Every knife with wooden handles or grips are always "stabilized." What exactly does it mean? Bear with me here cuz I have absolutely no idea what goes into making a quality knife.

So how do you stabilize a wooden grip?

I belive they use high pressure to force liquid resins into the pores of the natural scale material and when the resin cures the natural scale material is more resistant to moisture, cracking, and shrinkage.

Danny pretty much nailed it. depends on the specific process, but typically some form of process whether via pressure or vacuum is used to draw a resin into the wood. I stabilize my own woods in a lot of cases. I have a vacuum chamber which I use along with a two part epoxy catalyzed resin.

Dale, are there other woods you makers use besides Ironwood that don't require stabilization...?
I've heard that Ironwood doesn't require stabilization because it is so dense (and it has oils in it) that it actually resists stabilization...that the resins would only go so deep...basically just surface stabilization. And after y'all got done shaping and grinding, that the 'stabilized' surface section of the Ironwood would be gone anyway...!

Ebonies, blackwoods, rosewoods, cocobolo etc. do not need stabilization. Hard, dense, and oily do not benefit.

That's pretty accurate. There are a few sort of "fringe" tropicals and hardwoods like Bocote and some Rosewoods, Ebonies and other varieties that can still benefit from stabilization, but it's a sort of hit and miss situation depending on the specific situation. It's mostly about how oily and/or porous the wood is. I haven't found a situation where it hurts anything per se, but there are lots of cases where it just doesn't or wouldn't take if you tried to stabilize certain types of woods.

Dale

Heat is also used in conjunction with the vacuum. More times than not, you are talking acrylic resins rather than "epoxy" resins...but the end results are fantastic. I have always used a man named "Nicholas", which is his business name as well. He's the absolute #1 man in the biz. I have used WSSI and have have had very poor results with their product for what they charge.

My last piece he stabilized for me was a chunk of cypress that was carbon dated at 48,750 years old +- 500 years...it turned out eye popping.

They don't catalyze the resin under vacuum, it's done as a separate step and the acrylic is typically a two part "epoxy" or acrylic epoxy.

Would love to see a pic or two of that.