Before I left work, a guy I worked with asked me if I wanted some ash logs. I had gotten some wood from him before and made him a bowl out of it, so I figured “sure, I can always use more wood”. We made arrangements to pick up the three logs, like some kind of drug deal in the bottom floors of the parking deck. He warned me they may not be useable. I believe his exact words were, “these have been sitting outside next to the garage for quite awhile, and I can see some cracks in them, so they may not be all that great.”
How bad could it be, right?
Saying this wood was bad was like saying Hitler had some racist tendencies. True, but no where near the true reality of the situation. There were open cracks along the entire length of the logs, the ends were checked everywhere you could see, and judging from the coloration of the wood, some of it had already started to rot to the point I’m not sure it would even make good firewood.
The first log I cut in half, promptly threw the half that must have been laying on the ground away, and tried to cut a bowl blank out of the rest of it. what I ended up with was one bowl blank, about 7″ across, that still had a suspicious looking crack running through it. Perhaps that one can be repaired. The second log was even more split. I cut it into small blanks that I took to Youthbuild when I did a training class for the students, letting them make small spin tops out of the wood. Since the final products were small, I could throw away the bad part and use the rest. I’d guess about 70% of that log was discarded. The third piece was a section of a crotch in the tree (where two branches split apart) and seemed to be more solid. I cut it in half, lengthways, between the piths, and ended with one piece that was about 13″ across and six inches thick. The other piece was just as wide, but was only about three inches thick, and because of the weird shape of the outside of the tree, that piece was discarded.
Yesterday, I finally got around to working with the wood from the third log. After cutting it into a round blank and mounting it on the lathe, it because clear that somehow, miraculously, this piece of wood was actually solid. I quickly turned the outside of the bowl to remove the bark and to see the condition of the wood. The sapwood on a tree is always the first to breakdown, and you can’t really see what you’re working with until all the bark is gone. What I found was that the wood had started to spalt. Spalting is the first stage of the tree decomposing and is caused by bacteria that starts to break down the wood, typically leaving black likes running through the wood in a really intricate pattern. This wood had that, but it also had a type of spalting that made green lines also run through the wood. While there’s a specific scientific name for the different strains of bacteria that causes the various colors of spalt, I don’t care. I just called it gorgeous!
I flipped the bowl around to hollow out the middle of the bowl and about half way through, the tool suddenly felt like it was cutting funny. When I stopped the lathe, I realized there was a spot in the blank where the wood was running at a really, really weird angle. It was also still wet. The combination of the grain orientation and the moisture caused the tool not to cut the wood, it just kind of yanked it out in clumps like one sister pulling hair in a fight. Not good! I saturated the wood with lacquer that had been thinned way down and left it to cure overnight. My thought was this would stiffen the wood enough to let me get past this bad spot. This morning, I sharpened my bowl gouge and resumed the inside. MUCH better cuts, much cleaner surface, and much faster progress.
Below is the finished product, that ended up being 12″ across about about 3 1/2″ deep. Not Not sure this one will go to the gallery to be sold, it may find itself sitting on a table in my house. The pictures don’t do this wood justice. There is quilting that runs throughout this bowl, placing lines of chatoyance that run perpendicular to the grain pattern.
