Making Log Cookies

A.J. one of the questions I get from people pretty often is, they want to cut log cookies like this and the problem is wood doesn't dry worth a darn when it's still in this round shape like this. It's very prone to cracking. Now, you had a job come up where you had to make a bunch of these. What was the deal with that again?

Well it was a wedding and they we're going to place a jar with a candle on each one on each table. And they had, I think they had 30 tables. This was the centerpiece. And your goal was to make a bunch of these cookies with no cracks in them and they really wanted the bark to stay on, so they would look nice. So what was your approach for that?

Well I took a green log, which someone gave me and tried a couple of methods for cutting them and getting them even was a bit of a problem. So I ended up making a sled for the bandsaw. It's in the article on the website. Yeah, so we've got the sled for cross cutting these babies is in an article on the woodworkers Guild of America site. You can get all the details on that sled.

So you came up with a way to uniformly cut your cookies but then you had all these dripping wet sections. Right, and to prevent the cracking I treated them with Pentacryl and the Pentacryl this drinks it up pretty fast. Even though it's green wood it drank up quite a bit of it. You soak them or brush them? No I just brushed it, both sides.

So the Pentacryl product is pretty cool, whether you do this or you're turning green bowls it's a liquid that you can brush on or you can immerse the wood completely in it. And the key is it absorbs into the cells and it stabilizes them. And this is, how old is this one again? Five, six months ago I cut them. And it's actually just been sitting here in my shop the whole time, it's pretty dry in here.

So if anything was going to cause this thing to crack being in this environment sure would have made that happen. So, couple little hairline checks, but no grand canyons. And it's amazing that the bark is actually still rock solid on the thing and no signs of falling off. So the key is, cut a green log. Don't let the log dry before you cut it.

Your band saw sled to make it safe, right? Cause it's a little dicey. Oh boy! A little dicey cutting a round stock on your band saw. And then the application of Pentacryl which you can look that up on the web it's very commonly available to stabilize it.

Now A.J. these are pretty smooth and you really didn't, you didn't do any sanding on them, right? But it was all about blade selection. Right I used a real fine, a fairly fine tooth blade on the bandsaw, six tooth per inch blade. And the finish came up because the wood is fairly soft when it's wet like this, it came out very nice.

Well, and that's a big deal, cause sanding this dripping green wet wood would clog your sandpaper, just like that. So right off you went, right off the bandsaw to the Pentacryl. Once the Pentacryl had a chance to do its job a little bit of top coat on here, what'd you use for that? I used to just polyurethane setting.