Pentacryl: Wood Stabilization

My favorite way to do bowl turning is to work with green wood. And there are a bunch of advantages to this one. If I just go shopping for bow blanks by going to uh yard service or something like that, I can get a huge variety of species. The other benefit is greenwood cuts a lot easier than dry wood. So by Greenwood, what I mean is the wood is dripping wet. It's 25 30% moisture maybe higher. And the downside of this is that when I'm starting with that Greenwood blank, it's gonna turn easy cuts really, really easy. The downside is as it dries, a bunch of weird stuff can happen, it can distort, it can crack. So I've already turned a couple of bowls that I've got here and I wanna get to a point where we're talking about how do we prevent that distortion? How do we limit cracking? But let's talk about how I got here. So, with the bows I have in front of me, the first step was I did my shopping at a friend of mine's place because he's got a tree service. So a huge variety of logs laying around. I picked an ash log more specifically an ash log that had a nice piece of crotch on the end of it because I know that wood is gonna be really, really beautiful, separated the chunk from the log and then went to the next step of separating slabs from the specific crotch piece I had. Next thing I got it back to my shop and I cut that big slab into two large blanks so that it was easier to work with from there. I headed to my band saw and always best to get stuff cut round before you get it on the lathe. So I used my band saw to get that cut into a circle. Once it was on the lathe turned the outside, first got it round, got the bottom shaped, turned it around, started hollowing the interior. Now, my general rule of thumb when I'm rough turning, which is what I'm doing here is to leave the wall thickness at about 10% of the overall diameter. So that's why when you look at the bowls, I've got here, the walls are still so thick. I'm not gonna finish these, finish, turn them until we've gone through the drying process and the treatment with Pacer. So let's talk about Pacer because here's where we're going with this. We're gonna do it. We're going to do an experiment. The two balls came from the same tree, the same blank, they were turned the same way at the same time, one of them is gonna get treated with Penry. One of them is not. Now, Pacer is a product I've been using this since forever. And what it is is a wood stabilizer and it's gonna soak into the wood and displace the moisture and it leaves behind a shell on the wood cells, almost like the shell of an egg. So that when this continues to dry, those cells can't contract shrink. And it's that shrinking of the wood cells that when you don't use pry, that's what causes all of the distortion and the cracking and everything else that can go wrong. So by getting the PAC into this material, we're gonna stabilize it so that we don't have those problems later. Now, there are a couple important things. I rough turn these green because like I said, it turns easier when it's wet. Also. PRL does its best when we're doing this treatment while the wood is still wet, while it's still green. So this is all happening pretty fast. I, I did the chainsaw work. I got them in my shop. I did the turning. They're still dripping wet. Now, we're ready for the next step. The best way to do this is to do that rough turning first because think about if I did the bandsaw work and then I saturated that blank. I'm putting Pac Rill into a lot of wood that I'm just gonna cut away. What's the point of that by rough turning. This first, I've already done this hollowing. I've got the outside rough shape. So now I'm only treating material that's still a primary part of the ball. So where we're at is best way to do. This is immersion. What I did is I made a very simple plywood box and this is a very fancy black garbage bag that I cut to line the plywood box. The box is just a little bit bigger than the bowl. I'm gonna treat. Boom. And it goes. And then from there we're ready for Penta Grill. Now, if you can fully immerse, that's your best way to go. If you're in a scenario where you can't do that for whatever reason, you can turn this rough, turn it just like I've done and brush pac on. But you know, just think about this intuitively the best way to get full saturation of whatever it is you're working on, it doesn't have to be bow blanks. This could be a log cookie that you cut that you wanna make into a table. I've done that a bunch of times. The best way to get the penetration you want is to have this immersed so that we know we're gonna get good penetration. Now, the other thing you wanna pay attention to is the schedule for how long this has to be soaking. And in this case, this is ash. I'm turning for this material for this bowl. It's gonna sit in here for about three days. Now to be clear when it comes out, it's not gonna be dry. It's still gotta go through a drying process. But the PTA grill does a couple things. One, it's gonna stabilize it. Like I talked about two. It's gonna dry more quickly than its companion is. So, what I'm gonna do is gonna span it with this. I wanna make sure that doesn't start floating up out of there. Then I'm going to leave this, sit in the Pac Ryl for three days. The other one is gonna go into what's a pretty typical turn green wood treatment, which is paper bag, paper so that it can breathe a little bit, a bunch of shavings that came from the turning process. And again, you know, we're still drying this just like we're gonna dry that pentacle treated bowl, but we want it to dry slowly, not in a heartbeat. So the shavings help with that. I'm gonna capture all of that with another bag. He says to kind of seal this end off there. That's what I was trying to make happen. Now in three days, I'm gonna take that Penry treated bowl out. The really cool stuff with this product is whatever liquid is still in that box, I can pour back in here and I can use it for my next project. Once that comes out of the pedic, it will also go in a bag until it's dry, so then we can get it back on the lathe. We're gonna come back and do that and you'll have an opportunity to see the difference between the treated bowl and the untreated bowl. It's been about 1112 weeks since the Bull Blanks got put into their bags. So I wanna do, I wanna do a little check in here and see what we've got. This is the one that was not Pac Ryl treated. This is the one that was Pac Ryl treated. So one thing I wanna do is see where we're at in like egg shaped. If that's a word um On this blank, the grains running this way when I measure across the grain compared to with the grain, there's a little more than a half inch difference. This is about a half inch longer than this, which if it's gonna elongate, that's if it's gonna go egg shaped, that's what we'd expect on this one, the grains running this way. So same when I measure across and then I measure with on the pentacle treated bowl, there's about a quarter inch difference in elongation. So PRL treatment gives us something that's way less egg shaped than non pentacle treated when we look at the blanks. So that one still looks great, meaning no checks, no cracks. And this one pretty significant crack there, another crack there, another crack there. And remember that when this experiment started, these are sister boards, brother and sister, whatever they are, these blanks were cut from the exact same chunk of ash. So they all started, they both started on a level playing field moisture content. Um, it's a little hard with the pless to get a reading on a round surface. But if I go on the flat rim, 13.4 on that one, 15 6 on that one, so that also matches my expectations because another benefit of Penry is that the bowl will dry more quickly when it's been Penry treated than when it hasn't. So we already have a lower moisture content on this one. I'm gonna throw them back in the bags. I'm gonna let them sit just a little bit longer, let that moisture come down just a tiny bit more and then come back and do the finish turning on them. It's like Christmas Day here in my shop because I have gifts wrapped up in brown paper bags, which interestingly is kind of the way I wrap gifts all the time for real. Um So here's where we're at. You've seen a few stages of the bull blanks, those nice pieces of ash that one got treated with pac. This 11 did not. We looked at them a little while ago to see where they were at. So now this is the big reveal. This should be the final dry, our final drying point. This is the one that was not treated. I'm gonna hopefully get all the garbage in there. It's like I just jumped out of Buffalo Sketti. Remember when you do this, you want these bags to be craft paper like this, not plastic because you gotta have some air flow. The moisture has to have a chance to get out. All right, let's examine a couple of things for our science experiment. Turning back the clock, they were cut from the same tree, the same slab. Um So a lot of identical this going on there. This is the one that was not treated. When we look at this, it did develop and you saw this a while ago, it did develop a crack. The one that was Pac Ryl treated, we don't have any cracks going in that one. So that's cool. The other thing we looked at earlier was um, egg shaped, if that's a word, uh How much they've distorted. They were perfectly round when they came off the lathe. One of the thing that's gonna happen as green wood dries is it's gonna shift, it's gonna change a little bit non treated one. I now have 13 in that direction, 13.5 in that direction. And then on the pentacle bow 12 and a quarter, 12.5. So I'm a half inch out of round on this one, I'm a quarter inch out of round on this one where that out of roundedness or lack of it is gonna pay off is one of the things that you do when you're turning green wood and then you're gonna come back later and finish it is you leave a significant wall thickness because you know that you're gonna have to take it back to round. When this goes back on of late. We're gonna do that in a second, the less it distorts, the easier it is when this goes back on the lathe or let me turn that around, the closer this is to still being round when it goes back on the lathe, the easier this is for you to make this into a ball. So the lack of distortion is a big thing. Then I'm gonna throw my moisture meter on that hits 6.5% there getting a spot where it settles down 9.9 on this one. So another benefit to the Pac Ryl is it encourages the bowl to dry more quickly. It allows the chemistry of it as such that the Greenwood bowl that's pentacle treated is gonna get to its stabilized point where we're at today more quickly than the one that was not pentacle treated. So the bottom line out of our science experiment is it's worth working with the Pacer for a bunch of reasons. Um If you've got bark on something and you want it to stay on something, it's more likely to stay stuck. If you've treated with Pacer, the whole concept of being able to work with it sooner because it's gonna dry more quickly. Pentacle treated. That's a big benefit. The lack of distortion is a big benefit. Of course, here we're working with B blanks. You could be doing this to a slab. You've cut and you don't want it to crack like crazy. Um, a round cookie from a tree, a log ground. Those are so prone to cracking and I've had really good luck with reducing or completely eliminating that cracking in those log grounds. Next step for us. Let's get this baby back on the lathe and, uh, start turning it from a blank into a bowl. I know about you, but I'm dying to see how the outside looks. Gotta get a little more oil on there. OK? Pretty cool. I love that grain right there. So my agenda is I gotta get finished on the inside. I'll completely finish this, then I'm gonna turn this around and I've got a set of jaws that will grab the rim. That'll let me finish the bottom. I love this ash bowl and I love the positive effect that the Pac Ryl had on getting me to this point with no cracking. Way less distortion and quicker drying time. It's all good.