karlkuehn
11th August 2007, 03:11 PM
[This is a copy from an email I sent earlier to friends and family, bear with me on the layman's terms, but I wanted to share with you all!]
Well, I was a busy guy today, and I have a new respect for Grandpa Karl the lumberjack. I'm wiped out, must have lost 10 pounds in sweat today. We had a tree come down in the backyard the day before yesterday, and I was noticing last night that it was hanging like a widow-maker near where Wally (our dog) likes to poop, so I figured I'd better pull it down to keep him and the neighbor kids safe (the kids don't poop there, but you get my drift...at least I think they don't poop there. They got a better spot picked out in the bamboo thicket...). Besides, it's fun to yank trees down and make big cracking and thudding noises. :)
I emailed my friend Bill, who I get some pen wood from here in PA and described the tree to him, and he said it sounded like a box elder, which it turned out to be. Box Elder is a pretty highly sought after wood for turning pens and bowls and stuff, which is great! It is a fairly white wood, but if you can get the main trunk, it has lots of blood-red colored veins and grains (usually called “flamed”, “flame” or “flaming”) running through it that makes for a really striking contrast piece when finished.
This piece that fell was a big portion of main trunk that was dead and partially decayed, so I figured that there was a good chance for some spalting, too (spalting is those interesting random black lines that run through a rotting piece of wood - I read that it's caused by the initial phases of fungal decay doing all kinds of scientific stuff that I don't know about in the wood). There was also a couple of big burls on the trunk part - you can see them sorta through the branches in the first picture. The tree also explains the abundance of box elder bugs that gather on the house a couple times a year like a bunch of redneck cockroaches.
Sam (my boss) let me borrow his chainsaw and when I got back home after errands, I got to cracking bright and early at 10:30. er, noonish, somewhere in there. ;)
Here's a picture of how it looked when I started; notice how it's just hanging over the proverbial pooping grounds. (hehe...so far I've been able to type 'poop' four times already. Five even! *chuckles*)
[See picture 1]
I chucked a hitched-end rope over it and yanked it over sideways (crackityCRACKTHUDddd! gruntGrunt GRUNT! Woohoo!), managing to miss the dog poop (6 :D), but landing half in the creek and almost dragging me in after it. Once I got it down, I fired up the saw and started limbing it and cleaning off all the small stuff. I got a few pieces off of it before I had to start thinking about how I was going to get it out of the creek while staying dry myself. Well, once I got it loose from the small branches, down it rolls all the way into the creek. Fortunately, I had had the incredible foresight to wrap the rope around the trunk prior to cutting on it 'just in case'. Man, I'm smart! So, as it starts to float away, I quick-like grab the rope and start yarding it in, which ended up yarding myself, heels digging in all the way down the bank, halfway to my knees into the muck and splash! - in I go. Well, once I was wet to the thighs, I was able to wrestle it back to shore and get it halfway up onto the bank.
I re-wrapped the rope around the floating part of the log (did I mention that I was super-clever like that?), propped the other part up with smaller log, and lopped it in half. Of course, the part that I had out of the creek then promptly rolled back in, so I had to slosh it back up on the bank, where I rolled it up to the yard. I then started yanking the still floating part (with the rope on it from earlier) up to the bank. At this point, I became aware that there were about a million ants, spiders, centipedes and other creepies all over the whole thing, and since the log was in the water, they were all swimming for the nearest exit from the water, which happened to be my jeans.
Now, here's the thing; the other bugs I can deal with, but when the giant hairy spider from hell started crawling on me, only God saved me from going after it with the chainsaw at full throttle, which was my first reaction. Since it was on ME, that could've been unfortunate. With super-human strength that comes from being scared s**tless, I heaved my precious log onto the bank, schlupped my way out of the muck in one leap, and did the girlie-princess spider dance on the shore, beating my legs into bruises and adding to the poop pile until all the bugs decided that they'd be better off heading downstream a-ways than clinging to the screaming whirling dervish with the chainsaw. If I'd have been wearing a hockey mask, the neighbor kids and cows wouldn't be sleeping again this year.
Well, once I went inside and changed my shorts, I was able to come back out and lop up the logs to get the pieces I wanted to keep. I think I learned to empathize a little with the Israelites in the wilderness. The Lord provided manna from heaven for me, and after cutting up the first ten chunks, every time I looked around and saw more wood to cut, it became a chore instead of a divine blessing. When I first started cutting, I was eyeballing each piece with great posturing and consideration to what the best cut would be, but by the end of my toil I was just hacking and slashing, trying not to step in poop and frantically wiping spider guts out of my hair. Ugh, manna again!? Here's the aftermath:
[See picture 2]
I gathered up all the pieces and moved them up to the house and hosed them down to see what I had risked life and limb (literally) for. Here's what I got for my efforts:
[See picture 3]
Closeups of a couple burl pieces with really interesting grains and figuration:
[See pictures 4 and 5]
Now that I was done with the icky part - roughing and wrangling with the chainsaw, I got to work with some 'real' saws, milling up the wood into some usable stuff, and here's the payoff: Wood blanks that I can actually make something out of. These pieces came from only six of the chunks in the above pictures, and each blank is enough for at least one pen, and some of the longer ones will do up to three, depending on the kit I use (just looking at the first picture, I see 86 pens - subtract 10% for the inevitable screw-ups and it's still almost 80. I still need to mill the remaining chunks which will yield roughly seven times what you see here:
[See pictures 6-10]
So, once I get all the chunks milled up into pen blanks, I should have enough for about 600 pens. Needless to say, I'll be selling some of these blanks on the Internet. I'm going to use some of them to learn how to dye and stabilize, which could end up costing me a few in the process. There's a big market for dyed and stabilized blanks (stabilizing is impregnating the wood with one of a number of chemical solutions that hardens and makes the wood hold together during the rigors of turning them on the lathe), and they sell on the average for about $5 for each little piece. With the various blanks that I already have, the Russian Olive that I got from Mike's (my brother) backyard, the crazy stuff I get from Bill (he gets stuff that makes these look plain, lots of rare PA wood, and he's even sending me some pine cones to make into pens - some of his burls are as big as my entire truck bed), and the stuff that Dad's gathering up for me from the Alaskan wilderness, I should have enough wood to keep me busy a while!
Here's a picture of the first pen I turned from flaming box elder a couple weeks ago (got this blank from Bill). I sold it the other day on Ebay for $25, which was too low a price, but it's a start. The lacquer really brings out the color and figuration:
[See picture 11]
I better get to turning wood before the whole house starts looking like a wood shop. Oops! Too late!
[:)] Karl (see next posts for the other pics)
Well, I was a busy guy today, and I have a new respect for Grandpa Karl the lumberjack. I'm wiped out, must have lost 10 pounds in sweat today. We had a tree come down in the backyard the day before yesterday, and I was noticing last night that it was hanging like a widow-maker near where Wally (our dog) likes to poop, so I figured I'd better pull it down to keep him and the neighbor kids safe (the kids don't poop there, but you get my drift...at least I think they don't poop there. They got a better spot picked out in the bamboo thicket...). Besides, it's fun to yank trees down and make big cracking and thudding noises. :)
I emailed my friend Bill, who I get some pen wood from here in PA and described the tree to him, and he said it sounded like a box elder, which it turned out to be. Box Elder is a pretty highly sought after wood for turning pens and bowls and stuff, which is great! It is a fairly white wood, but if you can get the main trunk, it has lots of blood-red colored veins and grains (usually called “flamed”, “flame” or “flaming”) running through it that makes for a really striking contrast piece when finished.
This piece that fell was a big portion of main trunk that was dead and partially decayed, so I figured that there was a good chance for some spalting, too (spalting is those interesting random black lines that run through a rotting piece of wood - I read that it's caused by the initial phases of fungal decay doing all kinds of scientific stuff that I don't know about in the wood). There was also a couple of big burls on the trunk part - you can see them sorta through the branches in the first picture. The tree also explains the abundance of box elder bugs that gather on the house a couple times a year like a bunch of redneck cockroaches.
Sam (my boss) let me borrow his chainsaw and when I got back home after errands, I got to cracking bright and early at 10:30. er, noonish, somewhere in there. ;)
Here's a picture of how it looked when I started; notice how it's just hanging over the proverbial pooping grounds. (hehe...so far I've been able to type 'poop' four times already. Five even! *chuckles*)
[See picture 1]
I chucked a hitched-end rope over it and yanked it over sideways (crackityCRACKTHUDddd! gruntGrunt GRUNT! Woohoo!), managing to miss the dog poop (6 :D), but landing half in the creek and almost dragging me in after it. Once I got it down, I fired up the saw and started limbing it and cleaning off all the small stuff. I got a few pieces off of it before I had to start thinking about how I was going to get it out of the creek while staying dry myself. Well, once I got it loose from the small branches, down it rolls all the way into the creek. Fortunately, I had had the incredible foresight to wrap the rope around the trunk prior to cutting on it 'just in case'. Man, I'm smart! So, as it starts to float away, I quick-like grab the rope and start yarding it in, which ended up yarding myself, heels digging in all the way down the bank, halfway to my knees into the muck and splash! - in I go. Well, once I was wet to the thighs, I was able to wrestle it back to shore and get it halfway up onto the bank.
I re-wrapped the rope around the floating part of the log (did I mention that I was super-clever like that?), propped the other part up with smaller log, and lopped it in half. Of course, the part that I had out of the creek then promptly rolled back in, so I had to slosh it back up on the bank, where I rolled it up to the yard. I then started yanking the still floating part (with the rope on it from earlier) up to the bank. At this point, I became aware that there were about a million ants, spiders, centipedes and other creepies all over the whole thing, and since the log was in the water, they were all swimming for the nearest exit from the water, which happened to be my jeans.
Now, here's the thing; the other bugs I can deal with, but when the giant hairy spider from hell started crawling on me, only God saved me from going after it with the chainsaw at full throttle, which was my first reaction. Since it was on ME, that could've been unfortunate. With super-human strength that comes from being scared s**tless, I heaved my precious log onto the bank, schlupped my way out of the muck in one leap, and did the girlie-princess spider dance on the shore, beating my legs into bruises and adding to the poop pile until all the bugs decided that they'd be better off heading downstream a-ways than clinging to the screaming whirling dervish with the chainsaw. If I'd have been wearing a hockey mask, the neighbor kids and cows wouldn't be sleeping again this year.
Well, once I went inside and changed my shorts, I was able to come back out and lop up the logs to get the pieces I wanted to keep. I think I learned to empathize a little with the Israelites in the wilderness. The Lord provided manna from heaven for me, and after cutting up the first ten chunks, every time I looked around and saw more wood to cut, it became a chore instead of a divine blessing. When I first started cutting, I was eyeballing each piece with great posturing and consideration to what the best cut would be, but by the end of my toil I was just hacking and slashing, trying not to step in poop and frantically wiping spider guts out of my hair. Ugh, manna again!? Here's the aftermath:
[See picture 2]
I gathered up all the pieces and moved them up to the house and hosed them down to see what I had risked life and limb (literally) for. Here's what I got for my efforts:
[See picture 3]
Closeups of a couple burl pieces with really interesting grains and figuration:
[See pictures 4 and 5]
Now that I was done with the icky part - roughing and wrangling with the chainsaw, I got to work with some 'real' saws, milling up the wood into some usable stuff, and here's the payoff: Wood blanks that I can actually make something out of. These pieces came from only six of the chunks in the above pictures, and each blank is enough for at least one pen, and some of the longer ones will do up to three, depending on the kit I use (just looking at the first picture, I see 86 pens - subtract 10% for the inevitable screw-ups and it's still almost 80. I still need to mill the remaining chunks which will yield roughly seven times what you see here:
[See pictures 6-10]
So, once I get all the chunks milled up into pen blanks, I should have enough for about 600 pens. Needless to say, I'll be selling some of these blanks on the Internet. I'm going to use some of them to learn how to dye and stabilize, which could end up costing me a few in the process. There's a big market for dyed and stabilized blanks (stabilizing is impregnating the wood with one of a number of chemical solutions that hardens and makes the wood hold together during the rigors of turning them on the lathe), and they sell on the average for about $5 for each little piece. With the various blanks that I already have, the Russian Olive that I got from Mike's (my brother) backyard, the crazy stuff I get from Bill (he gets stuff that makes these look plain, lots of rare PA wood, and he's even sending me some pine cones to make into pens - some of his burls are as big as my entire truck bed), and the stuff that Dad's gathering up for me from the Alaskan wilderness, I should have enough wood to keep me busy a while!
Here's a picture of the first pen I turned from flaming box elder a couple weeks ago (got this blank from Bill). I sold it the other day on Ebay for $25, which was too low a price, but it's a start. The lacquer really brings out the color and figuration:
[See picture 11]
I better get to turning wood before the whole house starts looking like a wood shop. Oops! Too late!
[:)] Karl (see next posts for the other pics)