Osage orange galore

[Bill Jobe]

A friend of mine took me to a farmer's land that had no fense, but the crops grew right up next to a grove of trees that has lots of osage orange. He knows the farmer and was given permission to take all we want. Came home with half a truck load. Would have grabbed more but ran out of sealer.
One piece we cut was from a stump where the guy had cut a very large osage orange down to about 30" or so. From that I plan to make an end table. About 24" dia. That was just part of the entire top of the stump.
I love that stuff. One of my favorite woods.
When I learn how to turn like the majority on here I may make my friend the urn he asked me to turn for him.
I hope he sticks around for a few more years. Still using a HF 10x18 (while waiting for a 10% discount from Grizzly), focusing in tool grinding ( and making bowls).
That's the second time he located an unlimited supply of one species, the first being a huge willow tree that fell in his yard. He pushed it up and over a hill so he would not have to burn it, so, I get the whole tree if I want.

Wish I had more friends like him, but then I'd run out of room to store it.

[Frederick Skelly]

Sounds like two good hauls! I've read that orange osage can be hard to work - do you find it so?

[John K Jordan]

Sounds like two good hauls! I've read that orange osage can be hard to work - do you find it so?


"Hard to work" is relative. It is quite hard but then so are a lot of other species, especially exotics but also domestics. (e,g. lyptus, ipe, black locust, lignum vitae, white oak, dogwood, hickory) i've heard people cuss at hickory, give up on lyptus. Osage does have distinctive bands of early and latewood (very much like locust) which can be a challenge if you are used to soft diffuse porous wood like green cherry or maple. Almost everything I turn is dry.


I have turned a lot of osage (I like it too) and it boils down to sharp tools and good technique. With these you can often get a surface that requires little or no sanding. I do find that when turning thin spindles it tends to splinter using a sharp skew chisel so I use something else. (The splintering tendency may be specific to the wood I have which is all from the same tree.)


I haven't made any bowls from osage but a guy brought a big bowl to our club meeting. I think he said it was a challenge but didn't mention any particular problems.


Osage has a beautiful yellow color when freshly cut but eventually changes to a dull dark brown. BTW, if interested in color changes in wood the online Wood Database has a good article "Preventing Color Changes in Exotic Woods."


JKJ

[Bill Jobe]

I HAD to turn a piece last night. I've only turned green osage and though it is nice to cut green strings of the fibur builds up on the tool. That may be unique to me as I am still learning to sharpen tools.
Either way it is beautiful wood.
As for color change John mentioned, that can occur in very little time. One of the first bowls I ever turned was osage, and last summer I decided to turn a bigger bowl as close to the same shape as the smaller one. So I took it outside and set it nearby as I began making the bigger bowl. After a couple of hours I looked at the smaller bowl and it had darkened dramatically. Good, bad or indifferent my first bowl was and remains much darker than before it sat I'm the sun that one afternoon.
I was familiar with cherry doing that but until that day had no idea osage orange does, too.

Is it uv light that causes it to darken? I used and always use tung oil finish. I'd heard it is uv resistant, but that was not what I experienced. A couple of my cherry picces did the same thing just by placing them in a room where they get a lot of sun is all it takes.

[John K Jordan]

Is it uv light that causes it to darken? I used and always use tung oil finish. I'd heard it is uv resistant, but that was not what I experienced. A couple of my cherry picces did the same thing just by placing them in a room where they get a lot of sun is all it takes.


I've read differing opinions: UV, any light, oxidation. ?? I did some experiments with color change in purple heart once. Some is purple inside when cut, some is brown. The brown can turn purple quickly in the sunlight. I also put a piece in a low-light garage once with a small wood block on top. It turned purple anywhere it was exposed to air (and room light) I haven't done the same thing with osage but it would be a good experiment.

The article I mentioned above indicates some causes and some ways to delay the color loss. Worth reading for anyone interested in wood. Here's a link:
http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/preventing-color-changes-in-exotic-woods/
(http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/preventing-color-changes-in-exotic-woods/)
Osage also makes the best garden stakes, hands down. Won't rot. I use it for fence stretchers and other things here at the farm that I don't want to degrade over time.

Oh, and if you have too much osage, where do you live? :)

JKJ

[Steve Schlumpf]

Congrats!! This is one of those times where a few photos would add to your bragging rights! :D

[Jeramie Johnson]

Great finds. I love Osage orange.

[Tom Brouillette]

I was lucky enough to find some roadside rescue OO. I love turning it. Watch out for the milky sap when turning it green, and get it turned/sealed quickly. This stuff was cracking in hours of being cut down. This is a bowl I keep in my office. About 10" x 3".346369346370

[Leo Van Der Loo]

I like to turn Osage as well as other woods, and find it not difficult to turn.

To show the change that occurs in Osage Orange and Mulberry (they are closely related) I made a picture of some turned pieces of those woods that I had sitting.

None were really freshly turned, but one was done fairly recently, and so you can see how the color changes over time.

Both UV and oxidation does cause this, as I have a couple of small boxes that got turned years ago, the inside lids have changed as well as the outside, though less than that, a Padauk box and Purple Heart Osage Orange and Mulberry ones, and other species of wood.

346371

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

I am so envious. Interested in a swap? I have black walnut, sassafras, a lot of red oak and pin oak. Just some small pieces to try out

[John K Jordan]

I am so envious. Interested in a swap? I have black walnut, sassafras, a lot of red oak and pin oak. Just some small pieces to try out

Walnut, sassafras, oak? Where do you live? It sounds like Tennessee wood. :-) I took down a huge sassafras recently and just today started cutting it into turning blanks.

Do you turn spindles and small things like ornaments and boxes? I have some smaller pieces that are air dried, probably cut 7-8 years ago if you want a piece of dry to try out. If you happen to live near East TN you could come visit and turn some here and take a piece home! The second ornament in this picture has a hollowed osage orange globe:

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JKJ

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

I am in eastern Pennsyltucky on the Susquehanna river a few miles north of Maryland. We have a few acres of woods.. Most of the Osage orange here disappared as farmers bull dozed the fence rows for larger fields and now for GPS tilling. 20 years ago, I knew where patches of Osage orange could be found. They are all gone. Oddly, I now have paulownia coming up in my fence rows. Not very big yet give it two years. Grows like weeds. We probably have pretty much the same trees.

[Bill Jobe]

Perry, I've tried a number of times to PM you but they failed.Perhaps if you sent me a PM.....

[Bill Jobe]

Perry, I have tried many times to communicate with you via the first PM but they will not send.
Wood you mind sending me another PM?

[Bill Jobe]

While working on this Osage Orange slab a thought occured to me about the color shift problem with this wood. I'm assuming most of you finish sand, wipe with a damp cloth, then finish sand again. Sometimes I repeat this a number of times.
Then I noticed the bottle of water I had dropped a lot of sawdust in that had turned the water yellow.
Has anyone tried using a cloth dampened with this several times before the very last finish sand? Seems to me if you could wipe it on enough times that the additional yellow might slow down the color shift. Make any sense ? I'd have tried that on the piece I was working on tonight but had already put some tung oil finish on it.

[John K Jordan]

While working on this Osage Orange slab a thought occured to me about the color shift problem with this wood....


Bill,

By putting osage sawdust in water you are making a common natural dye.

Osage orange is in fact widely used as a dye for cloth, with and without mordants. This shows some differences:
http://www.folkfibers.com/blogs/news/7250546-natural-dyes-osage-orange
Notice the color in the first picture from osage dye with no mordant is more brown than bright yellow. The coth in the second picture was treated with alum mordant.

I don't know whether the dyed cloth is color fast but it must be somewhat or it probably wouldn't be used so much. As an aside, you might make a local fiber artist happy if you provide a present of osage orange sawdust! Many people buy it on-line for something like $10 per pound.

There is nothing I know of that will prevent osage orange from changing to a dark brown. Remember that not much will soak very far into osage due to its nature and the tyloses in the pores. I suspect applying a weak water-based dye to the surface would not do much. Definitely worth an experiment though, so let us know how it works out. Probably the first thing to try is making some osage dye then seeing if it changes color after a few years. Some people extract stronger dye with alcohol and/or heating or boiling. If you solve the wood color change problem you will be famous, and maybe rich if you can patent and capitalize on the process.

I have wondered if applying a mordant such as alum would help if applied directly to the wood, but I have never experimented. You can try that too.

I understand that two things which cause wood to change color are oxidation from the air and UV light. Applying a thick sealing finish may help slow down the oxidation. Keeping the wood out of the light might help. I've turned a lot of osage over the years and it has all lost its bright yellow color. (BTW, some finishes might accelerate color change - I once put Watco oil on beautifully colored cocobolo and it turned as black as ebony in about a year.)

At least 10 years ago I put about a pint of brilliant yellow osage sawdust in a plastic container and put it on a shelf in a corner of a garage that never gets bright light and never has seen sunlight. This might have minimized the exposure to UV. I looked at it just now - the sawdust is now a dull brown. The sawdust in the middle of the container is maybe a little less brown, but not much. This indicates the color change may have been primarily due to oxidation from air seeping into the container.

Trying to preserve color in wood has always been a goal for woodworkers. This article from the wood database might be interesting. Notice the note with Osage: "Drastic changes toward dark brown inevitable."
http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/preventing-color-changes-in-exotic-woods/

JKJ

[Leo Van Der Loo]

While working on this Osage Orange slab a thought occured to me about the color shift problem with this wood. I'm assuming most of you finish sand, wipe with a damp cloth, then finish sand again. Sometimes I repeat this a number of times.
Then I noticed the bottle of water I had dropped a lot of sawdust in that had turned the water yellow.
Has anyone tried using a cloth dampened with this several times before the very last finish sand? Seems to me if you could wipe it on enough times that the additional yellow might slow down the color shift. Make any sense ? I'd have tried that on the piece I was working on tonight but had already put some tung oil finish on it.

The Osage Orange was/is used as a dye for cloth, it is also a good way to differentiate between Osage Orange wood and Mulberry wood, as Mulberry will not make a yellow dye.