Spalted Silver Maple Slabbing [Embedded Steel, Brass, & Copper]

hey everyone my name is Matt welcome to my backyard this time gonna be slapping up some silver maple which is probably gonna be pretty spalted so it should be a really should make some pretty interesting slabs it's a pretty interesting lumber a lot of potentially interesting things going on in this stuff so I got this log as well as another one from the same tree this longer log is from the top of the tree it's about ten feet long and then the second log I have is about six feet long both around the same diameter about three feet wide so it's almost a meter wide for all of you metric folks my buddy Brandon brought me these back in November it is now August the following year this tree was topped and left standing in his customers yard for five years so it's kind of standing there rotting for both of those five years which is what produced a lot of asphalt and of course now has been sitting here for almost another year that should also help to increase the overall spalting and give us some more colors as well so I'm gonna start off with the longer section this 10 footer here get this thing up onto the mill and like we always do we'll take a look around the log before I start sawing it what gets some of the potentially interesting things going on in there and talk about how I'm orienting it to get the hopefully the best slabs I can't at least the best slabs for me as always that's the cool part about sawing is you can solve these things in different ways to produce different things and two people saw in the same log may saw it differently to create two totally different results so as always I use my trailer to bring the log over to the mill and then winch it off and then we'll get it oriented [Music] so I got this thing up here I have positioned and I haven't oriented the way the thing is gonna be the best for what I'm after and as always let's take a look around the log talk a little bit about the features of it how we're going to saw it and all of that we're gonna start with the end grain here so first off because this log was standing for so long and essentially rotting and well who knows what was rotting us because it was standing there because it started rotting before we're still alive there is a lot of spalting in here this is a lot more visible back before the ends of the law got weathered so in the shots from when was dropped off it's pretty evident these fault lines that are in here now they're a little more on the obscured side but one thing I want to point out about these spalting is we do have a lot of spalting down through here but up in this area we see all these big cracks that's actually because this is like actually some actual rot as opposed to just starting to rot which is what this but the light spalting is gonna be so this stuff is actually pretty you know pretty soft and mushy and I can get in there pretty easily with this clamp body so I'm expecting this to be pretty much to mush to actually use for slabs so I'm orienting it upwards so that way as we come down the cuts we're gonna Ruby removing these and we'll get less and less actual rot and we'll get into just some spalting down the ways if I had oriented it in the other direction 9 degrees from here I would be cutting through and getting heavy spot on one side which was also rotten and some salt off on the other side so we would have like a solid half of the slab and like a mushy half of the slab so I'm orienting things I get solid slabs once I get down through here one other thing it was a lot easier to see before us is whether it was the staining right here this looks like iron staining so there is probably some metal embedded this log somewhere in this area but somewhere further into the log so let me get down past the pith which is right here or probably find some kind of something could be a nail could be something else with spike screw who really know it at this point but will probably find it when we get in there and with this rot area here I think a big contributing factor to that is 'aslim which was kind of growing off over here so at one point there was a branch coming out of here and that was i must've been pruned off for something and this has been growing around it to close up that wound and I'm guessing that because this is well over here and then that rot was kind of on the same area as this hole here water was probably getting in here over the years causing some rot to kind of go down through the tree and that's probably what that rot is for so I would expect the rot to only hopefully only be from this point down and not really from this point on towards the top from here up should be pretty solid and then that side down there should be kind of a rot inside so if it is rotted we'll end up with some some slabs that are solid for like 8 feet and then have two feet of mush so they just become they could just become shorter slabs now normally for me because there was this limb coming out of here I would want to solve this at 90 degrees this orientation right now to expose some of the crotch figure that was in there from that limb but because of that rot I'm opting to go for some more I guess straighter grain type of slabs just what the bark falling off it actually makes it a lot easier to see some of the potential figure elements that could be in the log so if you come in over here you can see some kind of curl action going on there and like down here there's a little lump and that's gonna be some indicator s on quilts so there should be some figure here and there although I'm not doesn't seem like a super high density as far as interesting things go if you walk around to this side you can see there is a kind of burl kind of thing forming and this over here is where that Lynne is so this is kind of coming off the side of that limb so we have that as well this side the bark is pretty much coming off all the way and you can kind of see that the growth of the tree is kind of spiral so that could be interesting as well now looking at the other end of the log still looks pretty solid I don't see anything super punky and rotten maybe this corner right here is a little bit on the punky side but for the most part it looks pretty good so it should be a pretty well solid with some minor spalting or maybe a lot of Spalding but still fairly solid let's talk about the first cut I'm thinking my first cut will come right through here and that's gonna leave me with a sizable chunk that's gonna serve as the roof for where this is air drying out in the yard and I probably will stack something on top of this but what I like to do is just save that off cut just in case because at some point I could take whatever is on top of it off of it and I might need that off cut to serve as the roof at some point so I'll hold on to that the other thing too is that should come down below this burl so I'll be able to preserve this and when I'm done drying the rest of the log when I don't need that roof piece anymore I can always solve this up into smaller chunks for I know things you use burles for like turning things like that and if I have anything sizable down here I can always saw it on my board out of those or that in the future looks like it's gonna be around 33 or 34 inches and I'm sorry my metric or my Imperial and metric both tape measure thing broke so I only have an imperial tape measure so I have no idea what the metric conversions will be off top my head but I will include those on screen so I'm gonna start getting the saw raised up and ready to go and for those who are interested diameter down here is like 34 inches or so so I don't know it's probably like I'm gonna size like 90 centimeters somewhere in there that's my guess so it's gonna fall along with the bill you know I haven't quite put that adjuster arm back on here yet which isn't a big deal for this log since it's pretty much an even diameter so in order to keep my guides from wandering as I'm cutting get this bolt which will just hold it in position instead of getting pulled across look by the force that the blade is exerting on it I should reach okay that's cut oh yeah that was like 5 foot this is only 3 that when I pulled out a finale and Robbinsdale yeah I watch the booty walk that sorry I got sidetracked talking to my next-door neighbor ah all right let's see what's inside of this thing nice thing about this part is gravity is working in your favor so what does kick this thing off and stand back oh look at this wow wow wow wow wow wow wow check out all this figure through here around where this limb used to be this was a pretty big limb before I got cut off so this is what all of the rot was it's all from that limb I got trimmed back however many years ago but the area surrounding it is just absolutely gorgeous a lot of really cool color it's like a let's take a look at the actual log I start on this end look at this it's some really nice fault through here I've got some kind of figure different colors going on there so then on this side we've got some really nice figure coming in through here whatever this is me it's been kind of like bark inclusion or something going on there that's part of that burly I cut off and then it is pretty sweet hole here but all of this above the hole is just absolutely beautiful a lot a curl coming around through here and on up and then you gots palt here and there throughout the rest of the log which is super nice time to start cutting so I think I'm gonna do what I normally do in this cut as many slabs as possible while this thing is stable so I'll go and probably four or five slabs and then we'll start offloading them and let's take a look [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is as far as I got the other day it was Friday afternoon we're getting towards Friday evening I had like 45 minutes and this is how far I got in those 45 minutes before I had to go be a dad so it's now the following Monday it's a good weekend over the weekend my son helped me load up the next vlog the smaller ones let's ready to go on to the mill I've got a few hours today dedicated to just doing this so I'm gonna go ahead and get this saw uncovered and get back to song all right so I'm not quite enough throat depth to pull another piece of ten cord off of here which is going to cut these things at ten cord to 1/2 inches thick so let me start off loading these things now and I don't have a good place for these yet so I'm gonna put them over here on these blocks and then this white oak log right here this has been out here for a little over a year now this is probably ready to go inside to finish drying so when I remove this log this log as well as a smaller one will scull will get stacked right there but for the time being I'm gonna start pulling slabs off and stacking them there and I'm not gonna worry about flipping them because I don't have to because as I'm pulling them off I'll put them down in the orientation they will be when they're finally stacked because the log we reassembled in the same orientation as it is right now with the top side still facing the top whereas when I'm stacking in place I flip them so the log ends up getting flipped over from where the top is becomes the bottom and vice versa so before I clean these up I want to point out this white growth and some green stuff down there as well this is some new fungal growth growing on the surface of the slabs that's because I left these things on the log touching each other so they didn't have a chance for any surface moisture to kind of dry off they'll get this if you stack lumber without stickers between them now normally this doesn't happen this quickly this is only two days worth of growth this might take a little longer than that to see this much growth happen but since this is so spalted it was already starting to decompose it's already full of different kinds of fungi in here it's gonna go a lot faster that's nice that's the one thing I like about maple has been sitting for a while it's a lot more interesting visually as far as the color palette goes otherwise it's just boring kind of whites and browns as you get to the heartwood but it's been sitting for a while you got a little more red and some gray and oranges and stuff so I think down here is we're gonna see the heavier sport lines got a pretty good amount of those down here coming through here just gets kind of interesting as far as colors go not a whole lot of things to note there get them back up to the hole is where things start to get interesting again with some figure through here and you know that giant hole with some more figure on the other side and you start getting some more support lines and just discoloration positive discoloration I'd say up on this side flash that is some beautiful stuff these are getting better the further into the log we get so again down here got the spot lines this is a really cool cat terminates up here that's just I don't know something cool about that different color and everything through the center we've got some really nice Silver's and some Pink's through here beautiful spalting along the outside again and a big old hole and they got some more really nice figure through there I think at this point I'm gonna start cutting again I don't want to take too much weight off the slog because the lighter it is that I Greer is tendency to kind of move around as it's being cut so it looks like I can take one more cut before I have to move my stops in my clamp so if I go to move those and the whole thing ends up shifting I'll have to probably roll this thing over I hit whatever metal embedded object is in here on that cut so what I'm gonna do is pull off these four slabs and see what exactly it is that's in there chances are it's not too big because the teeth really aren't all that damaged probably most exciting thing about hitting something like this is you can tell us whatever it is pretty soft because the chip from the blade cutting it it's just stuck to the tooth so that's a little shading from whatever it is this blade just went through and here's another one here still stuck to that tooth and another one and another one that's a big one okay sit the camera the tripod with the bucket of water let's try that again I think color wise these are getting better check out these big dancers curl through here like that that's all those dark areas they're all streets of curl you can see one pretty clearly right there but the colors is getting really amazing further down we get we're getting into a lot more reds which is just beautiful I'm liking this one too because you get some really nice red and you get a little hint of the spot lines on just one side that's looking nice that's cool well is it getting better a lot more reading this one so this part over here is still little punky it's a little bit mushy so that's probably not gonna dry super well might need to be stabilized or willing to be stabilized if it stays in the future but it's surrounded by this really nice ring of this yellow orange color and you can see all of this figure through here and yeah there's a lot of really nice reds as you come down to the other side some more spalting and a little bit of light figure that's pretty nice I'm thinking the next one is gonna be probably the best one the spot on this side is just looking incredible I think the next one's gonna be pretty good or maybe the one after that because it won't have nearly as much of this mushy rot area but it should still have all the same kind of color and spalled set a phone set the water bucket socials looking really interesting as we getting in towards the center of the tree we have all of the old limbs that kind of shot off of here and fell off and we're cut off at some point didn't actually grow out to be full-sized limbs and we've got some really interesting figure forming around those limbs and of course that really nice band of small thing down there there is this much bigger old limb kind of inclusion in here so lots of figure happening around that which is absolutely beautiful this area down here is still a little soft but it brings with it a lot of really nice color and this is actually getting to be a lot more solid than the previous slabs okay so I'm gonna start pulling off this next slab this should show some steel or some metal embedment in it I think I felt us somewhere in this area here so as I pull back this slab we should see whatever it is that was embedded in this tree something big whoa that's probably the biggest thing I've hit yet so here is all that blue staining it looks like actually hit two things something here and something much larger right there and might be like some giant bolt or something totally different this almost looks like a piece of rebar I don't want to damage the slab too much because this could be a character thing but I also curious to know how deep this thing goes whatever this is it's pretty darn big it's running kind of on a diagonal so pretty big I'm not gonna really get it out whatever it is so we'll make another cut and we'll see if we hit it again the blade is still cutting all right so we'll see how this next cut goes but I do need to reposition my stops over here bring those down all the way and get my clamp out of the way as well so we'll see if moving those down a little bit for the next cut causes the log to shift at all so I thought I was gonna have a lot more time yesterday but our nanny had to leave early so I was only out here for maybe like an hour and then maxing that we're out here checking out slabs for a bit in the afternoon so it is now day three and this is turning into one of those piecemeal type of things getting things done but on the plus side it's kind of nice to be out here a little bit every day it's just being in the shop filming or sitting on my butt about computer editing or something so let's get the mill set get it all fired up and take another cut and we'll see if I cut to do this piece of field again I probably will because I haven't exposed much length of it so far the blade still looks like it's cutting all right at this point so we'll see how it does in the cut I might have to speed a little slower at this point but it made its way out of the last 12 inches of the black cut pretty easily after hitting all that biker rot or whatever that is so I'm guessing it should still cut the length looks pretty well but we'll see [Music] that did not go as well yeah I'm missing a lot of teeth now now I'm just curious what the heck it is so what ended up happening was whenever I cut through actually grabbed the blade and installed it so that's actually why it turned off so that blade is like wedged in there hooked on whatever it grabbed so I'm knocking able to just back it out of the cut so I will take the blade off the mill hit the note out of the way and then we'll try and get this blade out of here well at this point I don't know maybe it cut most of the way through whatever that was and now it's fine I think I'm going to put another blade on and see if I can get through I know some of you aren't gonna like this very much I gotta know what it is I don't want to ruin slap pretty cool if whatever that is is this something really interesting that could be incorporated into whatever the slab ends up being then embedded objects in your final piece [Music] all right this blade is an older one it's been through a few logs already I think I hit something with this at one point because it's missing a little row of teeth in the middle here but the rest of the teeth on the blade alright just fine so we'll see what happens if it makes it wrestle the way through whatever I hit it should cut that last foot of the log all right all right let's do this I think this is the part where I say something like engage safety squints something along those lines [Music] ladies probably me Iraq now - I also too bad a lot of teeth on here still I think it knocked a set off of him though so something to be reground which it needed to be regrown anyway it was dull but I felt a drag and as I was coming through there so the old blade must have cut through the old whatever was in there and then just kind of stalled up because I was missing too many teeth and this one is barely made it through so shall we see what the heck we just cut through huh some kind of looks like copper oh [Music] yeah we got that spike again right here which is what probably stopped you know that's probably about where the blade was then it stopped we also went through something weird to hear this looks like some copper lines it's a little bit of something I don't know what that is and that's that spike again so I think what I might do cuz I have no idea how much deeper this thing goes so I might pull a thicker slab off next maybe something like 12 or even 16 quarter or something down to here and then keep cutting from that point so before I bring the next lab over I realized I never showed the last slab from yesterday so here's some water this one's probably like one of my favorites starting on this and again it's some really nice light spalting along the edge here and of course this really cool band the small thing all the way up about halfway here along that edge and since now we're getting towards the son of the tree we have all of the early limbs that had grown and fallen off at the early stages of the tree's life as it was getting taller which produces some really interesting crouched figure and just general figure around it so here's some crouched figure right there a little band of that and you know more figure everywhere else getting up through here we got some more crotch figure from this old limb that is a little bit on the rotten side and that's the left of that hole down middle so another really nice-looking flap this might be my favorite they're all giving my favorite that's not usually how it works so once again down here we got that nice band of spalting another smaller band is bulk them along the side here but some really nice crotch figure with these really nice knots in the center there I got some really nice curl around that one that's always cool those baby limbs we're kind of towards the middle of these now and those are a really nice visual thing coming down the line or coming down the length of the whole slab and then getting down here on this end you got that sweet spike detail and whatever that is but some gorgeous curl around those pieces of steel and just overall really nice character especially with that blue stain coming through there and with the bottom side of the slab exposed you can see what actually come through first was whatever that is I don't even know but I've got some kind of copper cross section with some kind of steel thing in the middle there and then I hit that spike so coming through here I knocked off a bunch of teeth coming through all of that and then once I hit that it stalled the blade so interesting so this thing's been moving around quite a bit so it's probably not in the same orientation as it was one who made the last cut is probably tilted a little bit so I'm gonna go ahead and roll this bad boy over I get my winch all rigged up for that and then as that blade was exiting that last cut it did produce kind of a crown kind of goofy area so that area isn't totally flat so I'm gonna have to scoot this log down a little bit so that I'm not referencing that goofy area off of one of the runners ensemble bed but once it's all rolled over I should be able to go ahead and it's kind of zip through and make all the cuts to make all of the Restless labs that are left in this little part of this bigger log so I keep these anotr I'm gonna shuffle things around a little bit check out this really nice little not inclusion with this compression figure on this side and look what else I found cut through something else once again so not really sure what that is but I'm guessing it might go through this slab to the other side so we move this guy out of the way and we'll see what's under there some more copper or something huh somehow I got this how thick was this 15 quarter slab almost four inches thick I don't think I'm gonna be able to move this so much oh man okay all right we'll use the gantry function oh come on come on go go go go ah yeah that kind of works so normally I don't really like using rollers because as I've mentioned previously they allow things to get away from you very quickly like this oh my god whoa I love this look at all the figure around this knot that's incredible and that's just absolutely incredible and yeah you know I got some spotting coming up through there I got that band coming up along that side as well and just some really nice color through the middle here some really nice reds and all the hues associated with Reds you got this nice knot here in the middle some more figure around that and just looking all the way down here well here's those copper things they're just pretty cool but I like the way that this thing has some asymmetry going on there is some nice bands of spalting down each edge and then the center is really clear except for that one knot and just has a really nice reddish hue to it so that's just I don't know this is absolutely beautiful even this piece of copper or these copper things have some really nice figure around them as well but yeah it's a pretty hefty you have to slip this is much later this is almost stupid light these throws around so this is getting into the super sporty stuff now it should be a nice change from colorful and figured oh man this not here in the middle is just incredible this side now is more solid than the previous cut and there is some really nice figure surrounding it there we go so we got some really nice spalting on this end that kind of tapers off up into this knot here which has some really gorgeous figure around it and small thing continues back down that way and back up here we got the sport lines along the live edge then I got this uh oh actually it might be like a staple it's kinda what I'm thinking my dad texted me said it looked like a wire staple so it might be what that is these could be the individual strands of wire and that's the staple around them or something so this one's gonna get even more spotty it looks like so this is like the right moment for Spalding because this stuff is still nice and hard so it's not you know too far rotten getting punky and that's just a lot of really nice just spalled it's just awesome looking so quick look down the length of the slab some decent spalting and then there's some figure up here in the middle that's the top side over that knot is and then there's some nice spalting and interesting color around the outside there another beauty so this one's being towards the outside of log it's gonna have a lot more spunk going on that's cool so if you murmur back in the beginning I talked about how in the log you could see the green kind of spiraling as it went up and as we get to this cut here it's really obvious to see that spiraling motion of the green because look at back the diagonal motion of the spot lines coming up through here and the spot lines follow the green and it's just cool to see that angle of the greenness not parallel to the edge it is it's pretty close to 45 degrees which is a really cool detail so I was going to cut up the shorter section of this log as far as video but I think this one's getting long enough already enough adventure in one video what I think is going on down here with the the metal and bedded in there I'm guessing this was used as a light post or something along those lines at some point so the steel and the copper and I guess some of the brass all stuff is all right here in the log and don't forget the smaller log it's about a little over six feet long was down here and that was the base of the tree so the metal I was in this log well it's probably eight feet off the ground or so that's probably about the right height for a light or something now you're taking on cutting trees with metal and it might differ from my take on it me I don't really care that much it's just part of the adventure I'm not out here trying to cut as many logs as possible in a day or whatever I'm out here just trying to enjoy myself there's some joy being outside enjoy sitting what's inside the trees and the pieces of metal that are gonna be in these things that's part of the story of the tree and I think that's really interesting and valuable to me at least for me what I'm thinking about for a couple of these slabs is the potential for doing a tabletop or a desktop that includes those pieces of embedded metal in it now I would love to do like a desk does the full length of this big one here I'd be really cool I just on the space for right now by Sunday I might and ever really nice to have that steel embedded in the wood itself just like it was cut house another reason why I'd prefer not to dig things out because then you damage the wood around it and doesn't become as nice and seamless as an inlay just like it would just cut right out of log just like I was trying to do today so that's just me I guess that's just all for the fun of it but yeah we knew there was metal in here to begin with because less staining and I still cut it even though I knew it so just like if you had a metal detector and you detected their steel in there it would have made a difference to me because that knowledge of knowing or they're still in it just like I knew they were still on this didn't stop me from cutting it because I just want to cut it so that's gonna do it for this one thank you as always for watching I greatly appreciate it have any questions on the Slaven over the sawmill or anything back in the shop please feel free to leave me a comment supposed to be happy to answer any questions you might have until next time happy woodworking

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 1,880,779

Rating: 4.7788339 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, matt cremona, matthew cremona, fine woodworking, period furniture, sawmill, slabbing, live edge

Id: IW4MEi9BNJo

Length: 42min 18sec (2538 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 27 2018