Box elder logs turned gray inside

[Marty Tippin]

I'm finally getting around to cutting up some of the flame box elder logs I picked up over the summer and I'm finding that they've got some significant gray streaks inside.

Before I spend a lot of time turning these, can someone give me an idea of how I hold expected them to look when finished? I'm concerned that the gray will just me the bowls look old and uninteresting. Or maybe they'll be art gallery pieces, I don't know...

[Dan Hintz]

Looks like blue spalting to me... gorgeous.

[Bruce Pratt]

Red will fade to brown, blue will stay pretty much the same.

[Roger Chandler]

That is a common occurrence with box elder, Marty. We call it blue mold around here, but I do believe it is a form of splalting and if you can make a good contrast between the red flame in the figure and the blue, it makes some striking turnings.

[robert baccus]

Charge extra!

[Shawn Pachlhofer]

feel free to throw it away at my house.

[David DeCristoforo]

In pine this is called "blue stain". Blue stain pine costs several times the price of clear. You gotta decide for yourself if you like it or not but if not, there's plenty of people that would be happy to take it off your hands...

[Marty Tippin]

It turned into a somewhat academic exercise, as one blank turned out to be too punky to work with (at least, given my limited skills) and the other blank had a huge rotten void inside that I couldn't work around.

But I've got a couple more pieces that I might be able to hollow out and will give that a go soon.