For Chas... more "rotten" wood

Chuck Ellis

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6,997
Location
Tellico Plains, Tennessee
Hi Chas,
I like your treatment of your "rotten" wood... I look for that when I can find it..
here are a few pieces that I've worked up... one of the pieces is a piece of white oak or champion oak... my friend named her tree and when it died and was cut she offered me what ever I wanted of it... after ruining 3 chain saws, I settled for a few of the limbs and a couple of bumps off the trunk... this piece had some worm work in the bottom, but it gets lots of attention.

The whiter pieces are Hackberry... the center of these trees tend to rot out and then the outer edges will curl in to try and heal the wounds... makes for some really interesting wood. I was surprised when I cut into this at the amount of spalting I had.

The last two are a couple of maple pieces...
 

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Some attractive figuring there Chuck, never seen a spalted Oak over here, that sure looks like it's tough, do I detect some shakes in the unspalted areas?

The Hackberry looks very interesting, love to see some samples assembled against something like Walnut, make for a startling contrast.

We get spalted Maple here occasionally, more often and readily available is spalted Sycamore which looks very similar, although it needs careful drying to stop it deteriorating into a grey (gray :)) stained unatractive specimen in it's un-spalted state. This is a sample of lightly spalted sycamore.
 

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Alder, common along the water meadows here Vaughn, is occasionally seen in the wood merchants but not often.
For local aquisition you need to be quick off the mark to catch it right, kept wet, even under water it's fine, expose it to air drying and it will rot at the first sign of dampness so needs careful watching.

Ours tends to be rather soft and fluffy and without that warm glow of your piece.
 
Some attractive figuring there Chuck, never seen a spalted Oak over here, that sure looks like it's tough, do I detect some shakes in the unspalted areas?

The Hackberry looks very interesting, love to see some samples assembled against something like Walnut, make for a startling contrast.

We get spalted Maple here occasionally, more often and readily available is spalted Sycamore which looks very similar, although it needs careful drying to stop it deteriorating into a grey (gray :)) stained unatractive specimen in it's un-spalted state. This is a sample of lightly spalted sycamore.

Chas, not sure what you're calling shakes.. I do have some cracks running through it... and some worm work... I soak the wormy places with thin CA and then with my finish... customers seem to like the effect.

I picked up some sycamore off the side of the road where the power company or road company was clearing some trees and had just piled them up for disposal...at least I assumed they for disposal as I loaded my truck.. haven't noticed too much spalting yet, but I do have some discoloration.. maybe that's the spalting. It's nice wood and turns great.

I bought a piece of wood call Ambrosia Sycamore at Woodcraft a couple of weeks back... it was so wax coated I couldn't tell how wet it was until I chucked it up.... it looked like it was going to be a great piece, but I cut a recessed tenon, then cut the bottom out ... duh
 
Chuck, shakes = cracks in wood circles here, used more to define a natural split in the wood along the grain due to drying than a man induced fracture.

Not like your use where I think Shake = Shingle perhaps, although there is maybe an end grain common source in there some where.
 
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