Any ways to rot wood burls quickly?

E

Eriksen

Joined
Sep 18, 2005
Messages
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Are there any ways to make wood burls rotten fast in order to have a better pattern on the surface of a knife handle? Can any chemicals be used, or will it be better to bury it in moist soil or maybe in a swamp?
 
Mark, at Burl Source did a good tutorial on this several years ago.

Do not burry it in wet soil or it will rot and get destroyed. Spalt is a fungal invasion of the wood. It take time, warmth, just the right humidity, and the right amount of time. Forcing spalt is an art. It can be hit or miss. If it is a miss, you usually end up with wood that isn't even good for the fireplace.

A while back some of my buddy's persimmon pile that he uses for smoking his pork (BBQ Restaurant) was starting to show the signs of slight punkyness on the ends. I took some big logs home and sawed them up. It looked pretty good, with spiderweb spalting. I dried it up for a couple months and sent about 20 blocks to K&G to be stabilized. They came back nice and hard and looked great. We went to pick out the other logs that were showing signs of spalt before and found that the wood had deteriorated to unusable punk. In the words of Maxwell Smart, "Missed it by That much"
 
I have a related question. Found this in vicinity of my home in Croatia. It must have been cut by city service after a storm and left to rot for years. Can it still be salvaged for stabilized knife scales? How to proceed? I have two stumpy parts in my backyard protected from rain. The big part of it is still laying there. Does some recognize the wood?

RLoIHVO.jpg

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FredyCro said:
I have a related question. Found this in vicinity of my home in Croatia. It must have been cut by city service after a storm and left to rot for years. Can it still be salvaged for stabilized knife scales? How to proceed? I have two stumpy parts in my backyard protected from rain. The big part of it is still laying there. Does some recognize the wood?
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I think the only way to find out is to cut the log into blanks and dry them before stabilizing. You will then see how it turns out..
 
Does it make any difference if I leave it to dry first or cut and dry later? Next time I visit home I was thinking of a asking a neighbor to cut out the burls. Then I can proceed on my bandsaw (max 18 cm height of working piecea).
 
FredyCro said:
Does it make any difference if I leave it to dry first or cut and dry later? Next time I visit home I was thinking of a asking a neighbor to cut out the burls. Then I can proceed on my bandsaw (max 18 cm height of working piecea).
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It will dry faster if you first cut it into blanks and put them into an oven with low heat and the door slightly opened.
 
Eriksen said:
It will dry faster if you first cut it into blanks and put them into an oven with low heat and the door slightly opened.
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I would finish the drying in the oven, but thought that drying it agessivly might cause further chequering. It's not green wood, but is soaked from rain..
 
FredyCro said:
I would finish the drying in the oven, but thought that drying it agessivly might cause further chequering. It's not green wood, but is soaked from rain..
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Maybe it then will be better to let the blanks dry in normal room temperatur a week or two before the oven drying..
 
FredyCro said:
I have a related question. Found this in vicinity of my home in Croatia. It must have been cut by city service after a storm and left to rot for years. Can it still be salvaged for stabilized knife scales? How to proceed? I have two stumpy parts in my backyard protected from rain. The big part of it is still laying there. Does some recognize the wood?

RLoIHVO.jpg

zUSXjma.jpg
Click to expand...
I have lots of pieces that look like these drying under my porch. Some with fungal growths coming off them. After they sit there for a year or two I cut them into blocks and send to K&G for stabilizing. You will only know what you have once you cut into it.

The stuff you have here is very wet. It is highly likely you will wreck it if you put it in the oven. There is another thread where that gets discussed https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/cutting-and-drying-wood.1669912/

If you have time just toss the whole piece somewhere dry and let it air dry. If you have to speed up drying then slab it into 2 inch slabs, paint the ends and let it dry. The smaller/thinner you cut it the more it moves, twists and cracks as it dries. The faster it dries the more likely it will twist and crack too. For me, if I want to speed up drying I slab into 2 inch slabs, paint the ends and move them into the garage where it is slightly warmer, or into the basement where it is warmer yet.

When I cut up pieces into blocks I find that sometimes I only get a few blocks and lots of waste. Basically I would rather have one or two wildly excellent blocks than 4 okay reasonable blocks.

What Stacy says about the persimon off the woodpile. I'm in the bush daily and see stuff that would be great for handles all the time. I often make "mental notes" to come back and grab stuff only to forget. A year or so later I come across it again and sometimes it is still nice or even improved. Other times "I missed it by that much." BTW I met and guided Don Adams in the late 80s when I was a fishing guide. Incredibly kind and caring guy who looked out for everyone around him regardless of "status."
 
Randydb said:
I have lots of pieces that look like these drying under my porch. Some with fungal growths coming off them. After they sit there for a year or two I cut them into blocks and send to K&G for stabilizing. You will only know what you have once you cut into it.

The stuff you have here is very wet. It is highly likely you will wreck it if you put it in the oven. There is another thread where that gets discussed https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/cutting-and-drying-wood.1669912/

If you have time just toss the whole piece somewhere dry and let it air dry. If you have to speed up drying then slab it into 2 inch slabs, paint the ends and let it dry. The smaller/thinner you cut it the more it moves, twists and cracks as it dries. The faster it dries the more likely it will twist and crack too. For me, if I want to speed up drying I slab into 2 inch slabs, paint the ends and move them into the garage where it is slightly warmer, or into the basement where it is warmer yet.

When I cut up pieces into blocks I find that sometimes I only get a few blocks and lots of waste. Basically I would rather have one or two wildly excellent blocks than 4 okay reasonable blocks.

What Stacy says about the persimon off the woodpile. I'm in the bush daily and see stuff that would be great for handles all the time. I often make "mental notes" to come back and grab stuff only to forget. A year or so later I come across it again and sometimes it is still nice or even improved. Other times "I missed it by that much." BTW I met and guided Don Adams in the late 80s when I was a fishing guide. Incredibly kind and caring guy who looked out for everyone around him regardless of "status."
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Thanks, that's the info I was looking for, I will wait till summer to cut it up in blocks. It's more or less the experience I made with a rooty stump I picked up after river floods. I quartered it and it was drying nicely next to the heater in our living room. Once I put it on the heater it started splitting. I don't mind the rests from the middle of the burly stumps, I will be able to stabilize only small blocks and these stumps look to have burls for a lot of scales. I don't get as much to knife making as I would like to, so I guess these could bear a stash for couple of years. Will post results in the general topic in the summer.
 
FredyCro said:
Thanks, that's the info I was looking for, I will wait till summer to cut it up in blocks. It's more or less the experience I made with a rooty stump I picked up after river floods. I quartered it and it was drying nicely next to the heater in our living room. Once I put it on the heater it started splitting. I don't mind the rests from the middle of the burly stumps, I will be able to stabilize only small blocks and these stumps look to have burls for a lot of scales. I don't get as much to knife making as I would like to, so I guess these could bear a stash for couple of years. Will post results in the general topic in the summer.
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There is a very good chance it would have split eventually just being beside the heater. Basically you need it to dry evenly. It seems like denser wood is more likely to split and twist. I painted the ends on some cherry logs that were about 2 feet long and 16 inches across and left them under my porch. They absolutely tore themselves apart. Nothing could be salvaged.
I usually leave my pieces about 2 years if they are just a chunk of wood. If I have slabbed them out to 2" slabs I can usually get away with around a year before turning them into blocks.
 
It's actually going quite good. Probably cause the wood is so soft and porous due to being soaked in the river.. Will send the pics once I am home.
 
I am also actually interested if there is difference between green wood and seasoned wood that got wet in rain.. My gut tells me yes, since the wood I found is already chequered badly, but it seems the burls are intact, and the splits are mostly down the middle.
 
weo said:
In my experience (limited to maple) smaller pieces crack less but warp/twist more.
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Yes, I didn't think that statement through. When I started making native american flutes I cut some green wood up into 24"x1.5"x1.5" blanks. They didn't crack but they warped and twisted terribly to the point of being useless.
 
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