Spalted Birch Bowl err, Saucer - Early 2011

This is another of the posts chronicling some of my prior projects.  This was done in early 2011.

A friend of mine who works at another one of our stores gave me a piece of a big birch log end. The office lady who ferried it between stores looked like I'd just grown an eyeball on a stalk out of my forehead when I got so excited over there being mold growing on the ends. Took about forever for me to cut it up with my hand saw, but I was finally able to get it cut to length and split in half length-wise. Then came the great fun of lopping the corners off on the tablesaw (since I don't own a bandsaw); these cuts are always very high on the pucker-factor.

I put it on the lathe and actually managed to blow up the same piece of wood three different times in one evening. After the third time, I put down the tools, said some very bad words, insulted the tree's mother, and quit for the night without even cleaning up the shop. A couple days later, after watching several online videos and finding out what I was doing wrong that caused the explosions, I went down and was able to salvage this saucer/coaster out of the leftover piece of wood. Not much when you consider it started out as a ~11" bowl 6" deep, but a heck of a lot better than nothing. It's actually sized for the bottom of my large glass tankard and has a curve on the rim to guide the glass to the bottom to be a coaster, but looks more like a saucer now that it's done. Other people have said that it looks like an ash tray.

The grain is very interesting because, as you can see in the pictures, the wood appears as different colors depending on the angle at which you look at it, varying from nearly white to dark orange/red. There are no black 'spalting lines' that you see so soften with spalted maple, but the colors are just incredible. I have the other half of the log I cut up rough-turned to about an inch thick, soaked it in DNA overnight (had to borrow one of my mom's sauce pans for this because the bowl is too big for the gallon ice cream pail I usually use for DNA soaks), and the outside is wrapped up drying in my office. (My office is about the same temperature as the 7th level of hell due to inadequate ventilation and several computers being on 24/7 - figure it'll dry more rapidly there than in my house, where the thermostat is turned down except for about 6 hours a day.) Given how this saucer turned out appearance-wise, I can't wait to see how a 10+" bowl will look.