Scavenged Beechwood project, part one

I started today on my first woodturning project that starts from the very beginning - a tree felled by a storm on my mother’s property in rural New Hampshire.

In October 2014 I cut off a 4-foot section of the trunk and brought it to my studio in Brooklyn. I let it cure outside on the fire escape for a year.

Heh, I also put it on the fire escape because it had a lot of little bugs living in it, and I hoped to starve them out as the wood cured. Well, it seems like most of the teeny-tiny little bugs are gone, but when I was cutting the trunk into blanks (finally using the semi-terrifying portable bandsaw I bought myself with some consulting money) I saw a couple pillbugs crawl out. Hopefully this will be the last you hear about them.

I need to learn to cure wood much more competently if I continue doing this - over the course of the year the log developed some deep checking that may end up making it entirely unusable. I haven’t had a piece explode on me in awhile though, so I might as well press ahead with this one (with, of course, very conservative speeds and safety gear).

I read on the woodworking Stack Overflow about filling cracks with wood glue (Titebond III, which I happen to have on hand, is also foodsafe, which matters to me). Here are some photos of the glue stuffed into the checks; I had good luck just putting the nozzle right to the wood and applying gentle pressure until I saw glue peek out of other areas of the check.

I’ll post more one the glue has cured and I’ve done the next couple steps.