Resin stabilizing wood - without a vacuum

[@ScotBecker]

Thanks for this. The world needs more nerdy small scale experiments in creative things. I'm here for it. Hope to repay the favor sometime.

[@GillisBjork]

Thank you, Scot!

[@animalivaganti360]

It's a simple but great idea. I had never thought about it. I don't know why but I always thought that the vacuum pump was indispensable. Thanks for opening our minds 😄

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks! Happy I could do some mind opening😄

[@tobiasfrancisco5879]

Very interesting 🤔 I wanted to stabilize some maple burl for a tote, but also didn't want to buy a bunch of equipment. Thanks for the info, cheers my friend 🥳

[@GillisBjork]

Glad you found it interesting! Good luck with the tote!

[@pboireau]

Good job! One idea (for the next time) should be to use dye as you suggested to see how deep and homogeneous is the penetration. I can't wait to see the handle!!

[@GillisBjork]

Ooh that's smart. Since I was hoping to use this piece, and I don't want it dyed, the thought didn't occur to me. But it would have been a better experiment!

[@RachelShadoan]

I will definitely be trying this, thank you for running this experiment! I have a bunch of lovely gnarled ivy branches that are full of wood worm holes and quite delicate, and I have been trying to figure out how to make them less fragile for ages. I don’t have a vacuum chamber and doubt the sticks would fit anyway, as one is quite long. I am thinking of attempting to cure them with an infrared heat lamp

[@GillisBjork]

Wow that sounds cool! Glad I could be of help :) If the lamp works, that might be even more convenient than boiling. One thought I have is that you need to reach a pretty high temperature for curing, so make sure the sticks aren't sitting on a surface that can get burnt!

[@dale1956ties]

I'd never heard of this kind of resin so thanks for that. I think your method was methodical and although not exactly scientific, I believe you obtained useful results and made assumptions that were as accurate as you could get under the circumstances. Well done. I just might try his myself one day if I ever find myself in need of stabilized wood.

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks! Glad you found the results useful!

[@thomashverring9484]

Very, very cool! I'm definitely going to try that at some point!

[@TheRaven0811]

I personally have never used anything to stabilize wood, but I can see the benefits according to the use of the piece. Like in this case a handle that will constantly be touched, your skin oils will be absorbed along with dirt . This will prevent it from happening. Also less wood movement would suggest that the handle could potentially last longer in use before needing to be replaced. All good things to consider. I for one like this style of video. Presenting ideas that might not be realized and if not helpful for everyone, as I can see by some other comments, definitely helpful to me and most others. Thank you!

[@GillisBjork]

Precisely the kind of benefits I’m thinking about! Thank you!

[@rootvalue]

Great to know, thanks for sharing with us. I’ve had a vacuum pump on my wish list for years for this reason but couldn’t find shop space to store it. Looking forward to the handle video.

[@GillisBjork]

Thank you! Similar situation here, space is at a premium.

[@dwallich56]

Brilliant. I love the use of the scientific method. Very nice work. As a rough estimate of finished wood stability, you might soak the pre-weighed treated wood and a non-treated control in water for some time (maybe a couple of days?), then weigh the pieces post-soaking. This may measure water pick-up, with the expactation that the treated wood will have picked up much less water/moisture within the grain structure than the control wood. Good luck.

[@GillisBjork]

Thank you! Very clever, I might try that.

[@alexcartwright4567]

That’s actually a very good suggestion.

[@knickly]

That's actually how wood stabilizing treatments are tested in research papers!

[@MCsCreations]

Awesome work, dude! 😃 That's something I want to try some day as well! Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks! It's interesting to try new things!

[@stijnvanhulle4124]

Great info and video, thanks!

[@joelhollingsworth2374]

There are all sorts of ways to measure hardness; they get more "scientific" mostly in terms of applying repeatable force & choosing an indenter shape that gives usable data across the hardness range of interest, but I find your result convincing enough, and the only potential win from established methods is that they are fairly portable to other practitioners. There isn't really a linear scale of hardness, in theory, just many systems of ranking that often use numbers to represent relations among the rankings within each system. Seems like a fine stabilizing method & well-suited to the time & equipment I have on hand. Great video, as always!

[@GillisBjork]

Sounds very reasonable, thanks for clarifying! Glad you liked the video!

[@pmewUK]

Very interesting. Not something I'm likely to try - I'm quite happy using unstablised wood which works well enough for my needs - but a fascinating study nonetheless. Thank you for sharing 😊

[@GillisBjork]

It's a niche thing for sure! Thanks for wathing and commenting :)

[@gabrieleg6384]

Thanks for this great and honest video. It's nice to have someone experiencing without expensive equipment! What substance exactly is "resin" that you use?

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks! It's called Impresin 90, seems like more or less the same as Cactus juice. Unless you're asking what it actually is, chemically? Then I'm not sure, some type of plastic but that's all I know!

[@alexcartwright4567]

Hi Gillis. Interesting trial, surprising result. One thing I was wondering, having watched your method, was whether INCREMENTALLY immersing the wood into the resin VERTICALLY might allow CAPILLARY ACTION to draw the resin up into the wood, thereby expelling more of the air through the ‘open-to-air’ non-immersed section. If the immersion level were slowly increased, the capillary action should continue to rise proportionately and if the container were clear and a tight fit for the sample, you could monitor the uptake of resin after each incremental insertion. Nevertheless, thanks for sharing this technique and disregard the negative comments. If you want to try something and are good enough to share it, we all have the opportunity to learn a new technique. We should all remember that not EVERY 100 year old wooden chisel handle survives unblemished, but maybe yours will. Keep up the great work Gillis.

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks a lot, Alex! I thought about something like that as well, but I couldn’t come up with a way to do it without simultaneously allowing the wood to absorb moisture from the air, undoing the drying process. That’s why you’d ideally want a vacuum chamber I guess!

[@alexcartwright4567]

@@GillisBjork That is a very good point, I hadn’t considered that. I am sure you could create a work- around to protect the exposed portions of the wood ( cling-film on the sides, or something like it?) but your results seem to speak for themselves and so I think it’s probably better to keep things as simple, and apparently as effective, as you have done. Once again, thank you for sharing your ideas ( and traditional woodworking skills) in general. One of these days that silly You Tube algorithm is going to pay you back for all this effort…… keep it up please, we may currently be few in number, but your followers eagerly await your next video.

[@josephpotterf9459]

Thanks

[@mikescncshop]

Using a dye on your test piece might give you a better idea of how well the resin absorbed. I would think there would be less color where the wood absorbed less resin. A very interesting project.

[@GillisBjork]

Yep, another commenter suggested this too, it would have been smart but it didn’t occur to me since I wanted an uncolored piece to hopefully use later :)

[@hansjoinery]

Thank you for sharing! I might find some thermosetting epoxy resin, and vacuum system is like a must if for proccing white oak, here we used much, it can get about $150 from China, so it was not so expensive. And i thought the wood stabilizing maybe not a big deal for north lands, but in Taiwan which subtropical island, planes woods almost different shape every day, even rainy or some crazy weather is really makes me crazy, so curious about this stabilizing works.

[@GillisBjork]

Ouch, that sounds frustrating! I think stabilizing could be really good for your planes then, I’ll go into it a bit more in the next video but I’ve been testing water absorption on the stabilized pieces and it’s looking very promising.

[@ReRoy8]

Good work. Boiling instead of roasting would result in curing at different temperatures. I need to learn more about the resin to decide. Having a vacuum pump and a pressure vessel have other uses too. Everything comes down to how you value your time.

[@GillisBjork]

Thank you! If you have time, why does boiling and roasting result in different cure temperatures? Thermodynamics is not my strong suit ;) This resin is called Impresin 90, if you want to learn more about it.

[@ReRoy8]

@@GillisBjork Water boils at a constant temperature, around 100-degrees Celsius. Roasting in air is whatever temperature you set the oven to. How the wood conducts the heat internally will determine the internal temperature distribution. This temperature distribution represents the free energy available for the resin to cure. I'm still learning about the resin, but I now know they are not all the same. Always more to learn. ;-)

[@GillisBjork]

@@ReRoy8 ah, well, I do know that ;) The cure temperature specified for the resin was just below 100 C, that’s why I figured boiling would work. I thought you maybe were talking about how water vs air is conducting the energy. Anyway, the resin cured, I guess that’s the important thing :)

[@ping170]

Interesting method 👍 More details about the non cactus juice resin you used ?

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks! It's called Impresin 90, and I don't really have any more details than that, it was cheaper than Cactus Juice in this small quantity so that was why I chose it (Juice would have been cheaper if buying larger quantity).

[@ping170]

@@GillisBjork Thank you. Cactus juice comes indeed in pretty big bottles...

[@luvdub1]

Gillis, do you know the Iceberg Principle? It gets applied in a myriad of circumstances and areas, but usually related to success. The iceberg is generally the portions that people get to see: success and end products. The hidden portions are the side experiments and sometimes failures. Learning woodwork has been that way for me. Often when I tell people that I am a woodworker, they ask to see my work and people comment. Of course, as the maker, the thing that you remember about the project is hardly ever noticed. Like yourself, I am learning and I like to try things and new designs and new ideas. Some projects are successes in that my initial drawing turn out to be pretty close to the final project. But many of my projects are failures (to me). I still have the first project that I attempted to use dovetails and I see the huge gaps. You da man! Thanks again for allowing us to looking through the curtain.

[@HRConsultant_Jeff]

I have used a microwave oven to dry wood before and it works but you have to keep setting it aside for 45 minutes to continue drying and it takes a long time but is faster than oven drying I think.

[@GillisBjork]

Interesting, I can imagine that would be faster!

Hi can you please let me know the resin you used? Resin and brand name or maybe if you can share the link for it? Thanks

[@GillisBjork]

It’s called Impresin 90, seems similar to Cactus juice

[@pettere8429]

Vad köpte du för harts och var?

[@GillisBjork]

Impresin 90 heter det, minns inte vilken sida jag köpte från nu, men det kan googlas :)

[@lrmodranoel]

I know it will work.

[@klausbrinck2137]

If we suppose, that you were very successfull, how would you rank birch, compared to other woods, and how would the qualities of other woods influence success ??? What were to expect from harder or softer woods? What were to expect from heavier or lighter woods??? Thanks á priori for any answer...!!! And wouldn´t placing the grain vertically, help, into letting air escape easier??? Cause you placed it horizontally...

[@GillisBjork]

I can only speculate, but I’d guess in general woods with higher density would absorb less resin, and vice versa. But things like how large the pores are and if it has a high pitch content could also matter, so I could see for example oak potentially absorbing more than pine despite being much denser. Placing the piece vertically was an idea I considered, either to let it soak up resin through capillary action or have it drip down through the piece from above somehow, but I didn’t want the wood exposed to air, so if the whole piece is submerged anyway, I don’t think it’d make much difference. Thanks for your comment!

[@klausbrinck2137]

@@GillisBjorkThanks. If placed vertically, you´d need a different formed container, so that it´s still fully submerged. Capillary action can bring you only that far in the case of thick resin, but an escape for air is still fundamental. I´d use long, thin tube-formed plastic bags, with a piece of wood as support, for long wood-pieces.

[@GillisBjork]

@@klausbrinck2137 if there’s a spot open for air, the wood will take up moisture there instead of resin, that’s why I wanted it fully submerged. And the air did escape, so I don’t think placing it vertically (submerged) would change anything:)

[@klauskorper9012]

I still dont understand why i should do this to Wood at all. Is it the increased strength really necessary for the wood to work as a handle? Certainly not. Bit why then in all the world should i turn a biodegradable good smelling piece of nature into toxic plastic? I dont get it. I dont mean any offense by this. To the creator of such a Great channel

[@Macca81]

Because wood moves. Changes in temp and humidity make wood move, which depending on what you're using the wood for, is something you really don't want.

[@GillisBjork]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! As I said in the beginning of the video, there are a few benefits one might be interested in, but of course it has to be weighed against the downsides, which I perhaps should have brought up. I'll try to remember to talk about it in the next video, where I use the stabilized piece.

[@johnmcgrath7133]

check out old chisel handles that are 60 to 100 + years old none of this crap move on

[@GillisBjork]

Thanks for your thoughts, John. I use such chisels daily, and they are lovely, often cracked from drying out though. But anyway, who said I'm making chisel handels from this?

[@oih1969]

Knifemakers on a budget will love this method. (I have no current need for stabilized wood, yet I'm about to Google "cactus juice"... ).

[@GillisBjork]

Yeah, it should work well for hobbyists or startups that can't buy all equipment at once. Cheers!