Thread: Blue H2 Treated Pine - Removal of Dye

A long time ago I built book shelves out of structural pine bearers/joists after planing it to remove the rough header finish, very clear and you can't tell the difference between it and normal stuff except it is way better in quality.

The blue dye is not deep at all and removing a few mm should get rid of it.

I'd say it's safe to use in furniture, but not anything to do with food.

I'd also suggest after you've bought it, leave it to acclimatise for a few weeks, preferably with spacers in between to allow good airflow around each board. My experience from working in a timberyard is that it often wasn't left to dry out long after being treated and acted as such.

I'm glad to hear the blue is easily removed, I was getting worried that I was just going to have to buy something pre-made.
I have read about letting the wood acclimatise for a few weeks. I suppose I should probably finish all the other projects I have going first anyway. Might go buy it this weekend. Thanks guys, I'm exciting about building my workbench, the garage floor and work horses are becoming rather uncomfortable

H2 timber will be treated with insect repellants/insecticides using an envelope treatment, so the chemicals will penetrate 2-10mm into the wood but not necessarily through the entire section if you're using something like 90x45. What brand does your Bunnings carry? Contact them for their MSDS to find out what chemical they use in the treatment. If it's being sold in Australia, it'll be safe to handle, but be aware that the 'safeness' of a product is rated against it's expected use. The expected use for H2 treated timber is in framing, so how safe is it in a high contact use like furniture? That's going to be your call to make. The dust is going to be the dangerous part, you'll need to be fastidious about cleaning it up and not ingesting/inhaling any. Personally I wouldn't eat my dinner off a table I sprayed with Mortein, so I probably wouldn't make a dining table out of treated timber. Treated timber will also emit an odor for quite some time, probably not normally that noticeable but it may stink up clothes if you make drawers or cupboards using the treated timber.

Untreated can't be that much more expensive than the H2 stuff can it?

I wouldn't be touching treated stuff without a good reason. Aside from the smell, I just don't think it's worth exposing yourself to anything you don't have to

We don't use much H2 blue in Melbourne. In the last two years making timber roof trusses, we have needed to use it on one job only...and the boss purchased CCA instead of H2 blue..LOL! But about 6 years ago we had two identical medium sized single story houses to produce the trusses for. H2 blue was specified and the job consumed about 3 1/2 packs of it. I was one of two sawyers, and I was doing most of the work. After the first day my forearms felt weird. The second day, my forearms were tingling. The third half day had my forearms tingling to the point of kinda sorta maybe seeing a doctor about it. But then I asked the other bloke that was cutting if he had the same issues. He did so it was all good..I guess. Took about three weeks for the tingling to go away. I guess what ever the treatment is, my body absorbed it through my hands and it traveled up the forearms. It didn't kill me, so I would work with it again, but given the choice I wouldn't.

edit: the few packs of H2 blue were VERY freshly treated. Almost wet with chemical.

Originally Posted by Alkahestic

Untreated can't be that much more expensive than the H2 stuff can it?

that would be my thinking, especially after you remove 7-8 mm (say) from each face turning a 90 x 45 into an 75 x 30

Originally Posted by JustinH

I have read about letting the wood acclimatise for a few weeks. I suppose I should probably finish all the other projects I have going first anyway. Might go buy it this weekend.

perhaps you'll need to allow the H2 pine to "acclimatise" for a few months. House frames can be built from freshly felled timber which eventually reaches optimum while inside a wall. Furniture requires seasoned timber, either kiln dried or air dried at the rate of 1 year per 25 mm of thickness.

I second the notion of avoiding it like the plague. Its not only the dust you'll need to be worried about but the ongoing regular contact with the chemicals.

If you're building a bench out of pine due to lack of funds go to a salvage yard there's plenty around your area that will provide salvaged timber at a similar price if not better than what you'll find in the big box stores.

Also unless you have the required tooling eg thicknesser, jointer etc by the time you remove 2-10mm of wood required to complete a work bench, you may either be considering retirement or an alternative hobby as its not a fun task especially when you're just starting out.

Here's a link to the MSDS for the DeterMite chemical used to create the H2 pine.
The active ingredient is Bifenthrin, 0.4 - 0.6%. It's a synthetic Pyrethrin.

Here is the safety instruction for use of H2 timber
http://www.kopperspc.com.au/pdf/dete...f-brochure.pdf
Interesting even using the raw liquid, the 2-3% amount of petroleum distillate (light oil) used in the DeterMite rates a OHS level (5ppm in the mist) but the Bifenthrin component doesn't

Here is a MSDS for Bifenthrin.
https://homeshieldxp.com/wp-content/...thrin-MSDS.pdf
It's not cancer inducing and has low skin contact and inhalation toxicity.
Ingestion toxicity is considered moderate, LD50 for rabbits is 5mg/kg.
A 50 kg person would have to drink a few litres of the raw DeterMite liquid to reach that level of ingestion toxicity.
I think you would be well and truly sick after just a few mils and vomit it all up.
Some people may be more sensitive or allergic to it which is a whole different ball game.
I'd say you are more at risk from the wood dust than the Bifentrin.

Even so, I still wouldn't bother using H2 treated wood for the purposes described by the OP .

Why don’t you just make a good solid ladder frame and stick a sheet of 17mm ply on it for a bench top

Thank you all for your responses, I have been reading them and following links looking for further information etc. I'll try and respond to all the suggestions briefly.

Why not use untreated pine? - Primarily cost, I need around 70lm, so as a proportion of the total cost, an additional $70 or so is significant(there are a lot of tools I'd like to buy). It's also a little less convenient and the availability fluctuates and is uncertain.

Why not go to a salvage yard if money is a concern? - Mostly because hand tools are my main interest and hand planing hard wood that might have nails or screws in it is going to make it a much bigger job. Also, based off the one salvage yard I did visit, it seems like it will be difficult to have a design and then go to a salvage yard to purchase the wood. Instead, I'd need to have a rough idea, go and buy what I could and then come up with a design based off of that. Not to say it couldn't be done, but I have no experience with wood work so to start with I'd rather work from a design made by someone who knows what they're doing. Not to mention, given that this is all due to questioning treatment safety, I have no idea what salvaged wood has been exposed to or treated with.

Extra work with preparation, planing etc. - As mentioned, hand tools are my main interest, I'm not at all opposed to using power tools, but I'm doing woodworking at least as much for the woodworking as the end product and I enjoy the skill involved with hand tools. This workbench is my first big project and I expect it to be a good opportunity to learn and practice skills. The workbench design I've decided on is essentially Paul Sellers one with a few changes, mostly in increasing the width and changing the dimensions slightly to allow me to use the same size wood for most of it. I had started looking up different designs but decided that I could spend several months coming up with a design and then probably find 100 things I wish I'd done differently, so I'll just go with the design which has several hours of instructional videos and was designed by the person whose philosophy I value and have learnt most of my skills from so far.

Safety, risk etc. - I take everyone's input and cautions seriously, we're expecting our first child in 6 months(did I mention the cost?), so safety is especially important to me at the moment. It seems most people's caution comes from the lack of reliable information on the topic, which I think is a very good approach. As someone who likes to understand things as much as I can, I contacted the CSIRO who responded with a very detailed and interesting email which ultimately gave me no answers but several avenues to pursue. I did end up getting a response from Wood Solutions who, according to their email signature, are "an industry initiative designed to provide independent, non-proprietary information about timber and wood products to professionals and companies involved in building design and construction" and based off of this and them being recommended by the CSIRO, I consider them to be a fairly reliable source.
Their response is as follows:

...we don’t see any problem using H2F treated pine to make furniture, except that is has a blue dye added for identification purposes. Your furniture would not have a natural pine look and presumably would have to be painted. The treatment is the same as the chemical used for flea collars for dogs and cats, as explained on the NSW EPA website here: https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/your-envi...ents/blue-pine. The difference between H2 and H2F is that H2 is intended for use north of the Tropic of Capricorn where termites are more voracious. Consequently H2 treated timber requires greater penetration of preservative into the timber. H2 treated timber is identified by a red dye. H2F timber is only suitable for use south of the Tropic of Capricorn.

In addition to this, reading the SDS for the treatment chemicals, it seems, as BobL mentioned, a very large quantity of the pure chemical would need to come into skin contact or be ingested for it to be toxic. It would be difficult to touch or consume that much of the chemical once applied to the wood and I'll be planing all surfaces so the most saturated areas will be removed anyway. At this point, I'm satisfied to use the H2F treated pine for furniture. The workbench will be first, so once that is completed, I'll re-assess how it went and decide if I will use it for our bookcase/wall-unit/cabinet thing.

My book shelves haven't killed anyone and they have been up for about 30 years now and though I didn't mention it all structural pine is treated as are mine. Every brick veneer house if full of the stuff so I fail to see what the problems are.

Originally Posted by JustinH

Why not use untreated pine? - Primarily cost, I need around 70lm, so as a proportion of the total cost, an additional $70 or so is significant(there are a lot of tools I'd like to buy). It's also a little less convenient and the availability fluctuates and is uncertain.

I understand where you are coming from, but encourage you to do your sums very carefully.

My expectation is that once you factor in the material you will loose removing the layer containing the blue dyed treatment, the additional material required will bring the total cost up to around the same as for untreated pine.

I'm seeing two issues here
1. safety. You appear to have this covered. Once the solvent evaporates, the residual chemicals are safe enough unless you are deliberately eating them.
2. usability. Personally I'd want a bench top that was "pine" coloured, rather than BLUE, for two reasons. The blue dye might transfer to a piece I was working on and it's much nicer to work on a plain (bland) surface. Of course, the legs of your bench can quite happily remain blue -- except for where they form a part of clamping surface.