I got a call last May from a member in My Turning Club about a fellow that had a large Oak tree taken down and it had a "huge" burl on it.
The member was unavailable to get the burl and he asked if I wanted to take it.
I did.
So a different club member (Peter), my son Danny, and I drove the 45 minutes up to Duxbury, Mass and met the fellow with the burl. Turns out his name was Jim.
The burl was huge. It was about 4' tall and about 3' in diameter growing off to one side of a mature 20" Red Oak tree.
The tree was already down and sectioned up into firewood.
The large section with the burl was at the side of Jim's secondary driveway.
This one was easy.
Just cut it up and load the truck (or so I thought).
Firstly, my Stihl MS310 decided to suddenly act up.
Not sure why. So I struggled keeping it running the whole day. Secondly, I couldn't make up my mind on how to section it.
I finally just said what the heqq and cut into it. Being so large a ball and the saw running poorly made all the cuts difficult.
We managed to get it done in about 3 hours
On the way off Jim's property, I mentioned to him that it was customary to give the wood supplier a finished piece and I would call him when it was done.
I ended up keeping about 6 real nice blanks and gave the rest to Peter.
I also ended up giving the original club member "finder" one of my sections and I donated one to my wood turning club wood raffle.
I tried to get the saw running better at home and had no luck. I even swapped the fuel for fresh and put a new fuel filter in.
I ended up sending it out to the repair shop for $150.00 to re-build it.
It had been 10 yrs since it had seen a shop so it was probably due.
I finally got around to rough turning a nice bowl for Jim around August and alcohol dried it and put it up on my drying rack.
I basically forgot about it until I got an e-mail from Jim around January.
Here it is coming out of the brown wrapping paper after about 6 months of drying.
It had a crack from drying on the base and a few bug holes.
I filled them with CA glue and then mounted it on the lathe to turn a tenon for the chuck.
Shaping went real well and I was happy with how it was coming out.
The wood was real nice and stable so I decided to turn it thin.
Maybe too thin.
What can you do. I went right through the side bottom with my gouge.
I hate doing that especially with a nice piece of wood.
More to the story........
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No regrets, just some interesting results.
email:
nailed_nailer@yahoo.com