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Rockfish9 · 01-18-2010, 09:54 AM

After years of using BLO for all my sealing needs.. I'm finaly convinced I've found something better that isnt a hassel to use and wont stink out my cellar...or add weight to my plugs.

My experiment is complete( except for the final seaon long field test), after leaving a sealed maple and a sealed birch blank in a bucket of water for 3 days, neither of them sank or split,.. unlike the unsealed ones, the maple sank in 3 hours.. it took about twice that to sink the birch...

I've switched to pure tung oil, I've tried it with turps and straight out of out of the can, with out alot of difference in the drying process...over night and they are bone dry... after cutting the sealed blanks ( both with and with out turps) to check the penetration, I am going with the pure tung oil, undiluted, I saw no appreciable difference in the penetration , but what appeared to be less "product" in the diluted one when i cut the plug in half....

besides the drying time, which I realy dont care about, my goal was to find something to maybe harden the softer woods, like the WRC that I make the majority of my plugs out of, it does seem that the natural resins in the tung oil did harden the wood somewhat.. the extent wont be known until I fish them a season.. I do know that I got quicker and more penetration on the hard woods than I did on the soft woods, 30 minutes seems to be the maximum time needed to get the best penetration, ones left overnight didnt seem to soak up anymore than the ones left for 30 minutes,, and unlike BLO, the hardwoods blanks did not sink( when left overnight) in the Tung oil as they did in the BLO, also, they did not gain any aprecieable weight, telling me that the product did dry completly internaly, something that BLO, at times never seems to do..The true test will be this summer when i fish them, but for now I'm going to "run" with it for the remainder of the building season.. I see ( or smell) one other benifit of the tung oil, plugs placed in a sealed contained after finishing dont give off that "chemical" smell like ones sealed in BLO... I've got plugs I made 3 years ago, in boxes that still give off an odor.. and that can not be good..

I'll have to report again in the fall on my final findings..

01-18-2010, 09:54 AM	#1
Rockfish9 Registered User iTrader: (0) Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Reading Mass/Newburyport/merrimack river Posts: 3,746	Bye bye BLO.... After years of using BLO for all my sealing needs.. I'm finaly convinced I've found something better that isnt a hassel to use and wont stink out my cellar...or add weight to my plugs. My experiment is complete( except for the final seaon long field test), after leaving a sealed maple and a sealed birch blank in a bucket of water for 3 days, neither of them sank or split,.. unlike the unsealed ones, the maple sank in 3 hours.. it took about twice that to sink the birch... I've switched to pure tung oil, I've tried it with turps and straight out of out of the can, with out alot of difference in the drying process...over night and they are bone dry... after cutting the sealed blanks ( both with and with out turps) to check the penetration, I am going with the pure tung oil, undiluted, I saw no appreciable difference in the penetration , but what appeared to be less "product" in the diluted one when i cut the plug in half.... besides the drying time, which I realy dont care about, my goal was to find something to maybe harden the softer woods, like the WRC that I make the majority of my plugs out of, it does seem that the natural resins in the tung oil did harden the wood somewhat.. the extent wont be known until I fish them a season.. I do know that I got quicker and more penetration on the hard woods than I did on the soft woods, 30 minutes seems to be the maximum time needed to get the best penetration, ones left overnight didnt seem to soak up anymore than the ones left for 30 minutes,, and unlike BLO, the hardwoods blanks did not sink( when left overnight) in the Tung oil as they did in the BLO, also, they did not gain any aprecieable weight, telling me that the product did dry completly internaly, something that BLO, at times never seems to do..The true test will be this summer when i fish them, but for now I'm going to "run" with it for the remainder of the building season.. I see ( or smell) one other benifit of the tung oil, plugs placed in a sealed contained after finishing dont give off that "chemical" smell like ones sealed in BLO... I've got plugs I made 3 years ago, in boxes that still give off an odor.. and that can not be good.. I'll have to report again in the fall on my final findings..
	A good run is better than a bad stand!