Thread: Cleaning Found Wood

If you did my little local "tour" (Chasing Wood), you can't see just how dirty the debris piles are.
But, I did show a curved log shell, western red cedar, about 60x60x12cm, that I had gutted to bring home.
The rock dust in the wind seeps into everything and the cracked sapwood surface of that piece is no exception.
Even the rain here is dirty.
So, everything needs skinning. I can't decide if it's a keeper until then.
1. Use a sculptor's adze to finish cleaning the rot and ant works from the inside. Normally this is the best way to see if there are any knots which are hidden, over grown, from the outside. Two little pencil sized knots.
2. The edges come off. With a mallet & a froe, this is the easy part. Now, I can see clearly that there's about 12mm of whitish sapwood.
3. Not originally cut any too square, I've marked a center-line and drawn a grid in red grease pencil. The plan is to use a SkilSaw to score that entire grid about 15mm deep. If there's anything to rot in the short term, it's the sapwood. Soft punky spots, nearly invisible. Then the bugs tunnel around in it, both just beneath the bark and down into the sapwood. Plus fine cracks everywhere, most if not all filled with rock dust.
4. The final two cuts are full depth to clean off the ends. Also to get a look at the extent of any large cracks in the wood. I'll finish them off mostly with a bow saw. I want to leave some so the fresh cut ends don't have to sit down on any (dirty) surface.
5. The fun part is to bash off all the sapwood rectangles with a 25mm carpenter's chisel and 30oz lead core mallet. The pieces never come off flush but leave me with a nice grid for the orientation of a drawing some day.
6. Final inspection shows me that there are no big cracks and no big knots = good piece of wood. Next, it gets bagged up and stashed in the shed until I get some ideas.