When you send wood out to be stablilized...

[Fletch Helical]

How do you keep track of what's what? Pretty much all the wood I have for knife making I got from our resident dealer/junkie supplier, Burl Source. Since I'm pretty damn far from an expert on identifying wood the only way I keep track of what I have is: Whatever I order I write the number block down and what it is. So I essentially have a master list of what number block is made of what material. At some point I want to send whatever needs to be stabilized out to (likely WSSI since I know of no one else). However once it's gone how will I know what wood is what when I get it back? I'm assuming the pieces of masking tape with the numbers on the will be gone so how do go about making sure I know what pieces are what wood.

 

[Robert Mayo]

Write the # and your name in white out and it will be there when it comes back.

Bob

 

[delbert ealy]

Robert is correct, and this advice comes straight from Mike Ludeman himself, the owner of WSSI. I have sent hundreds of pounds of material to Mike and his crew to stabilize. I usually use an initial and a number, since my batches are fairly large. The initial is usually from the variety of wood "M" for maple and so on.
Thanks,
Del

 

[Larry D. Davis]

Yeah, white-out's an old trick..been around a long time. Some resins attack solvents and will dissolve it, however. You can use regular pencil on light colored woods and white pencil on dark woods. I keep a stock of white and black charcoal artist pencils for marking guitar templates and special knife pieces when doing infusion tests. You can get the charcoal pencils at any craft store or wal-mart in the craft isle.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

I use the white metal marker pens from Fastenal. They write on nearly everything. The mark on each block is something like SA-34. I send Mike a master list with each box, so he knows what the wood is,too. The wood should be divided into groups of like species. So the #1-29 is buckeye burl, #30-59 is Persimmon, etc. When sending 100# of wood, it is hard to keep track of it any other way.

A side note is that the white metal marker pens will write on the tangs of stainless steel blades being heat treated and will still be readable after HT. This is very useful in keeping track of which blade is which after HT. I think it is the titanium oxide that they use for the pigment that survives the heat with no problem.

Stacy