A Bark for Time

How does one know that woodworking and craft-making borderlines on the DSM scale for some form of obsession? Perhaps when your son (child) survives a horrific auto accident that could have taken his life and upon seeing a piece of bark (from the tree that his car struck) your first thought is to make something out of it. Yeah. That's when I knew that maybe I could use a little help. How to stabilize tree bark – In terms of makers and making the point of this video is to show that stabilizing resin is very effective in stabilizing dry tree bark. As this was the only piece of the tree that I have from my son’s auto accident (and the only remaining piece of that tree at all now) I did test the process on another piece of tree bark first, so that this piece of bark wasn’t used as the guinea pig. I kinda have plans to make a longer video on the process of making the vacuum chamber, but I doubt that I will get to it. Honestly I think it would be painful to watch. It really is just as I briefly described in this video – a plywood box lined with formica on the inside faces and lexan for the front and back faces. I used plenty of caulking in the joinery to help make it more air-tight, which probably didn’t help much. There are plenty of videos and other literature out there if you need more information on how to stabilize wood with an impregnating, stabilizing resin such as Cactus Juice - in fact that's the only brand of which I am aware at the moment. The process I followed is pretty much the same as what most anyone else would do. The only caveat is that I did not wrap the bark in foil as I did not want the hardened resin to glue foil to the bark. Plus once the bark was impregnated with resin atmospheric pressure was enough to keep the resin inside the bark. I would advise to not bake a piece of resin impregnated bark too long. In my opinion I let this one cook a little too long as I ended up with some burning, but under the bar-top epoxy it blends in well with the rest of the bark. The vacuum pump I used is an old air compressor. I used JB Weld to modify the air intake on it to fit the vacuum hose. You may notice that I used a two-stage system for the vacuum chamber. The air was drawn through a first stage prior to drawing air from the vacuum chamber. The first stage was simply an overflow in the event that I drew the resin out of the vacuum chamber. As it worked out it was unnecessary, but I may still use it on future resin-stabilized projects anyway as it doesn’t hurt to have a safeguard against drawing resin into the vacuum pump. Oh, that compressor worked very well, but it started burning oil or something as it was spewing out an oily smoke at the air outlet. So I switched to a different air pump. It’s a smaller one that I acquired that’s an old air pump used as a medical device for – things I don’t know and don’t want to imagine. It worked just as well. The species of the tree is unknown, but I think it was a type of maple. Time waits for no one – In terms of existentialism and metaphysics the point of this video is simple. We are here and we are here now. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Now. Now is all we have, ever had, and ever will have. This is not to say forget the past, or don’t make plans for the future. It is to say – live … now. For those who missed the point at the end of the video - the darkness with the continuing sound of the swing - the darkness is time past and time future. The swing is the passage of time. The dog’s bark at the very end? I don’t know. It’s just my dog and I thought I’d throw that in there as a treat for those who stuck with it to the end. I may use it and/or other bards from my dog in future videos. Thank you for watching. If you like this video, please give it thumbs up. Please consider subscribing to the channel. At this point in my life I’m not a regular post-er here in this YT community, but I’m trying to pick up my game and publish quality videos more frequently. In the meantime, so that you don’t miss the release of a new video, hit that bell if you want to be notified when a new video is published on this channel.