I had a little jaunt down to Inverness on Wednesday to visit a sawmill and a tree surgeons to shop for timber and I’ll share more on this later (once I’ve unloaded the truck, but not today as it’s bad weather – welcome home!).
Whilst looking at the various pieces of timber at Epic Tree Care Clive cut the end off a piece of Walnut to check and show me what it was like. The piece cut off was about 70mm thick and maybe 250mm diameter. This piece was never intended to be used. But, waste not want not, I chucked it in the back of the truck anyway.
As the weather is bad and, being ever the patient one, I fished the walnut slice out of the back of the truck and took it into the workshop to turn.
Now, as per the title of this post, I was pretty sure this was destined for failure. It’s not for no reason that bowls are not normally turned end grain. But it was essentially a scrap bit of wood so, nothing to lose.
The bowl I turned is shown below and it didn’t turn out too bad. However, being end grain, and very wet it was almost certain to split as it dried.
In fact, as you can see from the photos below, in the time from finishing turning, cleaning up the work area, and getting back into the house (maybe half an hour tops) it is already starting to split.
Ah well, it’s what I expected but at least we can see what the timber is like. I’m really looking forward to turning some properly prepared pieces.
