Since the homemade vacuum chamber I tried to make last month was such a bust, I broke down and bought one online. Luckily, our Chinese friends that make Harbor Freight look expensive have many ebay stores! I picked up a system that has a 5 gallon stainless steel pot, a small vacuum pump, and all the hardware for about a hundred bucks. WORKS LIKE A DREAM!!! The best stuff to use to stabilize half rotten wood is something called “Cactus Juice”, but you pretty much have to sell a kidney to be able to afford it. Since I want to stabilize bowls, not tiny little pen blanks, I might also have to give up a lung to afford enough juice to cover the entire bowl while it’s in the vacuum chamber. After many hours surfing the net, I discovered that any polyurethane based finish can be used, it just takes longer for the liquid to soak into the wood and longer for it to dry. After some creative use of rocks, towels and Wal-Mart bags to cut down on the amount of poly necessary to submerge the bowl blank, I managed to get one gallon of poly to cover the whole blank. When it was done, I put the wet blanks into the kiln and ran it at about 120 degrees overnight to help the poly cure. In hindsight, I should have left it soak in the poly for a day or so after the bubbles stopped coming out with the vacuum pump turned on, then cooked it for more like a week. I’ll also try thinning the liquid down a little bit so that it absorbs into the wood better. Here’s a picture of the inaugural test run:
The bowls that I used were the “mystery wood” blanks that I talked about last month. Here are two of the four bowls that were retrieved from Chris’ rotten tree and were put through the vacuum stabilizer. This is the final product of the rough out that was in last month’s post.
Here are two pictures of the second bowl. This one was from the same tree, but further away from the woodpecker attack, so the wood isn’t nearly as bad and didn’t require as much time in the tank to stabilize. Top view:
Side view:
There are two additional blanks that have been stabilized, waiting to turn, so stay tuned…