Can I get my wood stabilized like this?

J

jasperdog032469

Joined
Mar 14, 2007
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115
I love to use birds eye maple and dye it with my dad's homade dye that he uses on his muzzle loaders. What I'm wondering is if I can have it stabilized to look like this?

BirdseyeVincentwithguard7-26-07.jpg


Dave
 
Dave, are you asking about "in house" stabilization or about the services that would do it for you?
There are a lot of tutorials on stabilization, here is one example.
There are also several companies that will stabilize and dye your wood/burl for you. WSSI is one of them. River Ridge Products is another.
 
Jasper that birdseye looks great. Love that color. I dunno if you can have it done like that tho. I know they can do colors tho.....Heres some blue...

Is the maple on your dad's muzzleloader stabilized? Perhaps you could get away with not stabilizing and using the same type finish. I would experiment with it and see how it goes.

Larry
 

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Maple is a very hard wood. I doubt it benefits much from stabilization.
 
What I'd like to have done is to send it somewhere and have it dyed so that it looks like it does after I've dyed it. Everyone on here always has good things to say about WSSI, I'll give then a call.

any maple I've ever worked with has been very soft. That's why it is used alot when you are doing wire inlay, and I know that the blocks that I buy, that are stabilized, are much much heavier and harder than the ones that are not.
Thanks for all the advise.

Dave
 
Jasper I think the difficulty is that your dads finish, like the one using muratic acid and steel wool, or other finishes of that type tend to "ride on the surface" of the wood. Yes they penetrate somewhat, but if you were to cut the handle in half, the center wouldnt look the same as the outside (would be my guess)

The stabilizing process goes all the way thru the wood, and deposits a resin type material (MMA), which fills the cells and hardens the wood when it cures.

You can get your birdseye stabilized, but its the color that will be difficult to match IMO. If you wanted to go with a color choice from their menu, I don't think it would be a problem.

Larry
 
I find that maple does extremely well with stabilization. Quilted maple develops pattern and character that does not show in regular finishing. The process seems to "cook" the pattern ,similar to using steel wool and acid in many cases. The only problem is that you don't know the finished look and color beforehand. I have never regretted sending a piece to WSSI.

If you have a large batch of maple to stabilize, send a couple pieces to Mike to be a test run. Have him do one piece natural, and one dyed to whatever you want ( I like brown and black). Then you will be able to decide the benefits of having the rest done.

Stacy
 
Stacy you wouldnt have any pics of that quilted would you? I'd be interested in seeing how that looks when its done.

As far WSSI goes I can tell you that they have been great to deal with and even tho I'm fooling around trying to stabilize my own, I have sent a LOT of wood down to Mike. When you have high end materials that need to be done right, I don't hesitate, I just send it down. I have some pure white box elder burl blocks down with Mike right now. These will be double dyed. I wouldnt trust myself not to screw those up....so off they go.

Larry
 
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