Haven’t used either one. Mine is a Oneway Chuck. Excellent product. Bought it at Lee Valley years ago. The basic Chuck is about $200 CDN. There are most expensive Oneway options as well but I’ve never seen the need to upgrade.
If it is the wood you could use a different type of wood to act as a barrier between the YaYa wood and the resin.
Mail call brought a 1/2” router bit extender that is the perfect 12 buck collet chuck for my wonderful Beall I-X collets. Set up in the sunshine immediately and turned a couple more prototypes. The eagley one is pearwood, the beehive probably cherry. For quick prototypes I’m pretty happy. What did I learn? The router bit extender works great once it is bound down tight. Variable rings on a beehive look dumb, but now I have a good idea of the depth and spacing I’ll want. They are both drilled for 28mm boar knots and have a light beeswax finish just to bring out any grain. I am liking the feel of the pearwood. The cherry has nicer color, grain, and spalting; but it’s kinda punky. I’ve got the worst side showing - nicest spalting and weakest wood. I will be interested to see what sort of blanks I can get out of my black walnut. The set up:
I’m not familiar with those bit extenders. Very interesting. As for the punky wood- Have you used wood stabilizer before? Works well on soft or punky woods.
I just happened to run into the bit extenders when looking for the right chuck to hold the Beall I-X. Looks like the are many price points, but the low end one I bought is doing the job and staying well out of the way while turning. I figured the runout spec must be good if it does the job in a router. A bonus is that the extender’s locking nut presses out against the I-X collet when loosening, helps free the Beall’s shank from the extender’s collet. I haven’t tried wood stabilizer yet. I have used Minwax’s brush-on ‘wood hardener’ product for woodwork restoration around the home, but I don’t think that would work well for turning. Any suggested products? The blank I was using for the prototype wasn’t weak enough to crumble, but it couldn’t be turned or sanded to a clean surface.
Thanks! The spherical profile on this prototype is a real fist filler. My friend has big paws and likes big scrubby knots, so this is the way I may loft the final product. It won’t splay much.
Sorry it took so long to get back to this. Very possible the YaYa had a little moisture to it. I would pour a small amount in a cup (keep it clear) and stick a scrap of both woods in there and see what it does. Moisture in the wood has screwed up many things for me with Alumilite. This is Teak in Alumilite. It's over 20 years old but was sitting in a shed in the damp Santa Cruz Mountains where it obviously picked up more moisture than I expected. Alumilite still hardens but it puffs up if the wood isn't totally dry. A few thin scraps of wood tested in clear resin will possibly give you the answer.
The product I had was called Pentacryl. I used it to stop checking in a drying burl a number of years ago.
That is very good advice! Thanks for that, and yes, I think this may be the culprit...I'll look to do the moisture test you recommended.
Tried to turn a test handle today, but I liked the woodpile blank so much I finished it off. It was the crazy grain that got me. I even came to acceptance of the tiny tear out in the twig sized knot. I will mail this off to a friend with a love of large scrubby knots and gargantuan handles. I will make him glue the knot, hoping that he’ll set it at least 3mm higher. Pearwood Huge eagle-ish shape, just under 60mm tall and 50mm max diameter 28mm Shave Forge boar knot Beeswax finish Scrubby loft (and how!)
Resin ‘Fixing’ Project: Earlier on this thread I posted pics of a brush handle of mine where the resin didn’t harden properly on the wood edge. Lots of good advice came as to why- probably moisture in the wood. I decided to try and save the resin top as I really liked it. Here is the brush ‘before’, you can see the whitish, cloudy soft resin along the wood edge: Took it back to the lathe to partition off the top. I turned a 1 inch round ‘end’ to fit into a new handle. In the pic below, you can see where I was about to part it off. I also wanted wood on the bottom for a good bond, and not the 1/8th in or so of soft resin. Chose the same wood, YaYa: Next, I turned a new base for the handle, and used a 1 inch sawtooth to hollow out a receptacle for the top part: Finished turning it and made sure the top fit well: Epoxied the two pieces together, applied finish, some buffing and voila: I’m quite pleased with it, truth be told.
Bravo! Impressive fix. Thanks for sharing the whole process. Truth be told, I like the new profile and cleaner/clearer transition to the resin even better than the original! Work of art.
Some inkwell stands ready to go out to a friend. Pearwood. While I was at it, some yard art. Inkwells for scale. Deodar cedar. The odd wavy seam in the grain is a transition between a grafted dwarf deodar cultivar and the rootstock that bolted through and grew to 30 feet. I think I turned it just to see if my lathe and I could work at that size. About a peck and a half of shavings. If I could find a 125mm diameter knot I could loft it and justify posting to a brushmaking forum. Meanwhile, it’s a lonely rook that will never find its chess set.