Scavenging wood

[Pea Turgh]

Ola peeps.

Some manly men with chainsaws just destroyed a lovely habitat next to my house (apparently some other residents didn’t like trees overhanging in their gardens.  Fools).

There were some ash trees in amongst the sacrifices, which immediately made me wonder if I could nick some of it for a build.

However, other than seasoning it (with salt I suppose), what am I looking for in fallen trunks? Is there a “best cut”?  What is the minimum useable thickness?  There’s a couple of foot-thick ones I can see.

Is it that easy as grab a log, get someone to slice it up, then leave for a few years?  Or am I being (predictably) naive?

[Si600]

Before you do any liberating you need to find out who's trees they were. Also, the guys doing the felling may have been given the wood in part payment for doing the job.

I can't tell you which cuts are the best, but if all is OK then certainly nab as much as you can. You're looking at it drying at a rate of 25mm a year though so you won't be making anything from it anytime soon.

[Stub Mandrel]

You want slices along the trunk, not across it, for 99% of uses.

[Pea Turgh]

NHS land, NHS contractors, land rented to a livestock farmer.  I doubt they have any interest in keeping any of it.  If they don’t ever come back, I’ll take it as fair game.

@Stub Mandrel - Thankfully I knew that much! 😂

[Stub Mandrel]

Sorry it was this talk about 'Slices'"

[Pea Turgh]

Turns out the trees had a protection order on them, so the chainsaw men cut them all down illegally.

Can’t use that stuff now - bad mojo!

Edited July 14, 2020 by Pea Turgh

[ahpook]

22 minutes ago, Pea Turgh said:

Turns out the trees had a protection order on them, so the chainsaw men cut them all down illegally.

Can’t use that stuff now - bad mojo!

Oh no, really ?

That makes me sad.

[Stub Mandrel]

32 minutes ago, Pea Turgh said:

Turns out the trees had a protection order on them, so the chainsaw men cut them all down illegally.

Can’t use that stuff now - bad mojo!

I fear a lot of trees disappeared during the lockdown 😞

[Si600]

32 minutes ago, Pea Turgh said:

Turns out the trees had a protection order on them, so the chainsaw men cut them all down illegally.

Can’t use that stuff now - bad mojo!

I'd like to say that I'm surprised, but I'm not. A new development went up at the top of West Haddon a couple of years back, a few old trees were found to be 'rotten' or 'accidentally' hit by heavy machinery. You can't prove intent, but we all knew it was because they were in the way.

[Si600]

34 minutes ago, Pea Turgh said:

Turns out the trees had a protection order on them, so the chainsaw men cut them all down illegally.

Can’t use that stuff now - bad mojo!

Of course you can, think of it as keeping the memory of the little habitat alive. A bassy memorial.

[Jabba_the_gut]

@Pea Turgh have you seen the film ‘Felled’? I think it is on Amazon - might appeal to you!! (www.felledthemovie.com)

Edited July 14, 2020 by Jabba_the_gut

[Pea Turgh]

I felled over a wall the other day.  Made a right mess of my legs.  Mrs Turgh found it hilarious though.

[Jabba_the_gut]

 

 

[Pea Turgh]

20 minutes ago, Jabba_the_gut said:

 

 

That does look cool.  I’ll see if I can get Mrs Turgh on board with the telly box later.

 

”Just trimming back the overhang” they said;

 

[Jabba_the_gut]

2 minutes ago, Pea Turgh said:

That does look cool.  I’ll see if I can get Mrs Turgh on board with the telly box later.

Ah. That might be a problem as the film is about them making family tables so you might end up with a slightly different project to what you expected!!!!

[Grangur]

If you're going to process freshly cut wood to be useable what you need to do is dry it without getting so many splits that it will only be suitable for the fire.

As a wood turner, what I do is keep the logs in 1m to 2m length, paint the ends in PVA glue and stack them in the dry.

For a bass body or neck, you will be wanting boards of about 40mn thick. Yet you also need to a low for movement of wood, so I'd have the wood cut into 50mm or 60mm boards for drying. Then paint the ends again with PVA. For valuable timber, I'd paint the entire thing. Then stack the boards with an air-space. The people processing the boards would also take out the central core of the tree for you. This is the part that carries most sap and will cause most splitting if left in.

When the boards are dry, in a couple of years, they will then need to be cut roughly to size for your body and go through the thicknesser, to reduce them to 40mm and make them evenly flat. Trim the sides square to the faces  glue together, to make a good body blank and you're off on a normal bass build.

Now looking at the logs you have: They look to me like a type of pine. Pine often has a serious amount of sticky sap that I wouldn't want for turning. It mad dry ok for a body. Yet with those diameter trunks you won't get much from them in boards.

Tree surgeons generally take wood away as part of the service, but the wood is normally more of a problem to them than an asset. They will be only too pleased to give you wood. Their problem with this is the time spent with us, messing about with small amounts of wood, costs their time. What normally happens, in the USA, (don't know about UK on this) is wood gets sent to  power energy plants and burnt for power generation as "green" energy. It also probably goes for chipboard and MDF.

I hope some of this helps, even if it's not great news.