Pentacryl

[Bill Bulloch]

Does anyone have any experience with Pentacryl for treating Green Wood?

[Bob Hamilton]

Hi, Bill:
I bought a bottle quite a few years ago to try it out. I happened to have several slabs of white ash that I had grabbed from a local sawmill. They were the slabs they cut off the log to square it up before sawing it into boards so they were all sapwood. I roughed out about 10 6" to 8" bowls from the slabs and treated 5 of them with Pentacryl and left the other 5 alone. It was apparently not a good choice of wood for the experiment since as it happened all 10 of them dried without cracking. As I recall I did not care for the smell of the Penacryl and there was a bit of discoloration of the wood from it. Once it was finish turned I don't think I could tell which had been treated and which had not. I put the rest of the plastic bottle of Pentacryl up on a shelf and more or less forgot about it for a couple of years. I was unpleasantly reminded that it was there when I went to get something off the same shelf and found that the plastic bottle has spontaneously started leaking and had made a heck of a mess of anything that was near it on the shelf or below the shelf. I can't say I was best pleased.

Take care
Bob

[Bruce Lewane]

I use it frequently. Not soaking a rough turned piece but just brushing a heavy coating and letting the piece sit for a month or so. My impression is that it does help, somewhat depending on the amount of moisture in the wood in the first place.
That said, now that my inventory of wood has grown, I tend to season it to a moisture content of 15 to 20 percent at which point I can finish turn it with a certain amount of impunity. It still may warp a bit but cracking is very seldom a concern. As with most wood working, nothing is certain.
I always remind myself the old saying.
"Wood moves."

[Dennis Nagle]

Last October I turned a vase right down the center of a piece of black walnut. It is 14" tall and about 12" wide with an 8" opening. I made the wall thickness about an inch. I took it off the lathe, put it in a plastic bag, filled it with pea gravel (so I wouldn't have to use as much Pentacryl), then filled it with Pentacryl and let it over flow, then pulled the bag up tight so the inside and outside of the vase was submerged in the stuff. After a week I pulled it out, cleaned it off and put it on the shelve. Do this day there are no cracks or splits anywhere in the wood and the pith is still as tight as it was when I first turned it.