Posted by bartman on 5/26/2013, 9:40 pm Moonsnail Master
Does anyone have any idea how long to soak a deadeye that is saturated with salt water - i recovered one two weeks ago and been soaking it in freshwater ever since. To be honest it is dam near perfect and i do not want to damage it by taking it out out to soon.. I know it is made of that Iron Wood Stuff but i don't want it to crack - does anyone have any experience with this.... also what do you recommend putting on it to bring out the grain - i can see it looks like a real nice gun stock so i dont want to ruin the look... any help would be great
You should talk to Gary M. from the Metuchen Underwater Club. He once recovered a latern with a wood handle and was able to preserve the wood perfectly. The problem is that there are probably worms in the wood. The worms are leaving or dying in the freshwater, but they have left worm holes or paths in the wood. Once the wood dries out it can crumble. You have to "refill" the holes or gaps created by the worms. It's a slow methodical process to do it, but it works. After 6 months in a freshwater soak, you will need to start soaking it with sugar water (10%), for the first month, then 20% the second, then 30% and so on. The sugar crystals get into the holes and just stay there. After 6 months of this. Then you can remove it from the soaking process and when it dries out it won't crumble. Hope it helps.
RJ is right, and the procedure I used was taken from the TAMU website--the second link that Gene provided. The sugar treatment took time, but left the lantern handle looking like it had never been wet, and it had been submerged since the Goulandris sank.
The pros would use a series of polyethylene glycol baths, increasing the molecular weight of the polymer with each successive bath. This gradually fills in the voids in the wood cells, so that the cell walls don't collapse and cause splitting when the wood dries. Sugar works as a poor man's substitute, since there are some similarities in structure and properties. I started with 1% sugar in water, and went up in maybe a dozen steps to 70% sugar in water, occasionally adding a drop or two of bleach (I was working on a very small scale) to keep bacteria from growing.
For something as big as a deadeye, you'll be soaking quite awhile. A year might not be unreasonable. Or, you can send me the deadeye, and at the end of the treatment I'll send you back a picture of how it turned out!
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