Salvaging a Cherry Board with Rot

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

Hey fellas,
Hopefully that title is descriptive enough, I'm not exactly sure how I would describe this board. So that's the first question, I suppose. What's going on here?
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This is a piece of cherry that I got for free. Nothing particularly special but on my low budget everything is special. It was also cut down locally so that makes it a little cooler in my view. Either way, I don't want to waste it. I figure there's gotta be a way to creatively use this board. I know I could just plane it down past the rotted part or cut that part out but I'd like to try to use it somehow. It could make a very unique piece. My thought is to somehow remove the rotted wood that is not structurally sound (read: soft and spongy) then perhaps cut a piece of glass to fit, similar to Greg Klassen's work pictured below.
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Has anyone tried anything like this? Any ideas on how I could go about removing the rotted wood? Burn it out? Wire wheel? Gouge?

Thanks,
Matt

[Mike Heidrick]

Attachments are not working for me.

Is the rot spongy? You can use CA/superglue so some kings of "rot" and stabilize it.

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

Attachments are not working for me.

Is the rot spongy? You can use CA/superglue so some kings of "rot" and stabilize it.

Pictures should be fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

The rot is fairly spongy so I figured I'd better get rid of it. It's also a big enough section that it would take a hell of a lot of CA glue to fill it, and the rotted section isn't particularly nice-looking anyway so I don't think it'd be worth trying to stabilize.

[John Lankers]

Any fix would probably cost you more than it's worth, unless it really has a lot of sentimental value I would cut the rotted part out and try to salvage the rest if possible.

[Ken Combs]

It won't be cheap, but I think the pour on bartop finishes are thin enough, and cure slow enough, to penetrate that spongy area. Once cured, it will be stronger than the board. You could do this from both sides to assure complete filling. Like software guys used to say: It's not a defect, it's a feature. Or, undocumented function.

I think it can even be tinted if desired.

On second thought, I remembered that I have several kits of that stuff. A few years old but when used last, sometime in '16, it worked fine. If you want to try that it, I'll ship you one, cheap.

[Lee Schierer]

Minwax wood hardener would take care of the soft wood to make it harder. I'm not sure what it would look like as a finished piece.
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[andy bessette]

Cut the rotten part out and throw it away.

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. The rotted part is pretty ugly as it is-there's a lot of white mold, fungus, or something in that section so I don't care to save that. It's spongy enough that I went ahead and started digging out the rotten wood with a gouge. I'm gonna continue doing that until I get to good, hard wood and see how it looks. A wire wheel is the other option I considered but I don't see that going any faster than the gouge. I'll post pics of progress. Worst case scenario it ends up looking unattractive and I rip the whole thing into narrower boards.