Stabilizing olive wood?

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cjester

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I made an olive wood pen as a Christmas gift last year, which for various reasons never got delivered. It's been sitting on a shelf in my office since then. Pulled it out yesterday and discovered a small crack.

I just ordered a bunch of olive to make pens and seam rippers for a church craft show.

Even though it isn't "punky" wood, should I be stabilizing the olive before using it? Do I need to order a vacuum pump and some cactus juice asap?
 
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larryc said:
I've made and sold many olivewood pens and have never had a problem with cracking. This seems to be a one off situation unless you have somehow put some extra stress on the blank.
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Good to hear, thanks.

I know with any natural material there's always a chance. If nobody is regularly stabilizing olive before use, then I'll proceed with care.
 
I would concur with Larry on the cracking. I have, however, had olive wood blanks that have had stress cracks in them before turning. I just fill them with ca and they become part of the pattern and grain. it is possible that one of these stress cracks was in your finished pen and then expanded later. Darrell
 
KenV said:
Damp blanks will split over time. The common assumption is that wood is dry. Have been surprised a few times.
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Good point. "Not green" and "fully dry" are very different things. Something to double check when my current order arrives.
 
Something I have noticed, you can have "pretty wood" or dry wood, but seldom both, in the same stick.

This makes sense when you think about it: The wood is cut and offered for sale. The BEST stuff sells first, while it is still not dry. The plain wood sells last and may have sat in inventory for a year or better--likely to be much "drier".

BTW, if you want to stabilize it, it has to be dry--so I don't think you will gain much over just turning it, after it is dried.
 
ed4copies said:
Something I have noticed, you can have "pretty wood" or dry wood, but seldom both, in the same stick.

This makes sense when you think about it: The wood is cut and offered for sale. The BEST stuff sells first, while it is still not dry. The plain wood sells last and may have sat in inventory for a year or better--likely to be much "drier".

BTW, if you want to stabilize it, it has to be dry--so I don't think you will gain much over just turning it, after it is dried.
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Hmm, I think the batch I just ordered might just sit in my basement inventory for a year. I'll do some pretty resins for this year.

I just picked up some pretty woods at Kettle Moraine yesterday that feel pretty dry. Of course, everything in that building feels pretty dry, and the spider webs in the turning room say they've been there a while. But I'm not using those materials on church craft show seam rippers.
 
Stabilized Olive wood is not for the faint-hearted and is never a sure thing.

Not all Olive woods are the same, some are more oily than other and tree age as a lot to do with how it will behave after cut, however, I have no hesitation in saying that Olive wood (my preferred wood) has a mind of its own, even with blokes with plenty of experience with it such as myself, I get surprises often.

An inexpensive moisture meter is a great tool to have to check the wood MC% (Moisture Content) however, not all woods are considered "dry" at the same moisture levels, any oily woods such as Olive wood will always show a higher MC% even when dry, the natural oils do that, is this case most woods are categorized as dry at about 6 to 8 MC% while Olive wood at MC%12 to 14% is very safe to use.

Non-dried Olive wood will crack a lot more but and as others have mentioned, there are a number of things that you may have done that has "stressed" the wood, one of the most typical apart the non-dried wood is leaving some dry CA/other glues inside the tubes when pressing, too tight of a fit is not ideal for woods such as Olive wood.

I'm sorry if I can not tell you the exact reason of your pen crack, I hope some of this info I shared will be of some use to you and others...!

Cheers
George
 
I find a simple postal/food scale more usefully than a meter for small pieces. I weigh it when i get it and monitor the weight. A meter is best for boards.
 
I weigh all my wood when I get it. I keep a large supply, I never turn down the chance to add to my wood supply. I never use any wood that has not been in the shop at least long enough to tell if it is reasonably dry. Most will be in my possession at least a year before it gets to the lathe. I am in a semi arid near desert type of climate, if I don't follow my system, I find I get wood that checks or cracks, even supposedly dry wood.
 
I have to make some clarifications and "advises" on some of the issues raised/mentioned by some folks that posted after my first post and I would start with the issue of moisture meter Vs digital scales.

Yes, a kitchen type digital scales are great to control the moisture if you are either storing the wood for some time or, wanting to oven dry or microwave it, by making original readings and then compare as it dries until stop losing weight, that is a safe point to be however, the scales are of no use if you buy blanks that you need to get working on them immediately or within a short time from arriving/acquiring, in that these cases the only way to get an idea of the approx. MC% content is using a moisture meter.

Now, not all moisture meters are the same and you can spend $1,000 or more in a "professional/verified/calibrated" moisture meter, these are often used in the wood industry and by inspectors and read 100% as wet wood but not the type of meter you really need for our purpose. Sure, if you have the money and want to be accurate within 0.01% please yourself and buy it.

The type of moisture meter I'm referring to as inexpensive can be easily be purchased on eBay or Amazon for $20 to 30 and sometimes less, their accuracy is sufficient for what we do, 1 or 2% accuracy is very workable and will give you an immediate response to the question "how dry is it...?". Now, remember what I said about the MC% variations on different woods when classified as dry.

One of the most annoying and confusing aspects of these more economic moisture meters is the fact that each manufacturer uses a different total % reading scale, what this means is that some MM read from 39% as fully wet up to 99%. I have a few and each one reads different, I purchased them because they are cheap and I wanted to try them all and compare accuracy.

If I remember correctly, the ones I have its max. reads 39%, 45%, 52%, 68%, 79% and 99%, with such a difference it becomes very confusing. If you have the wood with you, you can easily put YOUR moisture meter on that wood and have its reading that you then have to remember what the wet % is and work out the percentages to what should be dry wood.

Where things get ugly is when you buy wood that is specified with a certain MC% but you don't know which type of MM was used and therefore the "wet reading" scale of that unit. It can say for example 12% and with many woods that is fairly dry, if the MM scale is low such as 99% however, if the MM scale is 39% for wet wood, the 12% is a lot wet.

For all these reasons and considering that most commercial wood processors use MM with 100% reading capabilities and the fact that I find it a lot less complicated to know that wet is 99/100%, half dry is about 50% and dry starts at 17% depending on the woods.

And lastly, don't be so trusty of what classification is given to the wood ones is trying to sell, different people use different terms to classify what they've got, some are telling you what they know but other will use the terms that they know people will prefer such as "seasoned". I've got Olive wood logs that have been "seasoning" for almost 12 years and some of them will crack like crazy when processed and the wood still reads 30% or more at its core.

The most accurate and best way to dry wood is by Kiln, if the processes are right and left there for the necessary time, you will have the most stable wood you can get however some still crack.

Again, I'm not trying to be complicated, I'm simply stating facts from own experience and knowledge of the industry.

Cheers
George
 
I love turning olive wood. The only problem I have encountered is having a few blanks blow-up during turning when they got too thin near the end of the tube...pilot error.

I have not tried this with olive wood but I have turned some bowls from green wood and stopped when the walls were about 1/2" to 3/4" thick. I weighed the bowls and recorded the weight. I then micro-waved them for a couple of minutes and when they were cool enough to handle, I weighed them again and recorded it. had always been told to do this until the bowl stopped loosing weight, however, I discovered this was incorrect. I started weighing the bowls again before re-micro-waving them. I discovered that eventually they reached a point where they were drier coming out than when I re-microed them. This was because they came out at a lower humidity than the ambient air. I have used this process on a number of green wood bowls and never had a problem with them. I have some olive wood blanks that I may try it on just to see.

Please don't tell my wife that I used her micro-wave.

Tomas
 
I don't think that olive wood is a good candidate for stabilization in general due to the density of the wood to begin with . for stabilization to work the wood has to absorb the agent and being as dense as it is it won't accept very much agent .
 
ldb2000 said:
I don't think that olive wood is a good candidate for stabilization in general due to the density of the wood to begin with . for stabilization to work the wood has to absorb the agent and being as dense as it is it won't accept very much agent .
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Yes, I agree and disagree...!

No doubt Olive wood is not the best wood to stabilise, far from it, its density may be one consideration but the natural oils are in fact the worst enemy of any stabilizing resin/product/agent. Natural oils in wood can be crystalised therefore becoming inactive and stopping being a "barrier" to the resin however this is no easy task.

Now, we say "Olive wood" and most people would think that all have the same density and or oil %'s and that would be incorrect. There are a few variations to the "common/Mediterranian" type Olive trees which are very different than the nursery or genetically modified species such as those planted in the Olive groves these last 20 or so years, why...? because they will stay short to the ground (olives harvesting), produce much less timber, start fruiting a lot earlier and are more fibrous, why...? because the modern machines that harvest the olives do so by shaking the tree trunk to very high vibrations, using this system on young common Olive trees would destroy them in no time, therefore the wood density and natural oils change significantly.

I don't want to turn this thread into an Olive tree "lesson" but not everybody is aware of some of these facts and as woodworkers knowing a little about the woods you may work or want to work with, can only be of help.

To finalize this post, I would say that through the years, I performed wood tests that most people wouldn't even think about it, some are due to curiosity but others are based on questions that I looked for an answer, not always available on the web or very difficult to find so, I make my own.

I'm referring to density tests I performed some time ago and posted on IAP, they show some of the woods I have from around here including the Mediterranian Olive wood species planted by the first Europen settles in this part of Australia, in the late 1850's.

As a point of curiosity, a common "mature" Olive tree can be density and natural oil %'s classified by dividing the tree into sections starting from the top, the higher you go and where the heartwood has started to develop those branches contain the highest % of oils but are a lot less dense. The main trunk is the densest wood but slightly less oil %'s but still high, as it reaches the base of the trunk/soil level the oils and density start to reduce. The first half of the root is still oily and of medium density, however, the bottom half of the root (and I would like to remind you that some of these old trees have roots the size of small cars) that last part of the root has very little oils with low density, these characteristics do dramatically when the roots are pulled out and some time has passed, they start to spalt and become very soft, so soft and dry in cases that stabilizing is the only way to make that "wood" workable.

OK, I'm going now...!:biggrin:

Cheers
George
 
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it is all assumed that it was from drying and that might be correct. However, there could be contributing factors that can increase the odds. A minor bit of glue residue inside the tubes can be enough to make a tight fit tighter yet not cause an immediate crack. It is well known that glue residue inside the tubes expand the tubes and cause cracks. So at what point is the difference between none and and the limit at which a crack will form?

Even incorrect initial installation can cause a stress that does not show up immediately but does reveal itself later in the form of a crack.

Just saying there can be other factors, even on forgiving wood.
 
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