• May 2025 Turning Challenge: Long Neck Hollowform! (click here for details)
  • Congratulations to Phil Hamel winner of the April 2025 Turning Challenge (click here for details)
  • Congratulations to Dion Wisniewski for "Basketweave" being selected as Turning of the Week for 12 May, 2025 (click here for details)
  • Welcome new registering member. Your username must be your real First and Last name (for example: John Doe). "Screen names" and "handles" are not allowed and your registration will be deleted if you don't use your real name. Also, do not use all caps nor all lower case.

Pallet wrap to help preserve logs?

Kalia Kliban

Kalia Kliban

Joined
Feb 16, 2012
Messages
196
Likes
905
Location
Sebastopol, California
I've got some fresh-cut green manzanita that I may not be able to get to right away. Since the sapwood is so much less dense than the heartwood the logs tend to check quite badly on the bark surface. I'm considering sealing the ends with a couple coats of anchorseal and then wrapping the logs with pallet wrap to slow down the moisture loss at the bark. Anybody tried this? Any success?

I'm mostly harvesting the manzanita for the dark heartwood anyway, so surface checking isn't too much of an issue, but those checks so often go all the way down that I thought I'd give this a whirl.

Kalia
 
If I’m not mistaken, Robo uses it. Curious to see if he chimes in. I’ve tried and found that mold grows very well under it after a week or more. Maybe it’s just my eastern woods and your experience will be different. Not sure if the mold is at all harmful, but it is unappealing to me.
 
The use of plastic wrap over a long term will like Bill said cause mold, but if you only use it for a day or 2 to keep it from checking as Dave explained it works good and if the plan to resume turning the next day is interrupted = MOLD.
The one solution is to freeze it, which works for me (I cover it with snow outside my shop), but the freezing may not work with green manzanita (you could ship it to me and I will test it maybe if I get snow and continuous freezing temperatures).
 
I think it will work, but like others said mold will be an issue. It should be relatively superficial though; however, this might cause some discoloration of the sapwood of left too long. An alternative is to just submerge the wood in water (if space allows). Cooler or barrel/bucket.
 
I started using plastic wrap about a year ago on rough turned bowls, just only on the couple of inches over the edge and down the side of the rim. I suspect they are not air tight wraps. I store them on a pallet rack under a close-sided carport that is in the shade. No mold on the few pieces I have. On the walnut, the tree had been cut into blanks about 6 months prior. So, at least some drying before hand. The others were very green Norway maple. No mold... and no spliting .... at least not yet.
 
I've used pallet wrap without issue on ash, oak, elm blanks and had minimal mold issues. Turned some blanks the other day that had been wrapped for probably 6 months, no mold and no cracking,it was a sort of experiment. Box elder however was a completely different story, started to mold after a few days, even had mushrooms growing.
If you're going to try the pallet wrap, I'd skip the anchorseal altogether.
 
Mold is a far bigger issue in my hot and humid climate than it is in the frozen north. If you see mold on the surface here it will take just a few days to become fully involved throughout the piece of wood. If the wood is sopping wet, even too much Anchorseal can lead to mold. I remember about 15 - 20 years ago, the late Jim King of Peru started using plastic wrap on the tropical turning blanks that he shipped to the US. The local Rockler Hardware received a pallet of the plastic-wrapped wet tropical wood and it was already moldy and it wasn't long before all the wood was black.
 
Kalia Kliban said:
I've got some fresh-cut green manzanita that I may not be able to get to right away. Since the sapwood is so much less dense than the heartwood the logs tend to check quite badly on the bark surface. I'm considering sealing the ends with a couple coats of anchorseal and then wrapping the logs with pallet wrap to slow down the moisture loss at the bark. Anybody tried this? Any success?

I'm mostly harvesting the manzanita for the dark heartwood anyway, so surface checking isn't too much of an issue, but those checks so often go all the way down that I thought I'd give this a whirl.

Kalia
Click to expand...
I would seal the endgrain to prevent the heartwood checking as much as possible (it is what you want to use), then if you can get them, paper bags, they will slow down the fast drying and makes it less likely to get mold 1thumb.gif.
 
Anything in the maple family will get moldy, probably from the high sugar content in the wood. Other woods, not as much. The stretch film works great for many woods. I kept one madrone blank for 6 months once just by wrapping the film around it. I use it more in the summer, but even in the winter, if I am prepping more blanks than I can turn in a day, I will wrap them. As for the manzanita, I don't really know. I have one piece that is really dry. I would suggest PVA glue like Titebond or Elmers on the end grain, then maybe the stretch film. Depends on the size of the log. Most manzanita I have seen is more shrub size. When I do spindle blanks that I want to keep, I use the glue to seal the end grain, and then stretch film over that, some times.... Do make sure to do a 1/4 round profile on the ends since a sharp edge is far more prone to cracking than a rounded edge.

robo hippy
 
Dave Landers said:
Can't speak to your fancy hard-to-spell wood :) but I often use pallet wrap on wet pieces I'm turning - if I have to break for lunch or overnight. Yesterday, I wrapped a 10" dia soon-to-be hollow-form because I was concerned it would move/crack while I was hollowing (end result - success happened).
Click to expand...
If have to leave a green piece on the lathe for a break or overnight, I have some large plastic bags and a big rubber band. slip a bag over the piece and rubber band around the chuck. When I take the bag off, I turn it inside out to dry and reuse. Also sometimes cover the rim and upper 1/4 of a rough bowl with plastic wrap when drying, but I don't ever cover the whole piece for an extended amount of time. In this climate that would mildew or mold.
 
One of our club members and I processed 3-4" blanks for a workshop, and wrapped the ash wood in cling wrap. He showed me how to wrap around the long way, covering the end grain, then rotate the wood and wrap well the other direction--all sides were covered.

The demonstrator only used 1/3 of the blanks, so we stuck the remaining ones up on a high shelf in the high school's very warm shop, and forgot about them. 2 years later they were moldy, but still reasonably wet.
 
Cling film will work well keeping the air out. I use it quite a bit. Depending how big the blanks are, other uncommon options for fresh cut wood include:
Freezing
Ponding (letting them free float in a deep bucket, barrel, or lake!)
Taking a torch to old candles and covering the blank in wax
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top