boiling small dogwood blanks

[Russ Kaiser]

Hello everyone,

Before I ask my question let me give you a little background. I have been turning for a couple of years now but instead of making bowls, pens, furniture elements, and decorative items I was making mandrels, tools, and other widgets to help me work on musical instruments. As a result, I was never really concerned with the finish and quality of my work. Starting this year I started making wooden pieces for the fiberglass serpents that I was making. These pieces included mouthpieces, finger hole trim rings, and a bell garland rings. Now the wood choices, quality of work, and finish matter quite a bit. This looks like a great place to pick up all the pointers I need to improve my work.

My initial question involves prepping green wood blanks to be used for my finger trim rings and mouthpieces. Up to this point I have been buying stabilized wood, but I just took down a dogwood in my yard and I would like to experiment with some of it to see if it is suitable for this type of work. A typical mouthpiece blank would be 2 x 2 x 3. Is this blank small enough to use the boiling method without roughing out the mouthpiece first? How about a 1 x 6 dowel, could this be boiled? After the boiling do I need to coat the end grain while it dries?

Here is a photo of a mouthpiece in African Blackwood.

http://www.kaiserserpents.com/images/serp6_06.jpg

http://www.kaiserserpents.com

[Patrick Taylor]

Welcome! I'm no expert on boiling, but you might also consider the alcohol soaking method (just search here at SMC for "DNA"). I used DNA to help dry a jar top I turned end-grain from a wet maple branch. I was expecting the "pac-man" effect as it dried, but I believe the DNA gods were looking down on me that day, and it didn't crack a bit. :)

[Brodie Brickey]

For a definitive response to boiling you may want to contact Steve Russell, a pro turner out of Texas. He is a great advocate of boiling. He recommends, boiling rough turned bowls for 1 hour per inch of thickness in the rough blank and one of the most important points is to have the thickness consistent.

Boiling apparently relieves the stress the wood is under, but doesn't dramatically speed the drying process (still takes 2 months to dry). Wood loss is in the 5% or less range using this method with bowls as I understand even with very movement oriented woods.

[Bernie Weishapl]

I'll throw another iron in the fire. I use liquid dishwashing detergent and the DNA method. I tried the LDD one some cottonwood. This is the first time I haven't had a crack develop in wet cottonwood. So going to keep trying it to see how it works out. A friend of mine says that is all he uses and hasn't lost but maybe a half dozen bowls in 4 yrs.

[Dale Bright]

Pieces of wood that small could also be dried in a microwave. Just another option for you. There is lots of info on microwave drying available by doing a Google search.

[Philip Duffy]

Russ, You should experiment with more than one method. I have found that, for small pieces, micro works very well, provided you do not burn the wood. Keep the level low, let the pieces cool between each time, do 3 to 5 iterations at low settings and then crank it up a notch. But, you need an accurate scale to do the job right, and start with a green wt. When the wt.loss gets to nearly zero, stop. At that point you will likely need to do a finish turning and put on some finish. Wrap the piece in a paper towel to avoid conflicts with the Queen of the Kitchen! Good luck.