The local woodturning club meeting (OPCAAW) was last night and it was fascinating! The demonstrator was (Dr). Sara Robinson from Oregon State University’s Department of Wood Science and Engineering. Her PhD is wood spalting. I’ve been following her work since her article in Fine Woodworking some years ago.
She spent time talking about the “natural” process, where you just let the wood sit and spalt. The action of the faster growing funguses that cause the wood to get lighter in color, and introduce the dark zone lines that people like so well. One of the things I learned about them is the primary fungus for “white rot” are not only edible (although she noted not very tasty) one is used in Chinese herbal medicine.
She also talked about the slower growing fungus that introduce natural dyes into the wood, the red, yellow, green, blue, etc staining we see in some spalting. These dyes are, infact, a natural anti-fungal compound some types of slower growing fungus produce to protect the wood from other fungus.
She then talked about how she has moved her spalting into plastic tubs, where she introduces specific types of fungus to the wood to obtain specific results. How she does this is, by controlling the environment. Which can reduce spalting time from up to two years, to as short as a few weeks or months.
She also talked about some of her most recent work, extracting the coloring agent (dye) that these slower growing fungus produce. She has been able to extract the color agent from the fungus and it has proven to be a very permanent dye. This dye permeates and binds hard to almost anything. In addition to wood samples, she had some fabric samples. The fungus dye has proven to be very fast in fabric – it does not fade in UV, nor does it wash out. She showed an example of red-flame Box Elder, where they had over-dyed the natural red with this red, and the red did NOT fade.
For this part of the program she had to leave out the exact process they are using to extract the dye as they are in patent evaluation.
(I've tried, I can't make the below not a link)
www.northernspalting.com
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