Creative and Custom Wood Work, Carlton OR
Learning to work with green spalted maple. Using a 60 degree bevel and conventional grind on the gouge is a good start. Spewing out wet wood shavings is fun! #woodworking #spaltedmaple #greenwood #grasshopperww #woodturning
Rough turned spalted maple bowl. It needs to sit for a while so the wood can dry out. #madeinpdx #woodworking #woodturning #greenwood #spaltedmaple #grasshopperww
The magic in spalted wood. Read more: http://grasshopperww.com/2017/magic-in-spalted-wood/ #greenwood #woodturning #woodworking #madeinpdx #grasshopperww
Roughing out a green wood spalted maple bowl. More to come. Trying to reduce the woodpile! #woodbowl #woodturning #greenwood #spaltedmaple
A while ago, we encountered a piece of spalted maple. It was beautiful. It had a bunch of squiggly black lines, some of which enclosed blocks of color. It was really pretty. Never having really encountered it before we were in awe. A new kind of wood? Was spalted maple like birds eye maple, or quilted maple, fiddle back maple — what was it?!? We had to find out more.
Where quilting, birds eye, and fiddle back, are attributes of wood grain and how the tree grew, spalting (spoiling), is actually wood rot. It’s a fungal infection, the early stages of decay. It’s what comes before you have a brittle or pulpy useless mush. It’s what happens when fungi start to break down a once majestic tree to re-integrate it into the earth. Whoa?!?