Are you sure the wood is oak ???? You need to put a air tank between the vacuum chamber and the vacuum pump. No need for heating wire in a vacuum since water boils in a vacuum. You need to keep the lowered pressure for a few hours. Then it will work with the goal in mind.
Girl, you've got people trying to help you.... stop being an idiot. You've got a log that full of water, worst case scenario. People with larger setups, much better vacuums, and dryer wood still take a full day to often 2 or 3 to get down to a decent moisture content. No doubt you let that log sit wrapped in plastic for a few days and you'll see the MC go back up. You are only pulling water out of the ends mostly, and thats where you are measuring. If you don't want expert advice, go throw it in your microwave....
Paint the chamber FLAT black and put it in the sun. Run the pump for 30 minutes shut the valve off to keep the vacuum inside the chamber. Turn off the pump. The vacuum will pull the water out even if the pump is off.
I think that's the same vacuum pump I have, that I used for making vacuum tubes. It's great, but it does get hot. I've never had it actually overheat, but then again, pulling a vacuum is a lot easier on it than pulling out water. If you only pulled a partial vacuum and added a cold trap, you could probably collect the water in a separate container and spare the pump oil. It should be pretty easy to do a teardown on it; I've taken mine apart and put it back together twice, and nothing about it was difficult; they're surprisingly well-designed.
pull the "fumes" thru a tank in a freezer. moste of the water will freeze in the tank. just suck the air out of the lower part of the tank. and have the incoming air swirl inside the top of the tank. the cold temp is from the evaporation inside. so only thing you can get past that is to use time in vacuum. let it sit over night etc. the SAP is food for microbes. if you cut a tree down the sap that comes out will start to go white in hour's.
I like your idea for coasters. I've had good luck cutting sections of various widths and lengths and putting little battery powered tea lights in a hole I drill out of the top. Great video again!
hi there! have you thought about putting a simple cold trap into the vacuum line? That will condense the water, preventing contamination of the oil. Just a thought :) One other thought. You're right, microwaves will really help here. So, too would silica gel in the cylinder (reducing the need for continuous vacuum pumping)
Hey Rin. Perhaps you could get a large metal container from the scrap yard (Maybe an old oil drum or perhaps find an old fuel oil container or something of that nature) and paint it black. Put it in direct sunlight, that should heat up to at least 40-50c inside and sustain as long as you have sun. You could put a moisture trap on it (or two, depending on how big the container is). In the winter, provided it is close enough to your workshop, you could funnel some of the heat off of the stove into it via a fan or something of the sort. Or, as you said, just put the logs above the stove itself (I'd suggest building a rack out of metal mesh). I built a composter out of a 55 gallon drum and painted it black and left it in the sun. While it was shit for composting, that thing would get incredibly hot inside, hot enough that some of the grasses I put in it combusted on their own. I assume that's what happened. Unless somebody tried to burn them while I was away for the day. Either way, after that, I had temped the inside around 80c. Granted, that was direct sunlight and with very little interior ventilation (which is part of the reason it made such a shit composter).
Smaller pieces will release more water. Perhaps precut those logs to nearly the size you want and put them in the chamber. More surface area will speed things up. If you could gently heat that chamber things go even faster. You could see if someone makes a water separator for your setup.
You need a water separator or two to keep the water out of your pump. Even a simple hose going into a container 1/4 full of oil with the hose under the oil and the container and oil kept cold with ice. Then come out of the container to the vacuum pump. Water boils at 104 or 40c degrees with 27.75 inhg vacuum, and would take 2-5 days to completely dry to the center.
@@RinoaL surprised it worked for years, woods with high sap can destroy a vacuum in one use because the sap hardens inside the pump. It’s super easy to build the separator with a mason jar and makes it where you can use the vacuum pump for a lot more things. I use it with a big container for sucking the oil out of boat motors or cars, and even used once for years with a converted water heater to suck up oil for biodiesel so I didn’t have to run the dirty oil thru a pump. You can pull a vacuum, then when you open it’s sucks whatever fluid into the tank pretty quickly.
Vacuum chamber won’t kill bugs unless you do it for a long period. As for larva. I am betting it will make them pop. I had a spider live in a vacuum chamber for a week and it was as alive as the day it went in.
More simple install a separator chamber in the suction line before the bulk of the water gets to the vacuum pump, all vacuum pumps we used in lab work came with one a very simple device, once you see it you could make up easily. A glass jar, fittings n baffles.
I am not certain of of a formal name for the species but in Minnesota it is called Piss Elm. It smells bad when burnd so is not preferred as fire wood. When fresh cut red oak is still dark colored. Mentioned elsewhere here, pull the vacuume thru a steel tank in your freezer. The water will frost the inside of the tank. This will need thawing and draining but keeps the water out of the oil. If you still get water in the oil connect more tanks in series.
Could you add a second small chamber in series and set it on a block of ice to condense out a lot,of the water vapor before it gets to the pump? Also, you might save energy and overheating if you put the pump on either a vacuum switch control or cycle timer so it draws down, turns off for a while until you lose maybe 20% of the full vacuum and then run again until it draws dawn again.
One thing you are going to run into with this method is an excessive amount of splitting of the wood because you are pulling moisture out of it so fast. This is referred to as case hardening because wood dries from the outside in so you need to control the moisture content and humidity as it dries or the outside will dry much faster than the inside and lead to stress within the wood causing it to split. Typically for nearly green red oak, cut 1" thick you would dry in a standard wood kiln (basically forced-air steam-heated shed that you control the temperature and humidity level with a dehumidifier or steam control) for around 28 days. Thicker materials like these small pieces will take longer. For most hardwoods, they control the drying time and temperature so that you reach about 20-25% after the first 10-15 days. The remaining drying takes place over the remaining time. The speed that you can pull out the moisture is directly related to the wood species as softwoods can typically be dried much faster.
need to build a water trap. in a freeze dryer, there are a myriad of drying options, one could be sillica jell (or crystal cat litter after baking it at 30f for an hour.) or calcium hydroxide (sold at dollar stores as damp-rid. ) those can be in a seperate chamber inline with your pump and your drying chamber. another technique is to super chill to freeze the water in a ubend of air pipe.
I got this off google for you Red oak has a notorious reputation as being the “smelly wood” in the wood burner community, as it can smell like vomit, poop, urine, manure, or in short, anything that has a foul odor.
I know I'm a bit late to post here, oh well. If you put you first freeze the wood, and then put your vacuum chamber in a freezer, and alternate heating cycles, you may achieve some interesting results ;) This is similar to how consumer grade (and many lower level commercial grade) freeze drying machines work.
A bit of wax or latex paint will help with the checking on the end of your logs. You could also use Anchorseal to seal the ends of the logs if you felt like buying a commercial product.
Wood glue works well. I’ve heard of good success with beeswax if you have bees. I’m currently using anchor seal, which seems to be a large percentage of wax. I’ve also noticed that I have to seal the ends right after I cut to have the best results. It’s amazing how quickly some wood will start checking
You could try and build a solar wood drying kiln. Wood will naturally dry an inch per year in thickness. I would also take the bark off to help drying. look up Matthew Cremona on you-tube, he cuts and drys a lot of logs to make furniture. If the log end were sealed you would less splits.
thats what i have with the white tarp shed. and yes i watch his videos, his processes annoy me slightly but he does have some good advice. he dries his logs with the bark on for the same reason i do, because its a pain to get the bark off.
Cut them into slabs . surface area is the key . wood can be case hardened . green inside, dry outside .case hardened wood will pinch blades, warp after cutting, twist . When slabbed, separate with "stickers" and stack and put weight on them. try to dry wood over weeks not minutes. Tootles... Wade
Most commercial wood vacuum kilns use a liquid ring vacuum pump. The liquid ring pump is moisture tolerant. A electric heating pad would radiate enough heat in this low convection environment too.
@@RinoaL Maybe you can pick up an old dental office pump for a small vacuum chamber. Many of these were liquid ring pumps. The wood turners do quite a bit of vacuum drying with electric water heaters and copper heating loops.
Curing wood properly takes months or even years in a woodshed. If you want to make coasters perhaps cut them before you put them in the vacuum chamber.
If you imagine that piece of wood is a big hunk of meat, you would expect it to take at least an hour for the middle to even get warm let alone cook. And at these temps it would take many many hours. Like others have said the wood needs to be left in vacuum for at least a day, if not multiple days and this will also allow the log to really become warm for a long time, allowing moisture to evaporate from the edge all the way to the centre.
You need a few other elements to make this work properly. I did a presentation on drying wood with a vacuum kiln for the Edmonton Woodturners Guild last June if you are interested.
@@RinoaL Since your chamber is metallic, you might get factors of radiant heat when heated, even if the vacuum is inefficient at transferring heat through convection, making it decently efficient at surface drying.
You need to warm the wood to about 40 deg c to get the water to “boil” under vacuum of 27hg. If you have a good seal so you don’t have to run the pump constantly and a good moisture trap before the pump you will get better results. Also let the water condense inside the tank and drain out through an isolation tank.
Yes I do understand how it works, I have built one and mine works. It takes about 2 or three days to totally dry the timber depending on the moisture content and wood thickness. It won’t work very well to remove the moisture from a full long log as it is too hard to get the temperature to the centre. The principle is that at a given vacuum eg 27hg the water will be boiled off at a given temperature about 40 deg. C. If you can get the chamber to hold the vacuum the water will come out of the wood when it is heated to the correct temp. It will then condense on the metal wall of the tank and can be drained into an isolation chamber and removed. If you have a good enough seal you only need to run the pump for short periods. Also the use of moisture traps eg a through chamber full of copper pot scrubbers kept cool and between the pump and your vac chamber will help keep your pump oil drier. Read the book by Joshua Salesin and you will get an idea how his is done. Also there is a goog video by a guy in Canada ( I think Edmonton ) who has done one. Mine is similar to his.
I don’t know a about yours but my vac kiln is 400mm x 1200 mm, much bigger than my microwave. Also microwave dries the wood at a higher temp and cause more checking and warping of the wood especially end grain wood like log cookies. I have had some luck with thin turned bowls in the microwave but you have to be careful to keep the wall thickness even so it doesn’t crack and they still warp. In the vac kiln you use much less heat and have the wood dry before you work it so you get less warping. Vac kiln won’t do breakfast as quick as the microwave though😆
Interesting think like the log is a resistor? what would happen putting electrodes on each end a current meter and feed a voltage to each end ac or dc? or a pulse width modulation like from a atx power supply
@@RinoaL yes maybe a light load for a long period of time to see if it world change the looks to something interesting? dont want a possible explosion of the log
Would it work better if you put the log in a warm oven to thoroughly heat it all the way through before sticking it in the vacuum chamber? That way your heating coils are only having to maintain the temperature rather than heat the log up from ambient.
i'm wondering where you're from, that pounds & ounces are confusing. i heard you say 'aluminium' [instead of the american 'aluminum'] in one of your other videos. are/were you canadian, perhaps ? just curious. please take care & stay safe.
@@duettatraktor7949 I was more concerned of the hair, fingers, face on the spinning wheels myself if someone were to stumble into it. But like I said, 'to each their own'.
i seem to recall the tally ho project had an issue with some of their white oak, that had a vinegary smell, when they were making the deck, and it was a problem with the oak that meant it was reduced strength, some sort of bug i think
yeah it was some dry rot or whatever, shame since he payed like what, 20,000$ for all of it, but thankfully it was only one board. i think this might just be how red oak is.
@@RinoaL Obviously. Ive been confused though as to why you keep trying to dry it in log form. That is typically done when you are seasoning firewood. But if you are trying to make mallets still the wood is always going to be easier to cut and less stressful on your machines when wet, and drying your logs is eventually going to net you, rotted logs. Cut it to your desired shape/size when wet, and then dry the cut lumber so it cures properly. Just trying to be helpful
Just came across this but I would recommend reading Vacuum Kiln Drying for Woodworkers: How to Build and Use a Vacuum Kiln for Drying Wood by Joshua Salesi. It is available on Amazon and will be very helpful.
I have a old Refrigeration Pump I use for this stuff. Mostly to pull air out of castings. Never thought about water collection. Betting it's oil is half water about now. LOL Eaaaa They're free.
Brilliant, you drug us through that with you, all the time leading us to believe that you came to a conclusion. Nope, you ended up telling absolutely nothing of value, and honestly you are very note taking proficient. Vacuum kiln drying works, that's already been proven. I was hoping to gain something here, but didn't.
@RinoaL perhaps you can enlighten me as to what you learned? Your conclusions about the mold were wrong, mold grow typically in cold wet environments. Your conclusion that vacuum drying was not a substantial benefit was wrong. It's amazing when done correctly. I liked the way you conducted it like a college lab project. I had high hopes, and felt disappointed in the end. I wish you the best, I believe you have talent keep going.
The fastest way I've found is to build a solar kiln. Either build a shed with the transparent poly roofing they sell at hardware stores, or get one of those small tarp sheds that are advertised as green houses. It will take a few months for the soil underneath the kiln to dry out, which during that time it'll be very wet, but as it blocks the rain and bakes the moisture out of the ground it will end up being very dry and warm inside on a summer day.
May I suggest "Vacuum Kiln Drying for Woodworkers" by Joshua Salesian? Its excellent.ISBN-10: 1546686126 ISBN-13:: 978-1546686126. First copyright date 2008, latest 2017. It is very thorough. I'm going to start trying to figure out how to build a vacuum kiln myself and found it an excellent starting point.
