Lilac | The Wood Database - Lumber Identification (Hardwood)

Many visitors to our wood store come looking for nice seasoned discs or chunks of wood 3" thick or more, preferably with the face machine-planed to show the grain. They ask "is it dry? What they want is wood which can be turned straight away and delivered to the user immediately, without any risk of warping or splitting.

You might think this a reasonable request but as you progress with your woodturning, you will learn one extremely important fact of life which is. If you do find really well seasoned wood you will have to pay a high price for it. One of the big advantages of being a woodturner is that you can use green or part seasoned wood without waiting years for it to dry - provided you know what you are doing.

Instead of paying a sawmill to store wood for years, you can take any piece of fresh cut material, even from the firewood pile, and turn it. As green wood is very cheap if not free, woodturners who understand the lilac wood for turning environment turning process can save a lot of money on material.

A hundred years ago, the woodturner was an important member of the village community - every bit as busy as the village blacksmith and employed to make furniture and household "treen", including lots lilac wood for turning environment wooden bowls for the kitchen and dairy.

All his material would have come from nearby woodland. If you could go lilac wood for turning environment in Lilac Wood For Turning Works time and ask the turner if he used dry or seasoned wood for his bowls lilac wood for turning environment would surely look at you as if you were mad.

Where could he get such a thing? Why should he use dry wood when it is much easier to turn wet wood? With difficult fine grained slow drying wood, such as Cherry or Apple, more protection is required.

The best method is to put the roughed out bowl in a cardboard carton full of dry shavings, again in a warm room. The process will take 3 months or so. You will lose a percentage of these especially if they have a lot of sapwood in them. Seasoning wood is the process of drying out wood to achieve equilibrium with its intended final home. It can then be turned or made into furniture or whatever without fear of warping.

It should be realized that wood does not season with time as the word suggests - it seasons with water loss. The fact that it has been "seasoned" for years will not prevent it shrinking when it dries a bit. To be safe, you should store wood blanks, before turning them, for as long as possible in an atmosphere close to the intended final environment of the finished turning.

This will ensure the minimum movement or warping in the finished lilac wood for turning environment and prevent splits. You should allow about 4 weeks lilac wood for turning environment 1" thick timber to achieve equilibrium. Less time is needed if the moisture content of the blank is already close to the final value. Fine grain wood takes longer than coarse grain to achieve equilibrium.

Bowls should be rough turned to 1" thickness or so and stored before re-mounting and finish lilac wood for turning environment. Wax coating of end grain is essential to prevent splits in blanks which are suddenly exposed to a dry atmosphere or to direct sunlight.

On sunny days cover any timber you take away in your car. If only a woodturner would intercept the process and cut the wood into discs and rough turn the material before it dries!

Then all the pretty swirly grain pieces would be saved because rough turning relieves most of the stress. Bowl turning was always done this way in olden times.

It is important to realise that any piece of wood is liable to split open if the very centre of the log the pith is left contained within the piece.

It is O. Lilac wood for turning environment method is simply to cut or split the log straight down the middle into two halves and seal the end with wax, paint or end seal. This is fine for logs up to about Lilac Wood For Turning 70 8" diameter. You could split them into four if you prefer.

Heart shakes tend to get larger as the wood dries so it is best to remove any heart shakes or defects at the centre of the log by cutting either side of the defects to yield split-free pieces which are likely to dry without further loss. It helps when seasoning or storing any piece of wood to seal the end grain against overfast evaporation of moisture. If you do not do this the end grain will split in hot weather. The best seal is candle wax or paraffin lilac wood for turning environment. Melt the wax in a shallow tray and dip the ends of the piece of wood in it.

If it is a disc of wood for a bowl, roll the disc in the molten wax to coat the entire periphery of the disc. Take precautions against fire - as with a chip pan. Some of the prettiest turned objects are made from branches and small logs of Laburnum, yew or similar trees. These can be turned green or part seasoned. If they are well sealed after turning, perhaps with three or four coats of sanding sealer, they will be O.

It is worth trying the following home grown timbers. Using green or part seasoned wood from hedges, woodland, gardens lilac wood for turning environment for your woodturning projects. Stable Wood Does not exist! Seasoned wood 4" thick or more is virtually unobtainable The reason is purely economic.

It takes many years to fully air dry a 4" plank of wood or several expensive weeks in a kiln. The high wastage and the cost of the overheads are so high that most sawmills are reluctant to cut anything thicker than 2" for stock. Thicker timber is available but it is usually sold as "part seasoned" before it has a chance to dry fully.

It is a sad fact that many sawmills, even reputable ones, will sell thick wood as "kiln dried" which is only dry on the outside skin. If you turn something out of it - say a bowl - you are asking for trouble. The stresses inside the timber are released when it is turned and it will soon warp or split. You might be lucky and find some timber which has been stored for years for some reason, but normally you can be sure that wood more than 3" thick will be only "part seasoned" and will not be suitable for turning immediately into a finished object.

Using part seasoned wood One of Lilac Wood For Turning Tab the big advantages of being a woodturner is that you can use green or part seasoned wood without lilac wood for turning environment years for it to dry - provided you know what you are doing. Useful sources of supply. Friends with large gardens or woodlands. Firewood merchants Tree surgeons, estate maintenance contractors, farmers etc. Timber auctions Old furniture Sawmills Offcuts from furniture makers Specialist woodturning shop Green Turning of Bowls A hundred years ago, the woodturner was an important member of the village community lilac wood for turning environment every bit as busy as the village blacksmith and employed to make furniture and household "treen", including lots of wooden bowls for the kitchen and dairy.

The process of making a bowl from green or part seasoned wood is very straightforward. The advantages of this process are many. You can buy the wood cheaper and have a much better choice of material.

You can get material as thick as you like lilac wood for turning environment nice deep bowls. Wastage from the log due to end splits etc is eliminated.

You can use pieces with wild grain which would not dry properly if left in the plank. Wet wood cuts easier and quicker Less dust is generated so that is healthier for your lungs The disadvantage is you have to look some weeks ahead - you cannot buy wood as you need it, you have to maintain a stock. Storing rough turned bowls Once the bowl is roughed out it has to be stored in such a Oak Wood For Turning Environment way that it dries out as quickly as possible without splitting.

Drying can be accelerated by warmth but moisture has to be prevented from evaporating from the surface too fast or the bowl will surely split. With coarse grained quick drying wood such as elm and walnut you can dry a large bowl from green in about 6 weeks. Simply wrap it well in twenty or thirty layers of newspaper open up a whole newspaper and use it to wrap the blank to make a parcel and keep it in a warm room.

Tape it up so that no gaps show. Write on what it is and date it. My father Peter Child use to rough turn hundreds of lilac wood for turning environment bowls and protect them with "paste wax" before drying them in the airing cupboard. Paste wax is a kind of cheap floor polish used commercially in factories, hospitals etc. End seal coating such as Mobil "C" would do just as well. The Seasoning Process There is no such thing as lilac wood for turning environment dry piece of wood.

Every wood blank or finished turning will lose or absorb moisture from the air until it eventually reaches an equilibrium point with its surroundings. The equilibrium point in, for lilac wood for turning environment, your living room depends mostly lilac wood for turning environment the average value of the relative humidity from month to month. If the atmosphere is very dry due to the central heating, then all the furniture and wooden objects in the room will lose water lilac wood for turning environment the air until the percentage of water inside the wood drops lilac wood for turning environment the value corresponding to the conditions.

I can prove this by using an electronic moisture meter to measure the water content of the oak beams which have been "seasoning" there for years, maybe more. Wood warps if its water content changes. It shrinks if it loses, and expands if it gains. Lilac wood for turning environment logging is wasteful The commercial method of processing wood is as follows.

Any lumps and bumps together with the top and bottom planks are thrown away. Even though all reasonable precautions are taken during seasoning, there is a great deal of wastage due to splits. Planks especially thick ones always split at the ends so a percentage is lost there. Planks with any thickness suffer from surface splits and split open around any features in the grain such as knots, crotches, wild or swirly grain - all the prettiest bits.

This is because these parts of the trunk will simply refuse to dry evenly. All kinds of stresses will inevitable build up inside the wood until it splits open. Lilac wood for turning environment is left to sell is boring straight grained stuff ideal for furniture but of little interest to the turner. Discolouration due to fungus can cause a lot of waste - blue stain in sycamore can affect a percentage of the available material even though special precautions are taken.

If you look at the costs all along the line including the cost of transport, sawing, storage and distribution you will find that the initial cost of the raw material - trees - makes up a tiny, almost negligable percentage of the cost of the finished material. Wood is expensive principally because of the wastage lilac wood for turning environment so much of it is destroyed by the pressures of the commercial world which oblige large sawmills to operate this way.

The situation is much worse in the tropical rain forests where millions of "non-commercial" species of trees are cut and wasted just to provide access to the loggers. All the most attractive portions of the tree - the part where the branches divide, the branches themselves, and the roots and burrs are nearly always discarded or destroyed.

Nov 04,  · Lilac is a cultivated shrub, who closest relative is the olive tree in fact you will find lilac works almost the same as olive wood, except it does not produce oil it is very dense.. it carves sweetly and the grain figuring is amazing.. like a blond olive wood. great for turning and carving spoons, pipes, anything that requires a. Lilac Tree Woodturning. 7 Eaves Lane, Cheadle, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, ST10 1TL - GB. Mar 28,  · Lilac is a wood that cracks like olive wood. In fact lilac and olive belong to the same family. Now I have turned a "big" piece of a lilac that was probably two hundred years old since it was planted in a classic position near a house built in the seventeen century. That piece came from the trunk that was crawling near the ground.

Woodworking Supplies Veneer 65 Things You Can Make Out Of Wood And Sell Put