... is more 'biological' than you might imagine. Exhibit A. Burlwood is formed in living trees, usually at the root crown. Decomposing fungi say 'here we come'; tree says 'no you don't'. Lather, rinse, repeat for 50 years and the resulting material is pretty nifty. Actually, slicing redwood burls from the few remaining stands is a big deal. Exhibit B. Spalted wood. More than one type of wood-decomposing fungi disagree about territorial occupancy. By 'disagree' I mean they throw the world's finest oxidative enzymes at each other in the hope that might beats spite. Once again, the resulting material is highly prized by woodworkers. There is a forest in China* where, every September, wood decomposition rates fall by half while environmental conditions remain favorable. Seems likely that various fungi cease new efforts and dispute new territory instead. Spalting in action *nobody else has done this. It would be great to know if it is a general thing, or if I just happened to find the one place. See Ockham and his razor. +++ I have never asked: does PriusChat host woodworkers? Surely we could talk about that somewhere.
i thought i would try it when i retired. bought the whole shop, found out i didn't have the patience and gave everything away. live and learn, the hard way. interesting about burl though, i love those little boxes they make from it.
How can we here put enough likes on bisco for 'giving everything away'? Not that it was necessarily a good decision; depends on the recipients. Worked wood requires a lot of interaction from the worker. Clay, melted metal and stone instead are 'dead' - a one-way street. Maybe I'm wrong about them but wanting now to talk about wood. ++Has anyone here ever talked to a luthier?
1) Exotic wood is expensive. 2) If it is not pine, it is exotic wood. 3) Most of that exotic wood ends up as sawdust. My initial observations.
I've done quite a bit of furniture restoration and refinishing, and in the process have had to make odd bits of moulding, but I definitely wouldn't call myself a woodworker. I do admire those who can produce fine objects from wood, though. Recently I helped a friend sell a set of bedroom furniture designed by George Nakashima (although sadly not his own production, which would have increased the price by a factor of at least ten).
The one wood/tree that caught my attention is Lignum Vitea. I knew that early US nuclear submarines used it in the main prop shaft bearing external to the hull. It was self-lubricating, withstood immense water pressures, and lasted for decades. That is some might impressive wood. Understandable, it was nearly harvested to extinction since the tree it comes from is very slow growing. What really surprised me is that the tree is native to Florida and is now a native plant recommended for yards and other natural uses.
Well..., I've watched a lotta New Yankee Workshop shows. More often than I care to admit, I doze off during the safety tip lecture, wake up when he's varnishing. All I can manage personally is rough and ready stuff, like DIY antenna for example.
dense woods: Top Ten Heaviest Woods | The Wood Database In units that make sense (to me) these get up to 1.3 grams per cubic cm. Water is a well-known 1. Wood averages about 0.6, and since it's all built of pretty much the same stuff, your stick of pine is about half air. The open space through which water goes. Into which fungi dream of growing Not a problem to drive a nail into typical wood, fibers just get pushed out of the way and the channels get compressed.
try it on an old piece of oak. one of the things i found difficult about woodworking was the massive amount of time it took to prepare a machine before using it. table saw, bandsaw, planer, jointer, mitre saw, etc. all require more fine-tuning than a '65 jag. have you ever seen what the japanese do to a block plane?
Oak (the genus) centers at about 0.75 g/cm, and it shrinks upon drying. So yes it's tough. America's National Tree by golly.
America's 'great eastern forest' includes most of the original species, but they are not as densely packed as in the pre-European times. So they grow too fast and make lower density wood. There are companies doing good business in raising sunken loads of wood from 100-200 years ago. Wood sunk in fresh water can be very well preserved. The marine critters who can eat it (terido and gribbles) never made it into fresh water. Something that I simply do not understand.
Gorillas eat wood (mostly to access NaCl which is weird) humans eat wood (but just one species of Carica), Bury the right wood in the right way, and fungi 'undo' lignin and the (gooey) product can be fed to horses and cattle. Wood eating is one of my favorite sections in the just completed review manuscript, and it's got to go ;( Journal space limitations Ironically perhaps, journals still print on paper. We kill trees by writing about them.
definitely need some wild boars around here. saw norm abrams working with the old growth wood dredged up from the great lakes, fascinating. they used to float the logs downstream to a place where they could be plucked out, but many didn't make it. you can't get wood like that anymore. and yes, it's expensive, and a very good business.
we have some beavers in the area, but do they eat wood? either way, it's more like rough framing than fine woodworking.
The teredo was also a hazard to undersea communications cables. The copper conductor of telegraph (and later telphone) cables was insulated with gutta percha from the beginnings of the industry in the 1850s right up to the 1940s, when polyethylene came into use. The teredo evidently liked the taste of gutta percha and would nibble its way through the approximately 1/8" of it surrounding the copper conductor, causing a short circuit to the sea water and the degradation or failure of the cable. Tired of this, in the 1870s a clever cable engineer invented the use of a spiral-wound thin brass tape around the core of the cable, which caused the teredo to go elsewhere for lunch: History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy - Henry Clifford - Teredo Tape Today's fiber optic cables continue to be insulated with polyethylene, and although they have a glass conductor rather than copper, there's still quite a bit of copper in the cables to carry the power for the amplifiers which boost the signal every twenty miles or so.
