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G'day
I have just started playing with cactus juice and find my castings are like concrete . It takes me an hour to turn a pen . I am wondering if I am cooking it too long .I have been cureing at the recommended temperature for 3 hours .This was for a single pen blank or for a four pen blank .After C J stabilization ,they were embedded in epoxy .
Ted
Is the blank super hard, or just hard to turn?
Stabilising hardens the timber by filling the micro voids within the timber but I've never found it to turn into super hard. It does however increase the abrasiveness of the timber. Epoxy also gets very hard with time, plus the combined epoxy and stabilised timber will make your tools blunt very quickly. I use TCT tools on my larger castings as my good quality HSS tools hardly last one pass on my pepper grinders
Neil
I wondered where you'd got to .
It is the blank that is super hard but it pretty much fits your description of turning your pepper grinders .When you say" epoxy gets hard with time"I presume you mean curing time . Not the age of the
resin . In fact this was the last of an old batch of resin, about 2 years old, and the residue in the bottle had gone hard and was dumped after this .
Ted