The stuff that salad bowls are made of

Big salad bowls are made from big pieces of wood. Acquiring this material is considerably more involved that driving to a wood supplier and throwing a few boards in the back of the car.

Earlier this year I purchased six big logs, a mixture of maples, yellow birch and beech. I hired someone with a tip truck to haul them to the spot in a neighbours woodlot where they were going to be sawn. I'd rather not say too much about getting the truck stuck in the mud and the resulting fun we had getting the logs off. Then we needed a tractor to lift the logs on to the brow, a raised platform that the logs are rolled along and onto the saw mill.

The big day came last Thursday when the bandsaw mill arrived. The whole operation went quite smoothly, and in a few hours I had a trailer loaded up with boards and larger sections from which I can easily cut bowl blanks.


First thing on Friday morning the wood was delivered to my yard. It was quite a good work-out unloading them, as they are still quite sizeable chunks of wood. These are the boards, some nearly two feet wide.


I don't have space indoors to store boards this long, so I have to cut most in half and trim off the ends to remove any cracks. Then the ends are sealed to prevent further splitting.

Finally I have this pile of wood which is destined to make salad bowls, some of which will be much larger than anything I have made to date. From this photograph it is difficult to appreciate the size of these pieces of wood, but it is a real challenge for me to move them on my own.


I will post more pictures as work continues to show the many steps that go into making a big bowl.

technorati tags: salad bowl, wood-mizer, woodturning

The beauty of wood

Today I was rummaging through a stack of papers in my office and came across a scribbled draft that I wrote sometime in the past. I don't recall what I intended to do with it, so I guess this blog is as good a place as any.

It is the structure of wood that makes it such an intriguing material. Each species has its own characteristics of grain and color. Each twist of grain, each knot and each bark inclusion says something of the life of the tree. These features make wood a challenging material to work with, but with care and skill these natural features enhance the crafted form.

Technorati Tags: wood, beauty

Mountain-Ash

After finishing with that beech log on Saturday, I hauled a log of mountain-ash into the workshop and began cutting that up.

Mountain-ash is a really nice wood for turning, being similar to apple wood in as much as the texture is very fine and it cuts easily. It has cream coloured sap wood and light brown heartwood with small dark flecks which add interest. Like the beech, this log had also been outside for a year or two and had developed some spalting which will add to the character of the finished artefacts.



I have cut it up into small pieces ready to make weedpots, inlays, bottle stoppers and bits'n' bobs bowls. The endgrain of each piece has been treated with endseal, a wax emulsion that slows down the drying of the endgrain to minimize cracking as the wood dries. It will be several months before any of this wood is ready to work with, but for anyone who appreciates things made from unique pieces of wood, the wait will be worth it.

There are two native species of mountain-ash in Nova Scotia; American mountain-ash (Sorbus americana) and Showy mountain-ash (Sorbus decora), a.k.a. northern mountain-ash or dog-berry. They are not easy to differentiate without the leaves and berries, so I cannot be sure which I have.

Local weather lore holds that an abundance of berries indicates a mild winter ahead.

The European mountain-ash, Sorbus aucuparia, has been introduced to North America and escaped into the wild, probably by birds feasting on the berries. This species is known as rowan, probably from the Gaelic ruadhan, the red one, because of it's scarlet berries. It was often planted on Highland crofts since superstition has it that rowan will ward off witches. It was also used in the Highlands, where timber is scarce, for making tool handles, household implements and small pieces of furniture. If it weren't for its unpleasant smell I would probably use it to make spurtles.

Mountain-ash is not a true ash, the only similarity being the compound leaves. The Sorbus genus is a member of the Rosaceae family which includes crab apple, cherry and strawberry among its 1,500 species. Its wood is generally considered to have no commercial importance, but I am only too happy to give it a good home. I look forward to being able to start turning some of this beautiful looking material.

(I am sorry, but I do not have any mountain ash for sale)

tags: woodturning, bowl, rowan, mountain ash, spalting

Spalted Beech

I spent the morning working on my books, or more accurately a box full of receipts, so for a bit of light entertainment in the afternoon I cut up a log of beech. It had been in the yard for eighteen months or more, and had a developed a nice amount of spalting.



Spalting is a discoloration caused by fungal attack. It is the first stage in decay, and sometimes the wood can become soft or totally rotten. In this case there was one strip of rot running along a wound in the side of the log, but for the most part it was very sound. Beech is a wood that I have always found to spalt very nicely.

This particular piece also has some figuring in the grain, and I think I will end up with some very interesting woodturnings. I have cut this mainly into small pieces for weedpots, and inlays for my inlaid weedpots.

Now I just have to wait for it all to dry before I can start working with it.

Tags: woodturning, beech, spalting

A warped bowl.

A few weeks ago I was telling you I was working with some green wood. I had finished turning a birch bowl and was leaving it to dry slowly, wrapped up in newsprint.


Today I have removed it from the paper. You can see how much it has distorted. No cracks! I will leave it to dry some more in a normal climate, then put it in the dry room to finish the process.

Tags: woodturning, bowl, birch, woodworking

Lumber update

Three weeks ago when I last wrote, I mentioned that it was warm enough to work outside in a T-shirt. That has all changed now. We have had some real cold weather since then, and a nasty storm last weekend which saw heavy, wet snow blowing horizontally. The wind was strong enough to wreck the raincap of the workshop flue pipe, so I spent a couple of hours yesterday getting that fixed.

The green wood that I was working on is now all stickered in the storage area. It is between the dust extractor and the shop, so returning air is passing over the wood. I am also cracking open the adjacent window so that the woodstove will suck fresh air in too, to help speed the drying process. My moisture meter only gives readings below 20% moisture content but yesterday I found one piece that was just beginning to give a reading. It seems to be drying quicker than I would have anticipated. Before then I was getting an idea of the moisture loss from a block of wood balanced on an old kitchen scale. It has dropped from 4lb 8oz to 4lb.

As well as the sawn lumber, I also bought a lot of the slab wood. This all had to be cut up into smaller pieces, or rough turned on the lathe to make bowl blanks. That all took some time, but it is done now and I can look forward to having plenty of relatively cheap material to work with next year. There are still two large pieces out in the yard ready to be cut up and roughed out into salad bowl blanks. I hope to get that done soon before it starts to split.

The business of woodturning

There is more to being a woodturner than working at the lathe turning out beautiful hollow vessels. Today was quite atypical of my working day and actually seems worth writing about!

I was on the road at 7am in someone's truck, on the way to fetch that lumber I had cut on Monday. Apart from heavy rain on the journey out, everything went well. The logging truck that was blocking the forest road had just finished loading so we didn't have to wait long. My lumber was still there too! Having lived in high crime areas in the past, rural Nova Scotia takes some getting used to. The loading was heavy work, but it didn't take too long. Then back to the foresters house where he has a big pile of burls for me to pick through.

We were back to my shop within four hours and the rain had stopped. Unloading was a breeze with a dump truck! But the wood was quite dirty, having been sawn in the woods, and was covered in sticky wet sawdust. So I decided to hose it all down to clean it up. The oak was already staining from contact with the steel saw blade, and maple develops blue stain if it stays damp for too long, so I think that cleaning it up is a wise move since the surface will dry so much quicker. It was a lovely warm day, 18'C, and a strong wind was drying the surface of the wood quite quickly. We don't get many T-shirt days in November, so it was nice to be working outside.

That green lumber was heavy though, so I was glad to take a break from my labours. At 2pm I had to go and meet a business advisor from Pictou Regional Development Commission. I am thinking about changing the name of my business, and I wanted to talk it through with someone to see if its a totally crazy scheme or not. It was a very useful exercise, and she is going to do some research on my behalf. We met at my local library which has office space available, a very useful facility that several organisations use as satellite office.

After that I returned home to find the wood quite dry, so I carried it all into the workshop and stickered it. I still have to trim the ends of the boards and endseal them to prevent them from cracking. Then they will be stickered in the storage area until they are air dried (<18% EMC), at which point they can go into the kiln or dry room, but that is months away yet.

Then it was time for a quick walk with the dogs. They had missed their morning walk since it was dark when I left home this morning. But we only had time for a short walk before I headed back to the libray again. This time it was to meet delegates from the C@P Summit which is taking place in Pictou. Although not strictly a business meeting, I had supplied the conference with bottle stoppers for the delegates goody bags, so I wanted to help out in return.

Tomorrow I still have a bunch of smaller pieces of wood to sort through and process, but I think the really hard work is done.

Busy, busy, busy

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since I last blogged! But it has been craftshow season. That and a short notice order for personalised bottle stoppers has kept me pretty busy. But that is all behind me now. My last show was last weekend, and I delivered the bottle stoppers yesterday morning. The rest of the day was spent in the woods getting some hardwood lumber sawn to my specifications. It was a glorious day considering it is the middle of November.

The fellow who owned the logs had a friend with a portable bandsaw mill come and cut the wood. Those machines are pretty neat. Most of the log handling is done by hydraulics, turning the log to the required orientation and clamping it in place while the bandsaw makes a one-eighth cut along its length. By mid afternoon I had several hundred board feet of maple, oak, white ash and black cherry stacked ready for collection. I have someone with a truck lined up to go collect it with me on Thursday. I just hope its still there!

Today I have been tidying up the shop, moving things around to make space for all this green lumber. My usual drying procedure involves air drying in the shop, then out to the solar kiln, then back into the dry room to get it down to its final 8% moisture content. Its quite a bit of handling, and could probably be made more efficient. Maybe oneday. In the meantime it keeps me fit.

World Rainforest Week

Continuing my search for information I have found a few websites worthy of note.

Eco-portal.com has a whole section on forests and forest destruction. Not only does this site have a good directory of relevant websites, but also a sidebar full of links to current news items.

The Rainforest Action Network website is a valuable source of information. And did you know that this is World Rainforest Week? This year they are focussing on Indonesia and encouraging a young persons letter writing campaign against Georgia Pacific.

Working with exotic woods - a dilemma

Most of the wood used in my shop was grown in Nova Scotia, and some from elsewhere in North America. A very small percentage though are exotic species, mainly from South/Central America and Africa. It is this last category that causes me some misgivings. Whilst it is very pretty wood, and very popular with customers, I do wonder what impact my use of this wood is having on the forests where it grows.

Some say that properly harvested woods help save the forest because it makes the local people see the value of the wood and leads to sustainable management practices. Surely this is better than burning the forests to make way for agriculture, which the local soil can only sustain for a few years. Also I have read in the past that large quantities of these timbers are used for low-grade applications such as construction (often for shuttering which is later discarded) and pallets, so does my contibution metter? Getting a balanced picture of the situation is not easy, but I think it is reasonable to conclude that rainforests are becoming seriously depleted.

Over the next few days I plan to investigate some of these issues, but in the meantime you can help save the rainforest by visiting The Rainforest Site and clicking the Save Our Rainforests button. Sign up for their daily email reminder service by following the Remember to Click link.

A windfall

Hurricane Juan left a trail of detruction in its wake as it passed over Nova Scotia. One casualty was the arboretum at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College.

A friend of mine who used to work there was kind enough to salvage some Honey Locust for me. The lumber looks quite interesting, and I am looking forward to being able to turn it. According to my Textbook of Wood Technology, "it has many desirable qualities such as attractive figure and color, strength, and hardness but is little used because of its scarcity". One of its traditioanl uses was for wagon wheels.