hardener with the vac. Has anyone tried using food saver bags with Casting Resin? For instance -- using some wood with gaps/cracks, put in a mold with tinted resin and then putting in a food saver bag and then vac and seal. I think it should puil the resin into the voids in the wood. Any thoughts from you experts out there. I see (and have used) the beautiful 'mutts' out there. I have a bunch of he scrap wood and I'm going to give it a try. Just thought I'd ask and see if anyone has tried it and how it worked.

Jeff in northern Wisconsin

 

[ctubbs]

That sounds like a good try, Jeff. If you give it a try, let us all know how it works out.
Charles