That is, for the first time I turned wood wet enough to create a vertical stripe on the wall from the sling-out. Great fun!
This bit of wood came from a nice gentleman in the woodturner's club I just joined. He brought a bunch to our meeting and gave it away for free. I picked up the last piece which included a bit of crotch wood.
He claimed the wood was hackberry. Now I wouldn't know hackberry wood if it introduced itself to me wearing a nametag, but a couple of gentlemen were looking at the piece and remarked that they weren't sure what the wood was, but the bark told them it was something other than hackberry. So I figure I'd call on you folks to help ID the wood. It cut very cleanly and wasn't overly hard (of course, it was green, so...). The freshly cut wood had a heavy sweet smell that (to my nose) was strongly reminiscent of almond extract. The cut wood has a very fine, even texture and doesn't seem very porous.
Probably the most unique thing about it though was how it changed in color. On initial cutting, the sapwood is a very light beige, but darkens to a strong yellow and eventually a rusty orange very quickly. The heartwood starts out a slightly darker beige and doesn't seem to change nearly as much as the sapwood. You can see this clearly in this picture:
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I roughed the outside of the bowl first, then reversed and hollowed, then finally rounded over the edge. The light colored wood at the top of the bowl is only different from the orange colored wood because it was cut much later (when I rounded over the edge). Also, where the chuck bit into the tenon, the oxidation turned the wood almost black (which makes an interesting case study for understanding how well my tenon is shaped)!
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The bark was rough, but not heavily furrowed or flaky:
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Here's a bit from the end of one of the blanks and also one from the chainsaw cut (yes I know that pith needs to come out, which is why I'm working on roughing these out now). The end was cut on the bandsaw a few hours before the image. The chainsaw cut was done around a week ago (which makes me think the yellow/orange coloring fades).
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I live in SC, but I don't know if this tree was native, ornamental, or what. I suspect it was a landscaping tree of some sort, but that's really just a guess.
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