Walnut is a wonderful wood to work with, it has been prized for centuries, and people like walnut things - furniture, bowls, heck, walnuts themselves. Let us delve into some of its attributes.Let’s start with the trees themselves - they are very good looking trees with compound, opposite leaves, and in the open they crown out nicely. I planted this one in 2012 after I moved into my current house. I took this picture of my dog Boudreaux and the sapling when the tree was about two years old:
Boudreaux didn’t like having her picture taken in her later days, but I tried to get a picture of her next to that tree every year. She was a great dog. I have planted a total of a dozen walnut trees here and in a good year (proper amount of rain, no late freezes and so on) I get a lot of walnuts just from my yard:
That’s a lot of walnuts! I like sprouting them and planting more trees. I think of it as paying it forward. My turning teacher lives a couple of counties east of here and he has tree guys deliver logs to his place. In the past I would take my saw over there and saw the giant logs and he would pay me with slabs or turning chunks.
I got a nice slab out of that pile, and the burl in the foreground became a nice bowl:
This slab is from out at that farm.
A few years later I got some walnut from local walnut that was knocked over in an ice storm.
Some of the pieces from that tree had a nice contrast between the heart wood and the pale sapwood:
I rough turned them into bowl blanks:
Then I finish turned them.
There is another story about that tree that I have to write. As I sawed the downed log into manageable sized chunks then ripped the chunks in half, I kept hitting nails. Seriously, I had never encountered another tree in my decades of sawing that had that much tramp metal in it. Sure, one finds random pieces of stuff in trees - one time I sawed a beer bottle in half - it had been set on a tree and the tree grew over it. This is a piece of sweetgum wood that my sawing buddy Mikey had been working on, he kept hitting this and when he stopped to sharpen his saw I cut around the obstacle and found this - an old glass insulator that had been attached to a tree to support a wire of some sort. Given the nature of sawing it is inevitable that one finds such things with a newly sharpened saw. Murphy wrote about that.
But back to the walnut tree - I would make a cut and the chain would become dull. It seemed like I hit metal every time I made a cut, but that’s probably an exaggeration. It was probably only about 50% of the time. I split out some pieces and I collected some of the bits of chain-dullers:
It was an impressive array of nails and other fasteners and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what was going on with that tree. I was working on the tree and around noon a bleary eyed guy stumbled up to me as I was sharpening my saw. “What you doin’?” “Sharpening my saw - I keep hitting nails” I replied. “Oh yeah”, he said, “I built a tree house in this tree when I was a kid and I nailed boards into the trunk so I could climb up to it.” Well, there you have it. Mystery solved. He was probably about 40 years old and had lived in that place since he was a kid. And, if you know how kids nail things together you know that he had used all the nails he could obtain. And, of course, the tree had overgrown them and they were no longer visible on the surface and the rungs of his makeshift ladder had long since rotted away. I swear I found every single nail he used. But the wood was beautiful and frequent sharpening was a small price to pay for such nice walnut. “Thanks for explaining that”, I said. “No problem”, he replied. “Now I’ve got to get my mind right” and he went inside and came out with a 24 ounce beer, which he proceeded to drink. Hell, it was noon, so go for it, bro. It’s five o'clock somewhere! Sawing is never a dull (argh!) or boring job. The human element just makes it all the more fascinating. I am pretty sure this small bench was made out of wood from that tree. I suppose I could run a metal detector over it just to be certain.
One more piece of tramp metal I found in a walnut tree:
That is a full metal jacket slug that I found with my band saw. No tree deserves to be shot - hell, they are just standing there - what’s the challenge in that, eh? But enough about that. Keep your tools sharp and you will always do well. |
