Back in November, my BIL told me he had a cottonwood tree down on his property up north. He thought it had a big burl on it and asked me if that was something I could use.......ummmm duh.
Then he said it have been down for awhile and would it still be good. I told him we'd find out when I cut it open.
In April my sister called and said he'd finally brought it down, so I drove over one day to pick it up. When I got there and saw it, my hopes were pretty much dashed. It didn't look like it had been down awhile, it looked like it had been down for years. It looked like an old, rotted, dried up piece of driftwood. I still had just a glimmer of hope, maybe it looked better on the inside. The glimmer was knocked down several degrees when we went to load it in the trailer, it was a lot lighter than it looked.
The burl measured about 2' x 2 1/2'.
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I got it home and unloaded it, and just for kicks I got out the chainsaw and cut it in half, and just as I suspected it was pretty darned rotten. So I gave up on it and left it laying there while I went on to cut up some nice green wood.
Well, on Friday I was getting ready for the club meeting today, cutting and sealing more blanks and loading the truck, and I decided to take another look at the burl. I saw an area on one half that looked like it might have some decent wood left. So since I had the chainsaw out, I started hacking away at it. I got a couple of chunks with some solid wood, but after cutting off all the crumbly wood, I was left with some pretty misshapen pieces. After loading up the truck I decided to chuck one of them up and see what I could come up with.
I roughed out a cup shaped ne form and thought I'd turn a pedestal and base. When I reversed it to hollow the inside, I was using my Easy Rougher to establish the wall thickness and knock off the crumblies down the solid wood, and the solid wood was showing some burl figure, so I decided to do a flat topped hollow form.
This is the 1st time I've done this type of hf and I worried how it would look since i would need a fairly large entry hole in order to reach all the way into the corner of the shoulder. Luckily there was a little inclusion right next to the hole and once I started hollowing, it left a void just big enough for the cutter to fit through when it was set at 90 deg to the bar.
There was still a little bit of punky wood near the bottom and it would have been better if i could have centered the blank better to get a more consistent rim, but I'm pretty happy with it especially considering it was destined for the trash and luckily the top all held together.
It's 4" tall at the highest point and 5 1/2" wide. It has a heavy coat of DO so far and I'll probably finish it up with some gloss.
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Thanks for looking!
Comments and critiques are welcome.
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