# Wood stabilizing, my way



## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

Really wast sure if this should go in the tips and tricks or the wood finishing section, but ah, whatever, i hop i didnt guess wrong.

Be warned, this is a very image-heavy post!

So, i make knives, as im sure bloody everybody is tired of hearing about lately. Now, a big part of making a knife is the handle, for obvious reason. For also obvious reasons, my material of choice for handles is wood (what a shock, right?). The problem is, wood, at least the common domestic species, isnt always the best choice for a knife handle, owing to wood movement. You can make the handle scales a perfect fit for the knife, but if someone with sweaty hands holds one for a while, boom, the scales expand and the fit looks sloppy. The normal fix for this is to either A) use an exotic hardwood that doesnt move much ($20 and up for a set of scales) or B) Buy stabilized knife scales in limited available species ($20 or up for a set). As you can imagine, the price goes up quick, so being the frugal (read that as cheap) maker i am, i chose option C) make my own dang stabilized scales. 

So, i did some judicious internet searching an formed a plan. First, the materials!









What i we have pictured is a standard 32oz mason jar, a 1/4npt to 1/4 barbed fitting, a 1/4npt brass pipe cap, some rubber grommets, a harbor freight vacuum brake bleeding kit, a drill with 1/4 and 1/2 inch drill bits, a ziplock bag containing my 9(?) walnut scales about 2x4x.25, a bottle of cactus juice and a can of coke. 

Err, it should be noted that the coke isnt part of the stabilizing setup. Also, cactus juice, despite the name, is not the juice of arizonas favorite plant. Its actually an acrylic(?) resin, made for wood stabilizing. I bought mine from exoticblanks.com, which i recommend, as their price is actually cheaper than the makers price once you factor in shipping. Anyway, more on the cactus juice here.

So, step one, take your mason jar and drill a hole in the top for a barbed fitting. My fitting was a 1/4npt thread, necessitating a 1/2 inch hole to be drilled:









Step 2, take your pipe cap and drill a 1/4 inch hole in it. This will make sense in a second:









Step 3, thread the barbed fitting through a rubber washer, made from a rubber grommet cut in half, then through the mason jar lid, then the other half of the grommet, and finally tighten on the pip cap, like so:









Step 5, connect your vacuum pump:









Tada, your vacuum chamber is complete! A quick pressure check:









And time to get down to buisness!


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

*Time for the fun part!*

Time to start, you know, actually stabilizing some wood. First off, a note on the wood. As i mentioned in the introductory post, im using some walnut, milled down to 1/4 inches thick. Now, according to the cactus juice instructions, located here, the wood has to be bone dry, with MC below 10%. To accomplish this, i planted the scales in my heat treat oven with the controller set to 250 for a couple hours. Once that was done, the scales were placed in a ziplock bag to cool, hence why my wood was in a bag in the opening photo. 

Anyway, enough with the wood, on to the fun part! Unfortunately, said fun part is a little bit shorter on pictures, but nothing much happened anyway. First, place your wood in the jar. Second, pour the cactus juice into the jar, enough to completely submerge the wood. Third, panic once you remember that wood floats and you need something to keep the scales below the liquid. Fourth, wedge the scales down with a spare piece of wood, then attach the lid to the jar. Once all thats done, it should look like this:









Connect your fancy brake bleeder vacuum and start pumping! And pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping and pumping...

Seriously, this takes forever, especially on a porous wood like walnut. You have to keep pumping that dang pump, keeping the vacuum level as high as possible, until bubbles stop coming off the wood. In my case, that took roughly an hour and a half. No pictures of this part, my hands were a little busy. 

Anyway, once the bloody bubbles finally stop, release the vacuum to let the air flow back in. This is actually where the magic happens, as all the vacuum does it pull the air out of the wood, not such the resin into it. Once you get air pressure back into the jar, however, the air pressure forces the resin into the cavities previously occupied by air in the wood. Pretty neat, eh? Anyway, the instructions say youre supposed to let the resin soak for at least twice as long as the vacuum was applied. 

AAAaand, that all for tonight. Seriously, thats as far as ive got. After the wood is done soaking you have to bake it at 200f for a couple hours to set the resin, but i havent got that far yet. At the moment im here:









To explain, im letting the blanks soak in the cactus juice, before i toss them in the oven to cure. I should have everything done by tomorrow, so ill get back with more pictures and post the final results then!


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

A few miscellaneous notes. First off, before anybody says anything, i know that a mason jar isnt meant as a vacuum chamber, that it could implode and all the other safety risks, which is why i dont recommend that anybody copy me without understanding all the risks. Im limited by my budget, and i took the necessary safety precautions to make sure i wouldnt be harmed even if the container were to implode. Your safety is your job, if you cant take the necessary precautions then you should buy a pre-made chamber, not copy me!

The second note, if you ignore the first note and copy me, for the love of god, get an actual vacuum pump. Pumping that brake bleeder was miserable and took forever, i already plan on returning it and getting a cheap pump off ebay. Theyre surprisingly inexpensive, i found a 1/3hp rotary vane pump on ebay for about $50, including shipping, or i could get a venturi pump to connect to my air compressor for about $35, either of which would be much, much better options. 

Third note, no, you do not need my fancy heat treatment oven to do any of this. I chose to use mine to do the initial drying of my scales as well as the curing of the resin because the heat controller on my oven can hold temperature down to a degree, so i trust it more than my toaster oven. Plus, you know what they say about hammers and nails...

Lastly, the silver thing i have sitting on top of the blanks in the last picture is an aluminium ingot. I needed something to keep the wood below the fluid level, and i happened to have a brick of aluminium hanging around from when i experimented with melting down coke cans. Long story.


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## NickB (Sep 24, 2013)

You hand pumped that thing for an hour and a half?!?! You must be a beast! And sore... It'll be a while before you can... erm, nevermind... Awesome write up. Your tutorials are always so amusing. 

I thought mason jars _were _made for negative pressure. Isn't that how canning works?


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## gstanfield (Dec 23, 2011)

Ok, you have my attention! Now I'm waiting for some finished scales 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

NickDIY said:


> I thought mason jars _were _made for negative pressure. Isn't that how canning works?


So did i, but the internet is full of people saying "dont do it, the pressure will cause it to implode, dont be cheap and buy an actual vacuum vessel". As you can imagine though, it worked fine, no implosion by my end. Still though, im not going to outright say "do this because it worked for me", just in case someone tries it and it doesnt work for them.

Also ,glad you like the tutorials. I know some people dont like my writing style, but i always find it a bit boring just explaining "okay, this is how you do this". I like adding a bit of humor to the process, makes it more fun for me!


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

gstanfield said:


> Ok, you have my attention! Now I'm waiting for some finished scales
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


Ask and ye shall recieve my friend!


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## hwebb99 (Nov 27, 2012)

I think you would be surprised at how much pressure it would take to implode a mason jar. Has this actually happened or just the safety police? If you wanted to build a "safer" vacuum chamber use pvc pipe. I know it isn't rated for vacuum pressure, but if it is rated in hundreds of pounds of pressure than surly it can hold back less than 15 psi of vacuum.


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

*Payoff time!*

So when last we talked i was soaking the blanks in preparation for the final bake. Of course, when last we talked i also said that i would update this in the morning, not 11 at night, but i hope you wont hold that against me. Anyway!

So the soaking proceeded without incident. I gave the blanks, weighted down in the juice, about 2 and a half hours to soak in all the juicy goodness, and then 'twas time to bake. First, the staging area was laid out:









Nothing fancy, just a sheet of aluminium foil to wrap the scales in. Next, remove a scale from the juice, let the excess drip back into the jar and place on the foil:









Fold the foil over the blank, like so:









Then stack the next scale on top, roll over the foil, stack and roll, rinse and repeat until everythings all stacked up, with foil between all the scales. Dont just lump all the scales together with nothing between them, otherwise the resin will stick them all together into a giant brick of acrylic. Probably. I dont know, i didnt try because i didnt want to find out, but it makes sense thats what would happen. 

Anyway, i was left with a foil covered brick. Said brick was loaded into my heat treatment oven, again because the temperature control on it is far and away better that my actual oven. You could also use a toaster oven or what have you, but hey, hammers and nails. Anyway, scales are loaded in the oven, and i set the controller to 200. Well, 196 actually, since for some reason the controller i have overshoots by 4 degrees for some reason. Pictures!


















Very nice no longer having the controller wires all be a mess of electric death anymore, im quite liking the box, bulky though it may be. Anyway, with the temperature set all that was left was to wait. And wait and wait and wait. In order tfor the resin to sure, the core temperature of the wood MUST hit 200 degrees, and if you take the wood out before you cant just pop in back in to finish curing. So, gotta get the timing right the first time. To accomplish that, i left the oven running for roughly 6 hours, about 3am to 10am. Wait, 7 hours...

Anyway, i gave the blanks time to cool, then took them out of the oven and got to unwrap them like the delicious little burritos they were:









You may be wondering where the second packet came from. Well, thats what happens when you lay out too little foil for all the scales and dont realize until you notice that the foil just ran out and you still have 5 more scales to wrap up

At that point, i repeatedly cursed myself for using aluminium foil, because the resin stuck to it ever so slightly, just enough to make it a pain to get off. So, note to anybody else wanting to try this, use waxed, or better yet parchment paper to do the wrapping. nyway, after unwrapping i had this:









That is 9 nicely stabilized walnut handle scales. Why 9, when each knife needs 2? Stupidity mostly. The picture doesnt show it very well, but there wasnt much color change after stabilization, no more than youd get with a coat of polyurethane. I seem to have gotten full penetration through the walnut, but its kindve hard to tell, even once sliced in half. 

Overall, im calling this one a success. Everything cured up hard, and the walnut does feel a bit heavier than before, and like i said, cutting a piece in twain i didnt see any obvious line that would indicate where the resin hadnt penetrated. Admittedly, with a 1/4 piece i probably didnt even need to bother with the vacuum to get full penetration, but i milled the wood to thickness before i decided to try stabilization. In the future i plan to try keeping a plank at a full 3/4 thickness, then milling it down after stabilization. All these scales already have plans too, as ive got several knife blanks i have big plans for, but ill post those in a separate thread as i finish them up


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

So yeah, thats how i accomplished stabilizing some wood to make handle scales. Hopefully this helps someone out, and not just for knifemaking. I see a lot of people using similar rigs for stabilizing spalted woods for pen blanks, or if you wanna really deep down into your pockets you could build a giant chamber and stabilize your own bowl blanks. Skys the limit really, just depends on how big a vacuum chamber you can build and how much resin you can afford

I really did like the cactus juice. It was pretty foolproof to use, and a little went a lot further than i thought it would. After i dumped what was in the mason jar back into its original jug for storage, i was left with this:









So i maybe used an ounce or two doing these blanks. Not bad for $20, vs spending that on one set of scales. The mason jar also held up well under vacuum, so i feel secure using the entire rig again. Although, i did learn my lesson, and i will definitely be getting an actual vacuum pump next time. 

Im typing this with my feet, as i still cant feel my forearms


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## hwebb99 (Nov 27, 2012)

I would mill them as little as possible after you stabilize them. I have some stabilized pen blanks that feel much heavier then regular wood. That crap can't be good for your blades. If you really wanted to go overboard with a vacuum chamber a propane tank with the top cut off just before it starts to reduce in diameter, with proper gasket material should work.


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

hwebb99 said:


> I would mill them as little as possible after you stabilize them. I have some stabilized pen blanks that feel much heavier then regular wood. That crap can't be good for your blades. If you really wanted to go overboard with a vacuum chamber a propane tank with the top cut off just before it starts to reduce in diameter, with proper gasket material should work.


Not as rough ad you may think. The resin is some form of acrylic, so its not that hard or abrasive, and you figure pen turners use it all the time on their blanks without destroying their tools. Can't say I'd want to send it through a planer, but that's only because the pieces are too short


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## hwebb99 (Nov 27, 2012)

Acrylic is definitely harder then wood or at least native hardwood. I wouldn't mind cutting an acrylic pen blank with my miter saw, but that would enough enough acrylic cutting for me. I would never send a sheet of acrylic through my planer. You can cut aluminum with woodworking tools, but it certainly doesn't yield a long blade life.


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

hwebb99 said:


> Acrylic is definitely harder then wood or at least native hardwood. I wouldn't mind cutting an acrylic pen blank with my miter saw, but that would enough enough acrylic cutting for me. I would never send a sheet of acrylic through my planer. You can cut aluminum with woodworking tools, but it certainly doesn't yield a long blade life.


Ill agree that it probably isnt healthy, but to me planer/jointer blades are disposable resources. I have no issues having to swap the blades in my planer sooner than normal if it means a project is done faster, easier and better. Besides, after working it i wouldnt imagine that the type of acrylic used in the cactus juice is any harder than something like hard maple, based on how easy it was to machine


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

So in case anybodys curious, i got around to using a few of those scales to actually handle a knife. Went ahead and started a thread in the project showcase section, here if anybodys interested in seeing how everything turned out


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## arvanlaar (Dec 29, 2014)

You said to use wax paper instead of aluminum foil... DO NOT do this unless you want a smoky mess. I do not know how many times I have grabbed wax paper instead of parchment, put it in the over and had to air out my house for days lol. Unless you are talking about wrapping in wax and then aluminum, that might work. Still I would highly recommend parchment paper. 

Great thread though! I have dabbled in the idea of trying my hand with knife making but haven't given it serious thought yet. This was good encouragement though!


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

arvanlaar said:


> You said to use wax paper instead of aluminum foil... DO NOT do this unless you want a smoky mess. I do not know how many times I have grabbed wax paper instead of parchment, put it in the over and had to air out my house for days lol. Unless you are talking about wrapping in wax and then aluminum, that might work. Still I would highly recommend parchment paper.
> 
> Great thread though! I have dabbled in the idea of trying my hand with knife making but haven't given it serious thought yet. This was good encouragement though!


The resin only cures at 200f. Should be well inside wax papers usable range, but I do agree that parch!ent should be the first choice


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## TimPa (Jan 27, 2010)

epicfail48 said:


> First off, before anybody says anything, i know that a mason jar isnt meant as a vacuum chamber...


 that was funny. how did you know somebody would say anything.

I love when someone takes woodworking into another area/level. I have to go look at your knives now.


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

TimPa said:


> that was funny. how did you know somebody would say anything.
> 
> I love when someone takes woodworking into another area/level. I have to go look at your knives now.


The first thing you get when you google "mason jar vacuum chamber" is usually "rahh, dotn do it, jar will implode and you're an idiot for trying". I was trying to head that off before it could happen


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## TwelveFoot (Dec 30, 2015)

Not that I know anything about this, but I'd expect the lid to buckle and relieve the pressure before the glass shattered.

What's your reason for wanting to stabilize before cutting? I figure just from a poor point of view cutting first means you're turning less Cactus Juice into sawdust.


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## Woodychips (Oct 3, 2015)

TwelveFoot said:


> Not that I know anything about this, but I'd expect the lid to buckle and relieve the pressure before the glass shattered. What's your reason for wanting to stabilize before cutting? I figure just from a poor point of view cutting first means you're turning less Cactus Juice into sawdust.


Have to agree. Wouldn't it be best to rough out a shape and then stabilize that?


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## epicfail48 (Mar 27, 2014)

TwelveFoot said:


> Not that I know anything about this, but I'd expect the lid to buckle and relieve the pressure before the glass shattered.
> 
> What's your reason for wanting to stabilize before cutting? I figure just from a poor point of view cutting first means you're turning less Cactus Juice into sawdust.





Woodychips said:


> Have to agree. Wouldn't it be best to rough out a shape and then stabilize that?


The first step to stabilizing is actually to bake the wood at about 225 to reduce the mc to as close to 0 as you can get. As you can imagine, that usually is accompanied by some shrinkage and warpage. We're I to rough cut these to fit a particular knife to begin with, there's a good chance that after the stabilization process they'd no longer fit the knife. That, and rough cutting them for a particular knife would require forethought and planning, neither of which I have patience for!

I've made some tweaks to my process since this thread too.first off, the vacuum pump; **** that thing. Used it once, couldn't feel my arm for the next day. Went out and picked up a cheap vacuum pump for something like $50 on eBay. I also did away with the rubber washer on the chamber lid. It didn't seal enough. Instead, I used some silicone caulking for the seal, and now the chamber will hold vacuum enough to dangle by its lid for several days. Lastly, I've stopped thicknessing the stock before stabilization. Like I said, the drying causes some warpage, but this warpage is lessened by keeping the stock thicker to begin with

And twelve, I'd suspect you're right about the lid. Like I said though, I've been using the Mason jar without issue for a couple months now, but if I didn't put in a warning the safety trolls would come out to play


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## Gumby175 (Jan 10, 2021)

epicfail48 said:


> A few miscellaneous notes. First off, before anybody says anything, i know that a mason jar isnt meant as a vacuum chamber, that it could implode and all the other safety risks, which is why i dont recommend that anybody copy me without understanding all the risks. Im limited by my budget, and i took the necessary safety precautions to make sure i wouldnt be harmed even if the container were to implode. Your safety is your job, if you cant take the necessary precautions then you should buy a pre-made chamber, not copy me!
> 
> The second note, if you ignore the first note and copy me, for the love of god, get an actual vacuum pump. Pumping that brake bleeder was miserable and took forever, i already plan on returning it and getting a cheap pump off ebay. Theyre surprisingly inexpensive, i found a 1/3hp rotary vane pump on ebay for about $50, including shipping, or i could get a venturi pump to connect to my air compressor for about $35, either of which would be much, much better options.
> 
> ...


I use an air fryer oven ,instead of a toaster oven ,I think it heats more evenly.
Anyone else using an air fryer oven To cure cactus juice?


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