Some time in the earlier part of the pandemic, I was talking to my daughter, who told me her husband’s sister had a tree in their front yard that was damaged in a storm and needed to come down. To a woodturner, that’s like telling a crack addict there’s a new dealer in town and they’re giving away free samples. I sent her a note and made “the standard offer”. For those who haven’t been around me, the standard deal is if you give me a tree trunk you’re taking down, I’ll make you a piece out of it, but keep the rest. Seems like a good deal and everyone seems to win.
After seeing a picture of the tree, I also offered to cut the remaining pieces down for them, so on a hot summer day, my son and I went over to start the process. The good news is it took less than an hour to have the tree on the ground, the parts I didn’t want on the curb and the parts I did want in the back of the car.
I’m not sure what kind of tree it is, but it’s a softer wood like a linden or some kind of ornamental tree. That means that two things are likely to happen. First, it means that the wood is going to be incredibly wet and as it dries, it’s going to move a LOT. Sometimes, it moves so much as it’s drying it can’t be turned round again. Second, whenever wood moves that much while drying, there is a huge chance the bowl will split itself in half.
I was able to rough out two bowls from the wood I swiped, but when they were dry enough to finish turn, I realized I’d BOTH of the problems on the both of the blanks.
I decided to start on the blank to the right, so the first thing to do was fix the cracks and the missing chunk on the outside. For the missing chunk, I chose a blue iridescent mica powder and used casting resin. For the cracks, using resin wasn’t practical, so I used Gorilla Glue’s two part epoxy, also with the blue iridescent powder.
One quick turn later and it was ready for sanding. This is where the third issue with turning softwood comes in. If the tree had been damaged in the past, the likelihood of the wood having some kind of structural change is also very high. In this case, the wood closest to the damage had started to turn a darker color, but it hadn’t yet started to rot. While notaenough to make me back out of the project, it did require about twice the amount of sanding to get the end grain to lay down correctly. Three hours of sanding and 4 coats of polyurethane later, and it’s finished.
Kinda like this one! The blue really seems to “pop” and the size (~10″ across) is a nice size. Hope she likes it!
