Post #203607 by amiotiki on Sat, Dec 17, 2005 6:48 PM

On 2005-12-11 21:03, Lake Surfer wrote:
Poly or not... if the wood has moisture in it and it is in your dry house in the winter it may crack. If the wood is dry it probably won't crack.
Wet wood is swollen, when wood drys it pulls apart because there is no moisture to fill in the gaps This is known as cellular tension collapse and it is irreversible (amiotiki).

Coating with poly for outdoors helps shed water and moisture for the most part... cracking and checking is a natural process wood goes through anyhow when it drys,
you just hope it doesn't get too bad.

I've been doing some coursework on stabilization and conservation of wood (mostly from an archaeological standpoint) - and it can be very tricky. You don't want wet wood to dry quickly, and you DO want the cells to maintain their structure when the water leaves them. The trick to this is keeping the vacating water from collapsing the cell walls, which leads to shrinkage, cracking (both radially and tangentially), and face checking. You can 'bulk' the cells with immersion in a sucrose solution (regular old sugar), and that will help a lot (you're exchanging the water with the sucrose).

I guess it all depends on how you want your tiki to look...but if you want to avoid cracking, etc. - the best bet is to protect it from waterlogging right from the gitgo, so a poly coat or some other kind of sealant is a really good idea. Just make sure the wood is properly (slowly) dried out, keeping relative humidity around 50-60%

Sorry to 'hold forth' on you (gosh, I could go on for pages)...I know how much work you all put into your carvings - and I just love giving wood and other artifacts a chance at 'life'!

amiotiki