*** NOTICE - This thread is VERY picture heavy ***
Hi fellow BOTL’ers. As you'll have seen in one of my previous threads, I had a fight with a new end-table humidor. Once I won that fight, I realized very quickly that this end-table cabinet was far too small to meet my needs. Anticipating that, I went ahead and ordered a Tower 2000 cabinet humidor, figuring that would meet my needs for quite some time to come. Well, that’s a topic for a different thread……
Anyways, because of where I live, it’s EXTREMELY expensive to ship things to me. This humidor came in around $500.00 JUST for shipping once all was said and done, and it was already in Canada before it came to me. I looked into American hand-made humidors, but the cost to ship a cabinet was going to be much more than the cabinet itself. My plan, ultimately, is to have a larger cabinet that is custom made, but that is going to be an extremely expensive piece of furniture. Actually, I will then call it an heirloom that will be passed down in the family when my time on the planet is up. Until such a time however, I am stuck with getting a Chinese-made cabinet, which as we all know can really suck for sealing properly and holding humidity. Before I even attempted any kind of seasoning with this beast, I took the lessons learned from my end table fiasco and applied them here, so I could prep this cabinet correctly and avoid losing my mind on it.
Here is the humidor unpacked, without alteration, sitting in my home. Let’s begin !
First thing was to evaluate all the trays and shelves. As expected, the tooling was not very good or precise. As can be seen below, there was a lot of “frayed hair” wood that needed to be sanded down and removed.
Ugh, and then we find that some of the Spanish cedar has sweated resin / sap. OK, I had heard that this stuff was hard as a rock, but you don’t realize HOW hard until you try and remove it. I tried just using a plastic razor blade at first. Ha ! Not a chance. I then tried a metal razor blade, which gave me limited success. Ultimately, it was smoothed down and made level with the wood using an abrasive sandpaper sponge. 200 grit if I remember correctly. And it took a good amount of time.
Now we move onto the “fun” part, silicone sealing. This humidor, like all other Chinese ones I’ve seen, is poorly joined at the corners and seams. This resulted in gaps where humidity would most definitely leak out if not addressed and rectified. Having had excellent success with the aforementioned end table cabinet humidor, I went ahead and picked up some additional aquarium-safe silicone and went to work.
One finished, I left the cabinet alone for over a week, door fully open, to let the silicone completely cure and for all odours to have dissipated. Now onto the final part, weather stripping ! As you can see in the images below, I wasn’t able to get a full seal around the entire door as I was hoping for. The door’s retaining mechanism got in the way, as did the drawers of the cabinet (if I had put the weather stripping where the drawers were, it would have obstructed the drawers from opening).
Here we go, hopefully all sealed up and ready for seasoning ! It is important to note that for this cabinet, I chose NOT to silicone the door glass. I evaluated the door and, in all likelihood, it needed to be sealed. That being said, the aesthetics of a humidor are important to me. This is a prominent piece of furniture in the household and it has to look as presentable as possible (also required for the “wife factor”
). The way the cedar lining is on the door, it would have been difficult to apply silicone cleanly without it being very visible from the outside. As such, I chose not to silicone the glass door, also taking into account that I would be using both active as well as passive humidification for this cabinet.
Next up, we prep the Heartfelt beads (65% RH). I took a decorative glass dish and filled it with beads. This is ~1 lbs of beads, which is not enough for this humidor normally but again, this is just the seasoning process.
The following images show 7 days worth of passive seasoning. In the cabinet I’ve got a dish of Distilled Water (DW), my dish of beads and a hygrometer. Important to note, this hygrometer is an el-cheapo from Walmart. It is NOT accurate, however all we care about is the differential day to day, not necessarily the exact precise RH. In other words, I need to see if RH is going up. Whether 51% should really be 55% is not really that relevant at this point in time
Hi fellow BOTL’ers. As you'll have seen in one of my previous threads, I had a fight with a new end-table humidor. Once I won that fight, I realized very quickly that this end-table cabinet was far too small to meet my needs. Anticipating that, I went ahead and ordered a Tower 2000 cabinet humidor, figuring that would meet my needs for quite some time to come. Well, that’s a topic for a different thread……
Anyways, because of where I live, it’s EXTREMELY expensive to ship things to me. This humidor came in around $500.00 JUST for shipping once all was said and done, and it was already in Canada before it came to me. I looked into American hand-made humidors, but the cost to ship a cabinet was going to be much more than the cabinet itself. My plan, ultimately, is to have a larger cabinet that is custom made, but that is going to be an extremely expensive piece of furniture. Actually, I will then call it an heirloom that will be passed down in the family when my time on the planet is up. Until such a time however, I am stuck with getting a Chinese-made cabinet, which as we all know can really suck for sealing properly and holding humidity. Before I even attempted any kind of seasoning with this beast, I took the lessons learned from my end table fiasco and applied them here, so I could prep this cabinet correctly and avoid losing my mind on it.
Here is the humidor unpacked, without alteration, sitting in my home. Let’s begin !
First thing was to evaluate all the trays and shelves. As expected, the tooling was not very good or precise. As can be seen below, there was a lot of “frayed hair” wood that needed to be sanded down and removed.
Ugh, and then we find that some of the Spanish cedar has sweated resin / sap. OK, I had heard that this stuff was hard as a rock, but you don’t realize HOW hard until you try and remove it. I tried just using a plastic razor blade at first. Ha ! Not a chance. I then tried a metal razor blade, which gave me limited success. Ultimately, it was smoothed down and made level with the wood using an abrasive sandpaper sponge. 200 grit if I remember correctly. And it took a good amount of time.
Now we move onto the “fun” part, silicone sealing. This humidor, like all other Chinese ones I’ve seen, is poorly joined at the corners and seams. This resulted in gaps where humidity would most definitely leak out if not addressed and rectified. Having had excellent success with the aforementioned end table cabinet humidor, I went ahead and picked up some additional aquarium-safe silicone and went to work.
One finished, I left the cabinet alone for over a week, door fully open, to let the silicone completely cure and for all odours to have dissipated. Now onto the final part, weather stripping ! As you can see in the images below, I wasn’t able to get a full seal around the entire door as I was hoping for. The door’s retaining mechanism got in the way, as did the drawers of the cabinet (if I had put the weather stripping where the drawers were, it would have obstructed the drawers from opening).
Here we go, hopefully all sealed up and ready for seasoning ! It is important to note that for this cabinet, I chose NOT to silicone the door glass. I evaluated the door and, in all likelihood, it needed to be sealed. That being said, the aesthetics of a humidor are important to me. This is a prominent piece of furniture in the household and it has to look as presentable as possible (also required for the “wife factor”
). The way the cedar lining is on the door, it would have been difficult to apply silicone cleanly without it being very visible from the outside. As such, I chose not to silicone the glass door, also taking into account that I would be using both active as well as passive humidification for this cabinet.
Next up, we prep the Heartfelt beads (65% RH). I took a decorative glass dish and filled it with beads. This is ~1 lbs of beads, which is not enough for this humidor normally but again, this is just the seasoning process.
The following images show 7 days worth of passive seasoning. In the cabinet I’ve got a dish of Distilled Water (DW), my dish of beads and a hygrometer. Important to note, this hygrometer is an el-cheapo from Walmart. It is NOT accurate, however all we care about is the differential day to day, not necessarily the exact precise RH. In other words, I need to see if RH is going up. Whether 51% should really be 55% is not really that relevant at this point in time
I havent figured out what that hole is for either. Nice suggestion with the beads. I have 2 new hygrometers on the way, should be here Friday. Will put a pound of beads next to one of them in the top...now remember I have a large 320 boveda in the tip ad we'll. 
