sanding sealer or lube?

Apologies to all. I typed most of this a few days ago and posted it, . . . I thought! I much appreciate the help and was unintentionally rude.

Vaughn,

Many thanks for the feedback on sanding and the source for sanding materials. Going back to my auto body shop days what I found worked best was speed and gentle pressure. Trying to do that with the wood as I think too much pressure is easily an issue with power sanding. Leaning into a sander with just body weight adds up to a lot of pressure. Yeah, I have a lot of body weight! :eek:


Dave,

Thanks a bunch for the details! I have learned the danger of making assumptions long ago and the internet makes that easy to do. Not sure how soon but I'm going to give the tung oil a try in the fairly near future. I like the thought of a natural finish.


To everyone:

Had a little time overnight to let things perk and think a bit and I'll leave the wet wood alone for a four or five days, maybe a week, before buffing. Doubt the oil is any dryer but hopefully the varnish will be. I'll just wipe it down once or twice a day and let it sit on the shelf. Just in case nobody has noticed patience isn't my strongest point but I may just let that bowl sit and see what happens with some time sitting drying on the shelf. It was wet enough to wring out like a sponge when I started turning it so it is at near maximum moisture content now, I misted it when it showed signs of drying. Wonder if the finish will help it dry evenly and minimize warping and cracking?

(new info)
Not too surprising as wet as the wood was it is happily splitting seven ways from Sunday! Being a thinking man it occurs to me that I don't have to worry about finishing until a blank survives long enough to turn. Five gallons of Anchorseal got my toy money this month. No big bills next month with a little luck and I'll get back to buying slick'ms to go on my turnings.

Planned to rough out blanks today, instead I'm firing up the chainsaw to salvage as much of this wood as I can. When the anchorseal gets here I will cut down a tree or two with decent wood or harvest some of the stuff already down.

Hu
 
Hu one other thing I do after turning a piece if I feel in anyway that the integrity of the wood has been computerized I will put 2 coats of minwax wood hardner on the piece. After any staining or dieing has been done. Then apply the finish.
 
hu, i am not a turner as yu well know but i think folks turn wet wood then leave it in a paper bag for some time to dry out slowly before finishing it.. so i would ask one of these spinny guys the best way to go from wet wood to a good bowl.. the anchorseal is for the blanks when yu cut them to rough size not for coating after you have your shaped piece..
 
hu, i am not a turner as yu well know but i think folks turn wet wood then leave it in a paper bag for some time to dry out slowly before finishing it.. so i would ask one of these spinny guys the best way to go from wet wood to a good bowl.. the anchorseal is for the blanks when yu cut them to rough size not for coating after you have your shaped piece..

Actually Larry, some guys do coat a rough-turned bowl in Anchorseal to slow down the drying. I've not tried that method, but I know some folks do it. (I'm a paper bag or cardboard box with wood shavings guy myself.)
 
wet shavings or dry one vaughn?

Whatever's on the floor. :) Typically they're at about the same moisture content as the blank since they just came from the blank...assuming the bowl was turned in a single shop session. The general idea is for the shavings to be a bit of a buffer and help slow down the drying. If they're a little drier than the roughed bowl, they're fine. If they're a LOT drier, they can end up sucking up water pretty quickly from the bowl, kind of defeating the purpose. (And if the blank is already dry, I don't worry about shavings or even bagging it.)

Seems to me the only thing that's really constant about drying roughed-out bowls is that it's gonna be different from one person to the next. At my shop in LA, the climate is drier than in Hu's neck of the woods, so what works well for me might be completely off base for him. As I see it, the main thing is to slow down the drying, which should help prevent cracking, but there's never a guarantee things will work out.
 
Whatever's on the floor. :) Typically they're at about the same moisture content as the blank since they just came from the blank...assuming the bowl was turned in a single shop session. The general idea is for the shavings to be a bit of a buffer and help slow down the drying. If they're a little drier than the roughed bowl, they're fine. If they're a LOT drier, they can end up sucking up water pretty quickly from the bowl, kind of defeating the purpose. (And if the blank is already dry, I don't worry about shavings or even bagging it.)

I've also had good luck with the bowl in the bucket of shavings method with the small # of bowls I've done. Quite a few warped but only a couple cracked and they both had flaws in them anyway (and weren't cracked so bad I couldn't mostly just cut that part off and get a smaller bowl).

One small caveat is that I've started pulling the bowls from the shavings and rotating everything every 4-5 days for the first couple of weeks after having a few mild mold issues (nipped them in the bud but had I not been obsessively checking things..). That may be a worse problem in Hu's neck of the woods as its pretty dry here most of the time..
 
Thanks Again! It all helps

I did try the bag with shavings a few times. Water would run down my arm picking up the bowl a day or two later! Some success just sticking a handful of rough turned blanks in a bag. I'm fixing to spend the day roughing blanks if the back lets me, cut a half dozen or so yesterday evening. A bright spot, been sharpening my own chain and tuning on my chainsaw. The wood was melting in front of it so easily that I rarely used the dogs.

Mold is indeed a major problem here. Probably need to dip or spray the blanks in a mild Clorox solution before bagging. Haven't tried it yet but instant mold is a fact of life. A little better here than where I was but still pretty wet by most standards.

A big thank you to everyone! I do gain something from every post.

Hu
 
back serious again

OK, back to serious. I roughed eight or ten bowl blanks from the popcorn tree yesterday. Forgot about misting and did get some end checking started as I turned. Used Titebond to seal and slow that hopefully, no Anchorseal yet. I have had wood and sap gum up on my gouge before but it would get so bad cutting this stuff that my gouge would quit cutting and I'd have to clean it even though it was still sharp. Almost out of interest in this wood already but I will use it to play with. The dark wood that I thought would add some nice color pretty much crumbles at a touch.

A quick note about Anchorseal. Bailey's sells a sealant for the ends of logs, wax based. Sounds like Anchorseal and a good bit cheaper when Bailey's is running one of their shipping specials. I think $64 from Bailey's plus shipping, $88 shipped from CPC. May try to get more info later but glad to go with Anchorseal for now and know where I am at. No brand mentioned for the stuff from Bailey's so I don't know if it is Anchorseal or not. Anchorseal is massively cheaper purchased bulk but a drum may be more than I need right now!

Resting today, aside from a lot of hours turning yesterday I noticed the midsize chainsaw isn't ideal for carving work to slim down my blanks here and there.

Back to finishing, buffed out some of my lacquer finished stuff a day or three ago too. I have to admit it looks so beautimus that it makes me think twice about the natural look. Definitely some lacquer finishes in my future too. No sealing problems either. Thin it down for sanding sealer and come over the top with lacquer.

Hu
 
hu as for using glue for the sealing part to guard against checking i think your supposed to use white glue not yelo glue like tite bond,, white glue is Elmer's or similar
 
hu as for using glue for the sealing part to guard against checking i think your supposed to use white glue not yelo glue like tite bond,, white glue is Elmer's or similar

Either should work. the idea is to put a semi-permeable seal on the wood to slow the drying. White glue is often recommended just because it's usually less expensive than the yellow stuff.

Hu, I've used a couple of different "wax wood sealants" that were not Anchorseal brand, and as far as I can tell, they worked just as well as Anchorseal. :thumb:
 
I did try the bag with shavings a few times. Water would run down my arm picking up the bowl a day or two later! Some success just sticking a handful of rough turned blanks in a bag. I'm fixing to spend the day roughing blanks if the back lets me, cut a half dozen or so yesterday evening. A bright spot, been sharpening my own chain and tuning on my chainsaw. The wood was melting in front of it so easily that I rarely used the dogs.

Mold is indeed a major problem here. Probably need to dip or spray the blanks in a mild Clorox solution before bagging. Haven't tried it yet but instant mold is a fact of life. A little better here than where I was but still pretty wet by most standards.

A big thank you to everyone! I do gain something from every post.

Hu

Yeah I suspect that the methods those of us in the dry lands use may not work as well for you..

There are a ton of other drying strategies out there that I've never tried (since its dry enough here that the box-o-shavings works :D). I don't actually bag them anymore here but have a plastic tub that I stack the blanks in and cover with shavings (I've been putting the blanks face down on some theory about shavings in contact with the outside and inside drying faster wich should lessen cracking but have no real evidence that either direction matters). The handful I baged I had more mold problems and they didn't dry as fast (and no noticable decrease in cracking but its a small sample so lots of hand waving).

A short list of other methods is here: http://www.turningblanks.net/servlet/the-template/greenwoodbowlturning,part3/Page
Its missing at least the "wax/anchorseal just the end grain parts" and "wrap just the outside in brown paper" (that is where I got the "if the inside dries faster its less likely to crack idea from) and probably a few others.

You may even need to consider building a small kiln with a couple of light bulbs in it to get things to dry where you are.
 
Thank You All!

Ryan,

As it happens my stuff went in a tub with a few shavings yesterday, then a few more shavings and a loose covering. I might be wrong but I'm working on the theory that the initial drying is way too fast and I need to slow it down. My thoughts on the inside and outside of roughed blanks cracking is similary to bending metal, the outside wants to crack when it reaches maximum stretch and the inside is in compression so not much obvious happens. In most metals there is a point roughly one-third from the inside if I remember correctly that represents the neutral area, it doesn't compress or stretch. This is assuming one of the metals like mild steel that does bend fairly readily of course. I don't really know, but the cracks start on the outside so it is as good a working theory as any for now. Thanks for the link, I bookmarked it to read over later.



Vaughn,

Thanks for the info about the sealants seeming to work equally well.


Larry, Vaughn,

The Titebond II in particular is favored by some protocols, straight or cut 1.4 parts water to 1 part glue. It had the major virtue of being what I had on hand too! I read up on glues in general and Titebond glues in particular awhile back and it seemed like the Titebond II best suited most of my uses. Going to do some glue ups and laminations soon and also glue waste blocks onto some blanks.

Thank You All!

Hu
 
As it happens my stuff went in a tub with a few shavings yesterday, then a few more shavings and a loose covering. I might be wrong but I'm working on the theory that the initial drying is way too fast and I need to slow it down. My thoughts on the inside and outside of roughed blanks cracking is similary to bending metal, the outside wants to crack when it reaches maximum stretch and the inside is in compression so not much obvious happens.

I think the problem is more disparate speeds of drying rather than absolute speed of drying. That's why the boiling and microwave tricks work - the whole thing is drying faster (well boiling does other stuff I don't claim to understand either). The boiling stuff is intriguing and while I've found some real good explanations of the process and results (http://www.woodturningvideosplus.com/boiling-green-wood.html) I'm still a bit in the woods on whats actually happening inside the wood when you do that though.

The compression/stretch sounds closeish to right. I read a really good explanation that sounded right before and it explained that you could pretty much dry the inside as fast as you wanted because it pulls the bowl together and the outside would follow. How accurate that is - dunno but it sounded good anyway :D
 
Ryan,

Pretty sure you are right about the disparate speeds being the issue. Most of the things we do try to slow down the overall process to even out the drying time. Alcohol soaks, microwaving, some things speed up the overall process. Boiling should break down fibers among other things, not sure I want to do that. Like most things, when I read too much I find there are seemingly dozens of ways to the same goal. I looked at one piece of wood yesterday evening, mold has already started so I'll have to try the Clorox rinse in the morning.

When I first read about microwave drying I thought of the defrost cycle. I read somebody does that using one third the wood weight as the weight to defrost. Seems tempting and I think I might have an old microwave in my cue shop still. DNA soak might be cheapest with a little effort to minimize the alcohol used and lost. Seems like I read somewhere that you can combine the DNA soak and microwave step and get a nice explosion so I think that is a case of one or the other or at least microwaving first. If I still have the old microwave I'll at least try defrosting a piece of wood to see how it works.

I used to have a sign hanging on the wall of my office when I worked in Design. "while I don't think we are closer to a solution I do feel we are confused on a much higher and deeper level!" I start getting that feeling about wood drying, sanding, and finishing sometimes! There are days when I really miss metals and plastics.

Thanks again for your help and the links. Insomnia has struck so I'm reading up on drying in the wee hours of the morning.

Hu
 
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