Experiment - Making Buckeye Black and Blue.....I hope

Burl Source

Burl Source

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Buckeye grows some pretty cool burls, but what makes the wood really dramatic is the black and blue coloring.
But........it doesn't always look that way.
When you first cut Buckeye it is a white/gold color.
The coloring that develops is a fungus that can grow in the wood under the right conditions.
Usually you just leave the whole burl sit for a couple years.
Then you cut it up and see what you have.

With this Buckeye I am trying something different.
Here I have a 300 pound burl that I have cut into 3 manageable pieces.
They are in black garbage bags to keep them from drying out and to give the fungus good conditions to get started.

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Buckeye burl usually has bigger burl points and a lot of voids with bark and dirt pockets.
This burl was the best my supplier had in his wood yard. I picked through all and settled on this one.
Very compact burl covering the entire piece. This may be the best one from this year's harvest.

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Here you can see the start of some of the fungus. Looks a lot like mushroom mycelium. (spelled wrong)
This might not be the fungus that causes the blue coloring but I have seen it on the other buckeye that has colored up so I think it is a good sign.

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When the weather warms up over 70f I will let these pieces cook in the bags for a couple weeks.
After that I will cut them into slabs and try 2 different methods to turbo charge the coloring.
One method is with corn meal covering the wood with the slabs flat on top of each other. This is supposed to give the nice blue coloring.

The second method is the same except you coat the faces of the slab with mayonaise.
This is supposed to give the darker black coloring.

Supposedly they will be colored up within a month and ready for drying and stabilizing.
I don't know how well this will work because I have never tried it before.
These methods are like seeing bigfoot.
You never get to talk directly to someone who has done it.
You talk to someone who knows someone who talked to someone who did it with great results.

I will make posts in this thread as the buckeye experiment continues.
This should go into a category of useless info, but possibly a little bit interesting........or not.
 
Don Nguyen said:
Neat!

I admire your conquest for new approaches. Also, I admire your big wood.
Click to expand...

HAHAHAHA...... now how am I supposed to follow that ??? :p

I just tried that with some white stuff Mark..... I gave up finally after about a month. I started with the garbage bag and mayo, but it just wouldn't get hot enough here, so then I moved the piece inside to big cooler with a work light and let is sit for about 2 weeks or so like that. It was still wrapped in plastic, but never got any coloring..... Might have been too dry to start with. Maybe I should've soak the whole piece water before I put it into the bag, but I was seeing lots of condensation on the plastic so I thought I was on the right track.

Anyways good luck and post some more pics. -Larry
 
Good luck, Mark! Other than the mayo and corn, sounds like the same basic process to force spalting. I wonder if covering it but leaving it in direct contact with the ground would do anything different? I really need to go hunt down some buckeye burls, just 30 minutes east of me there are thousand of acres of them. They even line the roads and are in thick stands, some of which are very old. Of course I will get all permissions needed before I cut one, but I still would like to try it. Do you think putting one in my cellar for a couple of years would do it?


-Xander
 
Would buttermilk work better than mayo? I've seen gardners paint planters, rocks, etc with buttermilk and it does produce fungus quickly. Just a thought..
 
Larry,
My experience is that once it is dry it kills the fungus. Wetting dry buckeye stimulates mildew growth instead of the fungus.
Xander
We get our Buckeye not to far away from you.
There is a guy near Porterville who has been supplying us with Buckeye burl for the past 20+ years.
He gets some big monsters sometimes 6 to 8 feet across. But the big ones usually aren't what I need.
We use a lot of buckeye for furniture so that is how the big ones get used.
My experience with leaving it in contact with the ground is not as clean coloring (kind of muddy colors) pun coincidental.
Bugs love it so watch out for powderpost beatles and termites.
David,
The buttermilk sounds like a good idea. I might give it a try.

I could just leave these under a tarp until next year and they would color up real good.
That is what we usually do.
I wanted to try this experiment to try to bet better and faster results.
 
I don't remember who it was that told me, but what I recall is that some processors use high pressure steam hoses to clean and "cook" a whole buckeye burl.

I don't recall which of these two ways it was done????
1) The burl is steamed, then left out to dry for a year or two. This supposedly causes stronger spalt and deeper colors.
My thoughts would be that it drove the fungus spores into the wood along with moisture. The sitting out in the "Burl Yard" would allow the spalt to grow as the burl dries.
or
2) The burl is dried for a years or two, allowing the spalt to grow, and then steamed to clean it and cook the spalt and deepen the color
The high temperature of the steam would probably help kill off all the surface fungus, too. I guess it would require another drying spell after that.


I also recall reading of a "paint" for spalting maple and other woods, using buttermilk, beer, and corn meal. The wood was fresh cut into large squared timbers six feet long. The spalt "starter" was painted on the slabs and then they were stored under a loose tarp while laying on the ground. They were flipped over to the next side each month and then removed after the last side was exposed. The wood was washed down, sides and ends re-cut, ends painted, and then stacked with stickers in the drying shed to slowly dry out for a couple years.

Another formula had composted manure and ground up leaves mixed with buttermilk and water to make a "mud", which was plastered on maple and pecan logs. The logs were laid out in the shady woods near the shop.

Whatever method is used, it is a fungus that does the spalting. At the same time, lots of other bacteria, fungi, and critters are also eating up the wood fibers. Too long and the wood is ruined, too little time and the wood isn't spalted much or any. Checking regularly is a must.
 
Today I pulled out the smallest chunk to see how it was coming along.
This is about a 70lb chunk of the burl.
Looking pretty good on the outside in a moldy sort of way.
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I will be using the meat cutter band saw to cut into oversized pieces.
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This is the first slab I cut. The reason why you don't see a lot of eyes is because I cut the slab extra thick to make the cut surfaces become the edges of the blocks. When I cut again I will make cuts parallel to the outer surfaces of the burl so it will show the eyes on the faces of the blocks.
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This is all the cutting I will do at this phase of the experiment.
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The wood is still good and moist. Still over 20% moisture content.
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Next I will get some cornmeal to try with this portion of the burl.
 
Now for the corn meal.
I bought some organic cornmeal because I wasn't sure if the regular stuff might have chemicals that would inhibit the fungus growth.

Here I poured a layer of cornmeal and covered the 1st slab.
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Now the rest of the pieces with cornmeal in between and covering everything.
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Now I closed up the bag.
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Now I will move it back in a sunny spot and let it sit and grow.
 
Have you considered putting a small piece of moist recently spalted wood in with your burl pieces to start the right kind of fungus?

Otherwise this experiment seems a bit like making yogurt or sourdough bread without a starter culture. You might get lucky and the right fungus spore will float in on the wind, or you might end up getting the wrong kind of fungus growing.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see what results you get.
 
Mahoney said:
Have you considered putting a small piece of moist recently spalted wood in with your burl pieces to start the right kind of fungus?

Otherwise this experiment seems a bit like making yogurt or sourdough bread without a starter culture. You might get lucky and the right fungus spore will float in on the wind, or you might end up getting the wrong kind of fungus growing.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see what results you get.
Click to expand...

The fungus that causes buckeye to color up is different than normal spalting fungus. It also does not turn the wood punky.
The way it was explained to me is;
The wanted fungus lives in the bark of the buckeye and spreads into the wood.
As long as the wood has not dried out it continues to live and spread throughout the wood.

Just a quick summary
This was fresh cut buckeye that I picked up at the source.
The fungus that causes the buckeye to get the blue coloring is present and alive.
It just has not spread through the wood and caused the color change yet.
What I am doing is trying some of the old wives tales methods of accelerating the process with giving ideal conditions for growth of the fungus.
The cornmeal and other additives are supposed to work like steroids to increase the effect.
This is a public experiment to see what works and what does not.
 
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I have a friend in CA who harvests a lot of buckeye - he swears by yogurt and kefir to get the coloring. I'm excited to see how these turn out!
 
Mark, glad you got your saw running again. Looking forward to seeing how these pieces turn out
 
Intriguing. We sure do go to a lot of trouble to get a pretty hunk of wood. Well, some folks do... I just buy it. :)
 
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