Chris Scott

I use one of these, works great, not silly money but nice quality. https://www.wealdentool.com/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Bottom_Trim_249.html

Bright colours certainly do exist and I make blanks like that for my living. Here are some pics in a slideshow of stuff i've stabilised recently. Blocks List 6 Slideshow by usmanicus | Photobucket

Looking good Blaise

If that is indeed a decent sized burr at the base of the trunk (its look like one) I'd gladly buy that. Always on the look out for a nice bit of lime burr.

Take a mooch through my photobucket theres all kind of pics of stabilizedc wood in there from very recent upto a year or so old. Chris Scott's Recent Uploads | Photobucket

Just saw this thread, so sorry for the slow response, I am a wood stabilizer mostly making blocks for vaping mods but a block is a block so happy to help out and process some wood for a small fee. I'm up at vapefest in shrewsbury this weekend taking about 100 blocks with me if anyone is interested. Hardwoods process well, yew is a bit tricky and doesn't respond well to it due to it being so resinous itself. The holly would be no problem though, should come out rock hard and polish up like glass.

I do wood stabilizing with Cactus juice, but the biggest peice i could do would be about 6'' square and a foot long, As that's the limits of my vacuum chamber. The cost would also be quite high for that size piece depending just how soft it is and how much resin it absorbed. Potentially a peice this size could take up £40-50 of resin. However, you can still get a good result without vacuum if you can get the peice that you want to stabilise completely dry - a couple of days in an oven at 110C and then soak it submerged in cactus juice for a week then back into the oven for a day to cure it. It won't be 100% stablized but it'll get most of the way there without vacuum if its spongy to start with.

I do quite alot of this and I use a polyurethane casting resin. But the peices that I do are very small and fit into a pressure pot while they cure so that any air bubbles in the resin and compressed out. I use various dyes and mica powders to get different effects into the resin, Pearl ex powders are great. A good friend also does inlaying like this of small coloured logo's into his work, he rout's out the logo then fills it with coloured (dyed) 2 part epoxy.

Is any of this for sale?

I paid £350 for it including the auction fees and another £200 to get it moved.

I bought this one, were you the opposition?

Like it, I do alot of filling in with resin, never considered using metal. I'd have reservations about using Pewter due to the lead content depending on the final purpose of the item, but some kind of lead free solder could be effective if its not prohibitive cost wise. Let me know when your having a yard day, I need to pay you a visit!

Steel conduit fittings perhaps, you can get a 32mm female bush and male plug to fit it I think. https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/CO32FBB.html

Lovely work Ian

West Mids, near Solihull

I'd be interested in some of that once its milled up, burry bits at least 2'' thick and i'm a happy bunny. Even just a small ammount would be gratefully received if its nice and burry.

For a coffee table, it probably doesn't need to achieve 100% stabilization, if its just the pretty colours and patterns that you want in the wood you can get a good result just by soaking for different times in different coloured resins. You'd need a big oven though to first dry and then cure a coffee table top.

I don't use wood dye, I stabilize the wood using a vacuum process and a product called cactus juice. Basically the wood becomes completely saturated in liquid resin which is then cured by baking it and the wood itself depending on the species and how punky it is can gain up to 3x its original mass, making it much harder and stronger and stable to movement in differing humidities. Added bonus is that you can add dye to the stabilizing resin to get these colours all the way through the wood and you can buff it to a high shine, a bit like an acrylic pen blank. So I start out with a rectangular blank of wood, stabilize it, and then no more colour is added after that stage. Its then shaped using a router, bench drill and sand paper and finally polished with a buffing wheel. After all this is done I add the hardware and call it good. Size wise there are 90mm tall, 50mm wide, and 45mm deep at the widest, designed to be a comfortable, ergonic fit in the hand. This one was the prototype, and its changed alittle over the last few months, I use a different PCB now and you'll see the ones in the OP has more buttons to select various options in the hardware, for scale the metal faceplate on the mods at the top is 72mmx22mm.

Its a device for vaping, alternative to smoking. So it houses a battery, and a circuit board to regulate the power, the fitting on the top is to screw on an atomiser. The empty hole at the front with a cut out is where a bottle of e liquid fits in which you can squeeze to push liquid up into the atomizer to feed it. For scale, these are 90mmx50mmx45mm

Long time since I posted anything so I thought it was high time I shared! Here are some vaping mods that i've finished up in the last couple of weeks, these are all made with stabilized wood, which I stabilize myself using cactus juice, some of them are hybrids cast with a polyurethane resin to make up the blank. Most of these are local horsechestnut burr, there is one oak and one Maple at the bottom. I would dearly like to source some nice poplar, lime, or willow burr to play with too, possible birch also. Getting bored of horsechestnut, but it does give lovely results, the dyes come though nice and brightly on it.

I usually pay around £40 per cubic foot for it when i buy it. But I'd pay more if its also burry.

I begin with small blocks of wood, dry them to 0% moisture in an oven, then stabilize under vacuum in cactus juice with or without dyes. The softer and punkier the wood the better. So I take a really rotten lump of spalted beech like this - Turning it into blanks like this perhaps, which are double dyed in red and then in blue - I then shape them into the mods using pillar drill, hand router, belt sander and sand paper, and polish them up then assemble them with the electronics and hardware to arrive at the finished article like so - Really dense woods like oak, or really dark coloured woods I can't dye, so they generally remain in thier natural colours, but the customers are very much looking for the funky coloured dyed stuff so I need softer, lighter coloured woods to do it with. Also having timber with a varigated density throughout the blanks causes it to absorb stabilizing resin to differing degrees and therefore the dye so I can acheive much more interesting colouration from Burrs and Spalted woods. So the horse chestnut being fairly soft and light is giving excellent results. Woods like maple and buckeye are excellent also but its serious money to import them, the shipping is insane. Its possible that sycamore could work well, though I've never seen a sycamore burr, but i'm sure rippled and spalted sycamore would work well.

I'm based in the west midlands, solihull area. The items that I make are small, I can get 100 blanks from a cubic foot of timber, so even small burrs can be useful to me though I'm happy to take large ones if they're available.

Hi Folks, I've been lurking here for sometime but never posted before, so gotta start somewhere eh! I'm a woodworker who makes electronic cigarette mods, I stabilize and often dye the timber with cactus juice as this is what the customers are generally looking for and I've found that horse chestnut is particularly good for this. But I'm having a devil of a job finding it, I suspect it all goes for fire wood. So I though it was worth a shout to you folks to see if there was anything floating around that I could purchase, happy to pay a good price for the right wood. Thanks for reading.