Doors to the '23 Rick

Saving Rotten Wood Pieces

PAGE 3 of 4

Here is a closer view of my rotten area after drilling holes in it. The main purpose of this is to give the epoxy something to bit into. You want to drill down to the good wood so the liquid epoxy will fill the whole area from the rotten wood to go wood.

You can see along the upper edge I didn't have to drill very far for good wood. After the drilling was done I gave the board a good hand sanding and blew it clean with an air hose.

I needed to find a simple tray to hold my rot killer sauce and my piece of wood. I found a paint roller tray to work great for this. I put on a pair of rubber glues and started applying my rot killer to my board. I gave it three coats over a period of an hour. The first coat soaked in pretty well after about 15 minutes, the second coat took a lot longer. Each coat was very thick and just dripping off the wood.

This rot killer sauce is about the thickness of maple syrup.

Here are my piece after three coats of the rot killer. You can see all the holes are filled with fluid.
I now left these parts sit over night to soak up and dry. There isn't to much drying since our sauce doesn't have any water in it to evaporate. The next morning it was all soaked into the wood and a nice shinny coating was still across all the wood.
The left over sauce I put back into my pan and stored away in the refrigerator. In the instruction they state this will help keep our sauce stable and not crystallize back up.

Again I'd advise not putting this into the refrigerator in the house. This goes into the shop refrigerator!!

Now it's time for part 2 of this process. Here you can see I've installed the parts into an oven. This oven is my shop oven for when I weld cast iron parts, not my wife's oven in the house!!! Very important not to confuse your ovens!!
This part of the process is to remove the powder pole bugs that drill the small holes in the wood. When I was at my wood experts shop he pulled a book out and we reviewed how to kill these bugs. These bugs are only found in non kiln dried wood...like all pieces found on my car. Both the rot and these bugs like wood that have over 15% moisture found in it. So at certain times of the year these guys could really like this piece of wood. If you seal over them they still might pop through the sealer then that hole will help let moisture back into your piece of wood.
The book stated to warm the wood to 180-200 degrees for 2 hrs, or 100 degrees for 12 hrs. I cooked my wood at 200 degrees for over 4 hrs to really make sure the core of my wood was good and warm.
With the rot killer on these pieces the first hour of cooking really made a smell. Make sure you have good ventilation available.

BACK	NEXT