I have been watching for a thread about stabilizing wood (ourselves) but haven’t seen an acceptable method of doing this discussed yet. I know stabilizedwood.com will do it for us but I am looking for a method of doing it in house. I have a substantial amount of poplar which always has some figure around each knot. It is usually a nice olive color, some with blue/purple or red/orange mineral streaks. This wood is to soft to use for handle material without being stabilized or hardened by some other method.

The companies that do this stabilization commercially appear to be using an acrylic resin. Having painted large items in the past (aircraft), my favorite coating was dupont centari acrylic enamel. This acrylic resin (paint) is, I believe, available in clear as well as custom-tented (transparent tint, not opaque). Might this be an acceptable material to use to stabilize wood if the wood could be saturated with it and then allowed to cure?????

Technique might be something like this:

1. Place wood to be stabilized in a vacuum/pressure vessel. Cover the wood with the unthinned acrylic with or without urethane hardener.
2. Reduce pressure to near vacuum until the wood has had time for all (most) of the air to be evacuated from the wood fibers.
3. Increase pressure in the vessel as high as practical, forcing the resin into the wood fiber.
4. After the wood is saturated, reduce pressure to ambient and remove the wood from the resin bath.
5. Again reduce pressure as much as possible to remove excess resin. (The objective to saturate the wood fibers and not to completely fill the pores between the fibers.)
6. The wood would then be removed and the resin allowed to curing. Might help to place it in a low temp oven.

This finish with a urethane hardener added will get hard inside a paint can in a freezer at 0 degrees F.

Has anyone tried something like this ????

Thanks
Pup