It has been a long time since I wrote about Pecan but I have finally had the chance to work with it again. I bought three green blanks from NCWood, turned them green, sealed them to slow drying and came back to them two months later when they were completely dry. They can’t really have been very wet to begin with.
Of the three, only one survived, which is sad, but it happens. I truthfully wasn’t very pleased with the blanks when I received them. They had obviously dried to some degree and checks were already present. Most troubling to me were the presence of very large knots on both sides of two of the blanks, while the third had smaller knots on both sides. Knots are notoriously unstable and I don’t consider blanks that have such large ones to be of any quality. Perhaps I should have complained or returned them, but I didn’t. I am, however, much less likely now to purchase from NCWood despite having done a lot of business with them in the past. It seems to me that the quality has greatly diminished since a change of ownership. In addition to selling me these, in my opinion borne out by final results, shoddy blanks, the wax seals on the blanks degrade very quickly, so as I always note in my major posts, if you buy blanks from NCWood green turn and seal them properly immediately.
Pecan Interior
The two blanks that failed failed at the knots. The checking was in a starburst radiating from the middle and in both cases a significant piece of the knot failed leaving a gaping hole in the side of the piece. In one case the loss wasn’t as total but the gap was still so significant that it couldn’t be passed off. I suppose, in hindsight, that I could have gone to great effort to try to stabilize the checks with cyanoacrylate glue, perhaps even filling them with sanding dust and glue, and had I done all that, perhaps they would have survived, but for me life is too short to go to great efforts to stabilize a weak blank when I have probably hundreds of good quality blanks without knots, checks, or holes. And as it turned out, the most attractive of the three blanks is the one that survived.
The surviving blank measures about 8.5″ x 2″. It would have been 3″ high but it too had a check and side wall failure, but one small enough that I could cut it out, reducing the height, but not requiring the total sacrifice of the piece. The wood took an incredible sheen just with fine sanding. There were some tough end grain areas especially around the two small knots in the side walls that took some concentrated effort to clean up but I’ve dealt with much worse. I was surprised at the high sheen which perhaps is the result of the heavy spalting in this piece. One third is quite swirly gray, the center is strongly reddish, and the other third has distinct spalting streaks. As one observer noted, it almost looks as though three different woods were segmented together. It creates quite an attractive piece and it took an amazing finish with high sheen.
Pecan Reverse
Sadly, this piece too is quite full of checks, some of which existed before I green turned it since it had dried considerably before making it to me despite the wax sealing with which it came. These checks are predictably most visible around the knots, again in starburst patterns, but once turned over the worst of it is seen in a large check that crosses the entire bottom from knot to knot.