April 9 – The Mulberry failure! I have a standing offer with the people I work with. If they’re taking a tree down, I’ll help them cut it up in exchange for chunks of wood that I can turn. I also agree to make them something out of the wood that I collect. Everybody wins. They get free help to dispose of the tree AND some kind of memento from the tree to keep, which is apparently WAY cooler than I had thought it would be! I get a steady supply of wood to feed my addiction. A couple of months ago, a guy I work with told me that his father-in-law’s place got hit by the season’s last winter storm and the high winds took a tree down. He asked me if I would be interested in a Mulberry tree, that’s about 20″ across. Asking a wood turner if they want something like that is pretty much the same thing as asking someone who makes meth if they want a couple free cases of Sudafed. The cutting was easy, and I managed to score a carload of hefty logs that I cut in half, sealed the ends, and left to dry.
Mulberry, if you’ve never seen it while it’s still green, has two very distinctive properties. First, its a beautiful bright yellow color that I haven’t seen in other domestic woods. It reminds me a lot of an exotic wood called yellowheart. Over time, it will change into a yellowish brown color, but it’s still very pretty, with a clear grain pattern! Second, it holds moisture like a sponge! Since my little lathe doesn’t have the horsepower to spin something that heavy, I took it to a friend’s house to rough out the shape so it could finish drying. As the wood spun, it literally had water flying out of it to the point it leaves your shirt damp. It will also cause rust to form on the lathe where ever it sits, so we had to make sure we had everything dusted off when we were finished. Here’s a picture of the wood, before we started to turn it into a bowl.
When I got home, I put the roughed out bowl in my makeshift kiln to dry at about 105-110 degrees, and figured after a couple of weeks I’d be ready to finish the project. That was Friday. Today (Sunday) I checked the progress and realized that Mulberry has another very distinct property: It doesn’t like to be dried in a kiln! This is what it looks like now, and it’s still nowhere close to dry enough to finish turn.
Each of those black lines radiating out from the top of the bowl is a crack and the other side of the bowl looks just as bad. Since it’s not done drying, the cracks are just going to keep opening up. A few years ago, once I got done cussing, I would have just tossed this kind of blank into the burn pile. Now, however, I’m not smart enough to cut my losses and have decided this is a potential “design opportunity”. I put it back in the kiln and raised the temperature up to 120-125 and lessened the circulation of air. With any luck, I can force the cracks in the bowl to open up even more. If it works, I should be able to fill the cracks with some kind of colored inlay, which will either look really cool when I’m done, or look really cool glowing in the firepit. We’ll see in a couple of weeks…
The rest of the Mulberry logs are going to remain sealed, in half-log form, until at least this fall before I even attempt to do anything with it.