jskeen
Member
Was turning out a couple dozen of these last week for SWMBA,
Ran out of the cherry scrap I was using for tops, and dug an old punky looking oak scrap out of the junk corner. Lo and behold, some pretty nice spalting emerged. So, of course I cut the rest into blanks, but they were pretty soft and had some frass filled worm voids. I took this as a sign from somebody that I needed to go dig my old vac/pressure vessel out of the loft of my shop.
My brother had welded this up for me years ago when I was seriously into making knives and I tried my hand at stabilizing some handle slabs. I had a little success, was able to pretty consistently penetrate to the center of 1x1.5x5 knife blanks, but was never really happy with the hardening I was getting out of several different mediums. I tried sanding sealer, a couple types of polyurethane, both straight and cut 50% with thinner, and a fairly expensive CAB Acrylic floor finish from sherwin williams.
Anyway, back to these blanks.
I put them in a new paint can with about 3 inches of Minwax Helmsman Spar Urethane and pulsed the vacuum most of a day. It takes about an hour to pull a max vac with the little vac pump I have, and have it leak down to ambient. I probably got 4 or 5 pulses over the day, then pressurized to 60psi before I went to bed. The next morning the 2 3/4 squares had sunk, but the 1" round was still floating a little, so it went back in for another round. I'll probably park them under a flood light for a few days and see how hard they get.
What have you folks had the best luck getting penetration AND hardening with? Best way to hold the contents?
I used to just fill the chamber up with wood, put a weight on it, seal it up very carefully, and use a vac gauge to mess with it till i could get it to hold a vac for whatever I felt was a good exposure, then use a stopcock on the bottom of the chamber to suck the liquid up into the chamber without ever releasing the vacuum. then pressurize the container for a few days, then release the liquid back out through the stopcock and open up and dry the contents. Proved messy and hard to clean out the container. Not sure if it ever yielded better results than the current method, but would be interested in comments.
Anyway, Thought I'd throw this out here and see if we can get some stabilization discussions going, as pretty much all this forum has has seen is casting lately.
Thanks
James
Ran out of the cherry scrap I was using for tops, and dug an old punky looking oak scrap out of the junk corner. Lo and behold, some pretty nice spalting emerged. So, of course I cut the rest into blanks, but they were pretty soft and had some frass filled worm voids. I took this as a sign from somebody that I needed to go dig my old vac/pressure vessel out of the loft of my shop.
My brother had welded this up for me years ago when I was seriously into making knives and I tried my hand at stabilizing some handle slabs. I had a little success, was able to pretty consistently penetrate to the center of 1x1.5x5 knife blanks, but was never really happy with the hardening I was getting out of several different mediums. I tried sanding sealer, a couple types of polyurethane, both straight and cut 50% with thinner, and a fairly expensive CAB Acrylic floor finish from sherwin williams.
Anyway, back to these blanks.
I put them in a new paint can with about 3 inches of Minwax Helmsman Spar Urethane and pulsed the vacuum most of a day. It takes about an hour to pull a max vac with the little vac pump I have, and have it leak down to ambient. I probably got 4 or 5 pulses over the day, then pressurized to 60psi before I went to bed. The next morning the 2 3/4 squares had sunk, but the 1" round was still floating a little, so it went back in for another round. I'll probably park them under a flood light for a few days and see how hard they get.
What have you folks had the best luck getting penetration AND hardening with? Best way to hold the contents?
I used to just fill the chamber up with wood, put a weight on it, seal it up very carefully, and use a vac gauge to mess with it till i could get it to hold a vac for whatever I felt was a good exposure, then use a stopcock on the bottom of the chamber to suck the liquid up into the chamber without ever releasing the vacuum. then pressurize the container for a few days, then release the liquid back out through the stopcock and open up and dry the contents. Proved messy and hard to clean out the container. Not sure if it ever yielded better results than the current method, but would be interested in comments.
Anyway, Thought I'd throw this out here and see if we can get some stabilization discussions going, as pretty much all this forum has has seen is casting lately.
Thanks
James
