Used Minwax Wood Hardener first time

Hey y'all;

Used Minwax Wood Hardener first time just a few minutes ago after learning of it on here earlier this year.
At beginning of month, after payday, ordered it from local hardware store in our little burg's downtown. They hadn't heard of it either.

Supreme weather for using spray paint outdoors or smelly stuff in or out - "Fair
78 °F (26 °C) Humidity: 31 % Wind Speed: W 7 MPH.
Can't think of anything quite ready to spray paint so it looks like just the Minwax today.

Definitely something to use with plenty ventilation, not a bad as lacquer but fragrant enough.
And see why it says use disposable brush, starts hardening brush bristles too!

Don't remember having done balsa nose cones on rockets before: would have liked to have this stuff 30 years ago for stick and tissue airplane noses.

Used it on these

(just noticed have bodies by wrong packages)

Something not shown here is that noses are being notched out to insert 1/144 scale F-15 cockpit seats and guys then add canopy.
Don't know if I'll ever try to fly rockets after that - the old CG/CP thing and, mostly, actually, deep paranoia about losing canopies.

Here's a better image of can for those unfamiliar with product as was I

Just had a thought, wonder how this would work on cardboard and cardstock?
Primarily for static models of my sci-fi creations.

I think you'll have to be the pioneer and find out.

The hardener might be very useful for internal, structural items. The stuff would darken and stain colorful printed surfaces.

I've used the hardener on balsa, typically nose cones. It's good stuff, though it doesn't harden quite as much as say a layer of CA would. Depends what you want it for, though.

A really good trick is to take a little bit of hardener, in a disposable cup or some such thing, and mix in a bit of 3m/Bondo spot putty. Surprisingly, it makes a good mix. This mix makes a good second coat of wood hardener, and with the added solids, buffs up nice and smooth.

So to be clear, a common practice of mine is to dip the nose cone or paint it with straight wood hardener, give it a while to dry, then paint on the spot putty mix. Let dry ~24-48 hours in conditions such as you describe before covering with any paint (though you can sand it a lot sooner).

One risk though: if you do the spot putty trick while it's cool, and it warms up over the day, you'll get these odd little bubbles as the air trapped in the cone warms up and pushes its way out. They sand out fine though.

Marc

Marc_G said:

One risk though: if you do the spot putty trick while it's cool, and it warms up over the day, you'll get these odd little bubbles as the air trapped in the cone warms up and pushes its way out. They sand out fine though.

Click to expand...

Aha! That answers something I was about to ask; although I did the Minwax during the warm part of the day and it wasn't 2 minutes before bubbling started on softer of 2 nosecones.

When I soak cones in Minwax Wood Hardener, I pile them in a big tin can, pour in the fluid, and whirl it around until cones are thoroughly coated.

Then I pour the excess fluid back in the can and tip the cones out onto a sheet of waxed paper. Then I stand the cones on their shoulder.

I let them dry for days, if not weeks. Sometimes I'll do a batch and not get around to using them for a year or more!

The hardener definitely swells up the wood some. I've found that a sanding sponge does a good job of smoothing the stuff. I follow that up with various grades of sandpaper.

The wood hardener takes a long, long time to fully cure. It soaks into balsa really well and then cures like epoxy, but over an extended period of time. Give it at least a couple of weeks, if not a month. The inner wood structure is not exposed to the surrounding air, so the hardener that has soaked in that far cures very slowly. The whole cone won't feel all that hard until all of it, inside and out, has cured. I was not very impressed with it when I first tried it either, and after a few days I just put the few cones that I had treated aside and worked on something else. Coming back to them several weeks later, I was surprised at how much firmer they had gotten in the interim. I accidentally knocked a large (2.34" diameter) pointy ogive nose cone off of its hook and had it fall, tip first onto my tile floor from a height of about 4.5 feet. It bounced and rattled around on the floor, striking a few things in the process, before I could get to it. That size of cone, if it had not been treated, would have picked up at least a few deep wounds and deformations, yet when I picked up my cone I was astounded to find that it didn't have a mark on it.

The Minwax Wood Hardener treatment doesn't make the nose cone bullet-hard and the surface won't feel like it has a thin fiberglass shell. Instead, it makes the wood very tough so that it is not deformed very easily and sharp objects or edges have a very difficult time penetrating into it. People who make knives as a hobby use it to harden the wood in the handles. It is not a grain filler, though. You will still need to sand the cone smooth and fill the grain afterward. The wood hardener is, in my experience, very effective at what it is meant to do if you give it the time that it needs to reach full hardness.

Oh, and you know that large cone that I was talking about up above, the one that fell to the floor? I used it in my Javelin XL, the rocket that I flew to certify for L1. In a subsequent flight it had a late deployment due to an old delay grain in the well-aged reload that I used. The shock caused the friction-fit nose cone to pop out of the payload section and fall to the ground. I was lucky to find it within just a few minutes and, perhaps not surprisingly, it survived the tumble and landing from a few hundred feet up without any damage, not even a scratch. So I'm a big fan of this wood hardener now.

Ah, that allow plenty of time to cure business is worth knowing.

Hmm, the "dump 'em in and soak 'em in a can of the hardener fluid" thing is an interesting idea.

Ditto most of the other posters on this one.
I usually string a bunch of wood cones balsa, basswood. dunk in a gallon can full of hardner, letting the lot set in the stuff for 15 to 30 minutes. then that the string out and hang it over a tarp letting them drop off and dry for at least a couple weeks before taking them off the string and into storage bags by size, type. Bags are left open standing up for another week or so before they get put away.

I mostly use it on large balsa nose cones (most of which are over 2" in diameter), so I pour a bit into a small glass jar and brush it onto the cones with a chip brush. I have never tried to dip one. (The cans of it that I buy don't contain that much.) I have never seen gallon cans of it. I buy it in pint cans, which run me around $12 per can. That adds up to nearly $100 for a gallon. :shock: