Best way for processing cedar blanks

[Dueane Hicks]

I live in the land of cedar (Olympic mountains); I have some green logs cut only a week ago. Is there a special way to process them? Is it better to split the long in half and seal the ends, or can I process them all the way to round blanks?

[John K Jordan]

I live in the land of cedar (Olympic mountains); I have some green logs cut only a week ago. Is there a special way to process them? Is it better to split the long in half and seal the ends, or can I process them all the way to round blanks?

I don't know what kind of cedar grows in the land of ceder. Around here cedar is eastern red cedar. I turn dry wood. I get the best results by processing green wood into whatever size blanks I want, spindles, boxes, bowls, etc, seal the end grain, and put the blanks up to dry. I cut the blanks with some combination of sawmill, chainsaw, and shop bandsaw depending on the size of the log and the intended size of the blank.

I inspect each blank after about a week or so and cut away and reseal any cracks that start to form. I weigh each blank and record the weight and date on each with a sharpie onto a piece of masking tape. Reweighing periodically will indicate when the blank is dry when the weight doesn't decrease after several months. I've processed and dried many, many 100s of blanks like this over the years.

If you turn wet wood forget all this. Leave the log in the shade and off the ground. When ready to turn something cut away any end checking from one end and cut a chuck of wood to turn.

ERC tends to be stable and dry quickly. If your cedar is not Eastern Red Cedar I know nothing.

JKJ

[Dennis Peacock]

I've turned a few piece of Red Aromatic Cedar, the stuff that grows in the south like weeds :) and I've had more blanks fly apart on me than any that have stayed together. I've had better success at turned spindles in cedar than I have bowls of sizes larger than about 8-10". I stopped turned RAC when I got hit in the faceshield by a chunk that flew off a blank I was turning. I've not turned RAC since that time.....IIRC, that was about 9 years ago. :)

[John K Jordan]

I've turned a few piece of Red Aromatic Cedar, the stuff that grows in the south like weeds :) and I've had more blanks fly apart on me than any that have stayed together. I've had better success at turned spindles in cedar than I have bowls of sizes larger than about 8-10". I stopped turned RAC when I got hit in the faceshield by a chunk that flew off a blank I was turning. I've not turned RAC since that time.....IIRC, that was about 9 years ago. :)

One problem is some trees have a convoluted perimeter which folds the surface deep inside the log, sometimes with weak sap wood and sometimes with bark inclusions. These can certainly fly apart when turning face work. But some trees don't have this "feature" and are solid all the way through.

I got a lot of shallow bowls, wide platters, and spindles out of this one short long cut into 2" slabs, solid all the way through but with some knots, 18-24" wide, sold about 1/2 of them. Other logs give almost no wide slabs but long lines of bark inclusions.

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JKJ

[Jeffrey J Smith]

We’ve got several cedars up here in the upper left hand corner of the country - Western Red Cedar is most prevalent where I live, along with Port Orford Cedar, but you’ll also find Alaska Yellow Cedars (which I think is actually a cyprus) and incense cedars. I haven’t turned a lot of it, but the two species I’ve tried - western red cedar and alaska yellow cedar seem very stable when processed to blanks (cut to length and ripped to remove the pith). There’s four chunks of Yellow cedar that have been bouncing around my tarped wood storage for a couple of years now that show no signs of end checking even without sealing the end grain. I’ve turned a bit of it and enjoy it, but softer woods like sharp tools...my neighbors friend is an arborist on Vancouver island and she brought me a few yellow cedar burls that are waiting patiently. There’s so much BL maple and madrone available most times that cedar is down the list of wood I’ll chase down.