My town has a wood dump. It’s tucked away between two public parks, off a back road that I’m pretty sure most people in town don’t know about. It’s where the city workers who trim trees and pick up brush go to process what they’ve collected. The small limbs are thrown through massive chippers, leaving mountains of mulch that other workers spread around the town’s public playgrounds. The tree trunks and large limbs get thrown into a massive pile until they either rot away or the city workers get bored enough to cut them up. Picture playing “Pick up Sticks” with telephone poles and you should get an idea of what the place looks like. It’s not the safest place to hang out, but to people who work with wood, it’s a treasure trove! On any given Saturday, if the weather is nice, someone will be there, collecting. Sometimes it’s people fetching firewood for a cookout, sometimes it’s people wanting materials for a DIY project, and once I saw a guy with an “Alaskan sawmill” hooked up to his chain saw, cutting a 100+ year old maple tree into slabs. The city doesn’t care, because the more the lumber bunnies cart off, the less they have to process. For a woodturner, you never know what you’ll find. Ash is always a glut because of the beetles that are killing all the trees and there’s always oak. Every once in awhile, though, something different will be laying there, waiting to be saved from the chipper, which serves as bait. I’ve seen sycamore, maples, and one lonely walnut log that I’m pretty sure the workers had set aside to come back and get after work. (Don’t tell them, but it was me who took a chunk off the end…)
On one of my forages (at least two years ago), I saw a huge oak tree that would have taken a bulldozer to move and had several other logs laying across it. Since I’m not real fond of turning oak, I kept scanning. On top of the oak, was a tree that looked like maple AND it looked like it was freshly cut, so the wood should have had less checking. As I stepped up on the oak tree to look at the maple, I saw the back side of the oak tree had several large burls that had grown out of the side of it. JACKPOT! Burls have THE most interesting grain of any wood, they’re hard to find, and they’re usually scooped up by the first collector on the scene. These, though, had what I’m sure was the remains of a squirrel nest right in the middle of them. That means water surely would have gotten into the middle of the tree and most likely rotted the burls from the inside. I took the chain saw and tried to remove as much of the wood as I could, without causing all the logs to shift an squash me. I ended up getting several chunks, but could tell from the dirt and rot that most of it would be unusable. When I got home, I took the pressure washer to them to get rid of the rotten spots. After the icky parts were removed, there was enough left for some bottle stoppers, a mini-birdhouse or two, and a couple chunks that could be turned into bowls. I cut them into turning blanks and left them to dry.
Cleaning out the garage, I stumbled on one of them and decided to spin it up to see what I had. When working with burls, one of three things will happen:
- you’ll get solid wood all the way through, with really interesting grain pattern. This is the equivalent of winning the lottery or getting a brain tumor. Yeah, it happens, but no one really expects it to happen to them.
- You’ll get a blank with holes, gaps, voids, rotten spots, etc. that have to be “fixed”. This is the most common. Some people leave them open (creating a hole in the side of the turning) and some fill them with epoxy. I opted for the epoxy route.
- You’ll get a piece of wood that is so unstable it will come apart at some point during the turning process. This kind of “blowout” is potentially lethal, usually painful, and not something a rookie turner should try, even with all the proper safety equipment.
Here’s what I came up with and all I can say is WOW!!! This is easily the prettiest thing I’ve turned in quite some time. After sanding this thing up to 20,000 grit, it’s got a coat of Yorkshire Grit (which is an abrasive paste wax) followed by a harder wax product called Renaissance Wax (which is a petroleum based wax). I like everything about this, from the unpredictable grain, to the epoxy fillers, to the feel of the finish. Now, I need to go dig back through the garage and the shop, cause I’m pretty sure there’s another piece like this, somewhere…
