cutting logs (Im new to this)

[Irvin Cooper]

Good afternoon everyone.

First, I am totally new to wood turning. My very kind neighbor gave me a lathe recently, and i have never turned anything. At all. Please keep my total lack of experience with turning in mind when you read below.

The city came in to "clean up" around a creek that is at the back of our neighborhood in december. They have probably 10 +/- black cherry trees in piles with everything else to I guess burn or haul off when things dry out in the spring. These trees have been down for about a month or so. The cherry trees that have caught my eye and are accessible to someone with no heavy equipment are all between 12 - 20 inches in diameter.

My questions are as follows:

1. Would these be worth cutting out of the pile for turning?
2. Have they been on the ground to long?
3. If 1 & 2 are yes and no respectively, is 4 ft the right length to cut these into since the lathe will accept up to what looks like a four foot piece?
4. What is the procedure for treating these so that they will dry properly?
5. Are there any books or web sites you can refer me to to get me started in this?

It kills me to see these trees go to waste (I guess I am a tree hugger in a sick sense).

Thanks.

Irv

[Kurt Rosenzweig]

Check out Bills site! A lot of good info!
http://wonderfulwood.com/

PS: His videos are excellent!

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Irvin........if you are just starting to learn to turn.....By all means...get your hands on the wood....You can use all the practice you can get! I know ...I'm just learning.....You can practice on anything wood........


It'll be green and the chances are it's starting to crack or check but you can cut back until you get beyond the effected area and have some green wood to work with....Green wood has to be handled using certain methods....

There is also a article in the Articles Forum here where Dennis Peacock shows and explains how he uses the DNA Drying method of drying green roughed out bowl blanks....

Try doing a search here using DNA drying method.........

Good luck with your adventure in learning to turn!

[John Shuk]

This is a very helpful article written by Dennis Peacock.

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=34370

[George Tokarev]

Depending on where you are, they'll be like they were felled yesterday come spring. Especially with the bark on. I've turned cherry down for 5 years with no sacrifice beyond sapwood. Down south will be less friendly, of course.

In the log is way to leave them as you harvest and rough. With P serotina you want to be really careful about heart checks, though at that size you might have some brown rot to avoid instead. Not much percentage in taking chances with either, in my experience, especially when you see the little wood cubes in the brown rotted areas.

The way to success in drying is to keep the rate of loss from the outer surface at or below the draw from the interior. If you're blessed with high relative humidity, turn and store, if lower, let the piece elevate the humidity inside a containment of some sort like paper wraps, paper bags, anything to slow the mix with the atmosphere. I wouldn't bother playing with ethyl alcohol, as it has a lower boiling point than water, and will not affect the rate of loss, nor help maintain structure against fiber shrinkage. Use of other water-solubles with higher boiling points than water as bulking agents is a technique available for smaller pieces and special woods. Acrylics are a commercial product of this type, though some like 50/50 mixes of vinyl acetate wood glues. PEG enjoyed a vogue a number of years back, but what it does to wood is not particularly attractive to my way of thinking.

For good, experimentally valid data on how wood dries and reaches equilibrium with its environment, try http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/ , where you'll find the Wood Handbook listed on the home page. If you're broadband, get it all. If not, go for chapter three, where you will find the charts of moisture content of woods at various relative humidities to guide your drying. I'd also like to suggest you look at the direction of warp as it pertains to grain pattern in fig. 3-3, and the tables of tangential and radial shrinkage for common woods. Read the notes. What you see represents 30% to 0% moisture, so in most cases you can work with 2/3 of the full figure in determining how thick to leave your rough. Thinner the walls, faster the dry. That way you can avoid some of the strange but persistent rules of thumb you might hear, like the "10% rule," which is extemely conservative, for rough thickness, or the "one year per inch rule" for drying, which is irrelevant on a turning. With a bit of education, you won't need magic to help you.

[John Hart]

First off...Welcome Irvin!!! Great place you've found here...and welcome to the world of turning. You'll be addicted soon. Accept it.:)

Secondly...if it were me..(and I wish it was), I'd be out there every day with a chainsaw so there was nothing for the city to haul off in the spring except a bunch of wood chips. Heck...I'd take those too and use for mulch around the house.;) My recommendation would be to buy some Anchorseal in the 5 gallon container. Rip the logs in half to get rid of the pith and seal it all. Fill your garage and living room with wood. Then enjoy years of the sweet smell of cherry permeating your home.:)

[George Tokarev]

You want to be careful how you use cherry shavings. They're pretty acid, and can actually kill vegetation which doesn't tolerate acid soil. I like them under electric fences because they do kill weeds pretty well, as do walnut and oak shavings, or at least keep them from growing too high and shorting the fence. Cherry isn't recommended where horses are being contained, because they apparently love the taste. I keep my cherry shavings separate from those going to neighbors as animal bedding.

As ornamental mulch they're pretty nice, depending on the planting, because they do take a while to decay. Most evergreens can tolerate a good deal of acid, so that's where the recipients of cherry or oak shavings use them.

Nice thing about giving proper shavings to your livestock-keeping neighbors is they return them after use if you ask, complete with the additional nitrogen required to balance the decay of the wood!

[Jason Christenson]

You are clearly way too inexperienced to deal with this situation. PM me and I will give you my address so you can UPS said logs to me. :D