I have messed about with a bit of wood stabilization.
I don't know whether I would use a food saver, but that's only because I am a housewife, and it would render it useless for anything related to food.
I discovered a hand operated vacuum pump that is used to bleed the brakes of a car (automobile). It uses 1/4" clear tubing, which is handy because you can make it long enough to be comfy, plus you can see through it (to see if you are sucking up any resin/wood hardener) plus you can fold it over on itself and put a peg on it thus creating a seal for your vacuum which means you don't have to continually sit and hold the pump.
I used a mason-type preserving jar with a metal lid, bored a hole into it and put in a gas fitting which I 'sealed' each side of the metal using rubber washers. The plastic tubing fits neatly over the air fitting (if you buy the correct size first time).
I poured my wood hardener into the mason jar, dropped in my piece of wood, and put a piece of metal (aluminium in my case) on top to weight down the wood to submerge it in the hardener. Then I closed everything up, and pumped like mad until all the bubbles were out of the wood, held it there for a little while, then released the pressure. I did this three times until the wood sank fully without being helped. Then I fished out the wood, and set it to dry for a couple of weeks outside in the dry (it stank too much to come indoors for that process) and used it for knife handles.
I have stabilized about 50 sets of scales and about 20 knife handle blocks of wood this way with success. The hardener goes all the way through the blocks. I was not terribly happy with how it glued up though (on three knives that I made), and want to experiment with some adhesives to see if I can break the bond. Not got there yet, life keeps getting in the way...
If I do this again, I will purchase a thin molding resin that is specifically formulated for vacuum forming for things such as fibreglass boats, wind turbine housings etc, and I will pour enough resin into a plastic bag which I will insert into the mason jar and then drop my wood into that and suck out all the air. That is more economical on resin, and I have been told by someone who does this regularly that it works well.
The other two things I would mention are:
1) I would not breathe the dust from the stabilized wood
2) Preserving jars are known to collapse on occasion when under severe vacuum. I have never had that problem, but maybe I have been lucky. Someone else I know has had it happen, and has learned to wrap several layers of Duck tape around the outside, leaving some spaces to see the bubbles. Ah - I had to put a plastic bag between the jar and the lid to help get a true air seal when starting off, but then I was using a second hand jar and lid which was slightly corroded anyway.
Next time I do this, I intend to use my vacuum chucking pump with a proper resin fume filter bath to suck out the air. The brake vac pump works well, but it does require some effort.
Message to self: think of all those calories you could burn pumping that little handle...
