{"id":1118,"date":"2015-11-15T04:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T08:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woodturningpens.com\/?p=1118"},"modified":"2015-11-15T04:00:15","modified_gmt":"2015-11-15T08:00:15","slug":"green-wood-turning-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woodturningpens.com\/green-wood-turning-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Green Wood Turning Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I first learned to turn wood using dry and seasoned wood that was not going to change shape or crack once it was finished. Of course I first learned to turn wood by making wood pens, and you could never use green wood for that purpose without certain disaster and heartbreak. So, I was quite accustomed to working with completely dry and seasoned material.<\/p>\n
When I started to expand into bowl turning, I soon learned that most commercially marketed bowl blanks are sold in some stage of the drying process ranging from very wet to almost dry to completely dry, but most of them will have some significant degree of moisture left in them. Knowing this, I usually store my bowl blanks, sometimes for years, with the date of acquisition written on them (a practice not employed early on, but I know blanks with no date are at least several years old and therefore more likely to be dry). Then I wait patiently, again, sometimes for years, for the blanks, most of which are at least partially waxed to at least slow the drying process and prevent cracks, known as checks in the hobby, from forming, to dry completely before attempting to turn them. I have followed this practice for years and only once was I surprised to discover a blank that wasn’t completely dry in the center. This accounted for why I could never get the end grain to sand out and why the bowl changed shape on me when left on the lathe for a few days as I let my frustration with the unknown problem lessen before coming back to it. Once I realized that the wood had been wet, it all made much more sense. Rainbow Poplar is not any harder to turn than any other wood, but it will behave differently, as any wood will, when wet.<\/p>\n
I have long known that many wood turners prefer to turn their bowl blanks while they are still green and then re-work the pieces later to correct for the inevitable warping that will occur as the wood dries. Various methods can be employed to slow the drying and reduce warping and checking including chemical treatments, waxes, and drying in bags with or without wood shavings. Some wood turners just turn the bowl to final size and let it warp and call it “art.” Maybe it is. There are many schools of thought about how best to turn and season green wood but I have found that there are many schools of thought about literally everything related to the hobby of wood turning. Everyone has an opinion and most everyone thinks their way is the only way. And for each person, I guess it is. A very well informed and experienced opinion is offered by Dale Nish through this resource<\/a>. I keep the advice posted on my shop wall and ignore it routinely, probably to my own peril.<\/p>\n I have had lots of green blanks and some of them have dried quite nicely while others, especially Red Gum warped all to hell while it was still a blank and presented quite a challenge and a great deal of material loss to get it back into a useable shape. However, this would have been true of the Red Gum had I turned it green and I would have had to try to re-mount and shape a very out of round and difficult to mount piece. And it has been exactly that fear of how to re-mount, safely, a green turned blank that has since warped that has kept me from attempting green turning, until now.<\/p>\n I picked up some small pieces, 4”x2”, of a local wood known as Cucumbertree, due to the long and green unripe fruit produced that resemble cucumbers. Unlike true cucumbers, these will turn red when ripe and they are not eaten by people. The wood is actually a species of Magnolia, about which I will write in greater detail in a future posting. It looks, smells, and works very much like other Magnolia wood, being quite soft (700 on the Janka scale), pale yellowish heartwood sometimes with gray streaking or lines, and prone to spalting easily. Most commonly in its native area of the Southeastern United States, it is used as a utility wood, often mixed with and sold as Poplar.<\/p>\nExperience with Drying Green Blanks<\/h2>\n
Cucumbertree Wood<\/h2>\n