Just in case anyone doesn’t know what punky wood is: Punky Wood is wood that has started to rot and become very soft.
The thing is woodworkers love spalted wood which is wood at the stage of decay just before it starts to be rotten (punky) and there is a quite fine line between the two.
Here is a bowl I turned a while ago with spalted wood. The mineral lines left behind by the fungal growl add character and interest to the wood.
Of course, when wood goes too far as per the header image for this post it is clearly not much use for anything.
Nicci managed to get me two pieces of Sycamore from town that had reportedly been in someone’s garage for a few years. They were very dry as expected and looked quite promising on initial processing with nice grain patterns.
Here is a piece of the timber. I have soaked it in shellac to try and stablise it. I’ll see how I get on with it later.
As you can see above the awl just pushes into the soft wood. Unfortunately, the only place for this is in my wood burner!
With a bit of judicious cutting, I did manage to get a small bit of stable wood out of it and turned it into the live edge bowl below.
