Pentacryl: Wood Stabilization

George Vondriska

Duration: 18 mins

Description
Discussions

Description

Turning bowls while the wood is still green (wet) has some advantages. When you harvest your own bowl blanks you can pick from lots of different species and cool looking stuff. And, green wood is a lot easier to turn than dry wood.
The downside to working with green wood, whether it’s bowl blanks, slabs or log rounds, is its tendency to distort and crack as it dries. Pentacryl provides a great answer for this. It’s a wood stabilizer that not only helps prevent distortion and cracking, it also helps the material dry more quickly.

How to use Pentacryl

Your best bet to get good absorption from your Pentacryl is to immerse the wood in it. Yep, give your material a Pentacryl bath. You can also brush Pentacryl onto the outside surfaces and let it soak in from there. The larger the item the longer you need to let the wood soak. The bowl blank in this video only needed about three days.

A very cool aspect of Pentacryl is that when you’re done with the soak you can pour the excess back in the bottle and use it on your next project.