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So yesterday I was over at a fellow woodturner’s house (he’s a member of the Front Range Woodturners and an arborist) as he was trying to sell off some of the wood he’s collected. I picked up a piece of lilac stump and a few other small pieces of burl.

While I was there I was telling him that I had picked up some plum and ash from the local tree trimming. He told me that fruit wood checks/cracks easily and that I should process it down to blanks and then seal them.

When I got back to my tools I changed the blade in my bandsaw (for the first time)and then I got to processing some wood. I cut a few pen blanks, a few bottle stopper blanks, and a couple that might be able to be used for about a 10″ pepper grinder.

Some of the blanks had some purple in the wood:
Plum Bottle Stopper blanks

and some had some really pretty grain:
Plum Pen blanks

I ended up picking up a hotplate and a couple of inexpensive stock pots (different sizes, so they nested) in order to make it easier to melt the wax down out in the garage. It all seemed to go fairly well.

A couple of things I learned though: I need to set up some sort of jig for the bandsaw so I can get straighter and more repeatable cuts. I worried about cutting the wood poorly.

By poorly I mean that I might be cutting the ‘good’ parts into parts that weren’t as nice.

I guess that’s part of being a wood geek as well.