The spalted wood I like to turn for its colorful grain often comes with a down side: soft, punky wood which shows a lot of ‘tear-out’ on end-grain cutting. Because the wood is soft, the cutting tool doesn’t get the benefit of having hard wood ahead of the wood being cut, so the fibers tend… Continue reading Treating punky wood to get a clean final cut

This project was inspired by one of Philip Moulthrop’s hollow-forms, which I saw in an exhibition at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The project begins with a simple hollow-form which will serve as the base for the mosaic work. This base can be any wood at all; it will be almost entirely carved away in the… Continue reading Mosaic hollow-form

This project combines three uses of epoxy: (1) epoxy stabilization of spalted/rotten wood; (2) molded casting of epoxy and wood, and (3) epoxy finish coating. The wood pieces were mainly from corners cut off of half-round log blanks. Being on the outside of the logs, they were more severely spalted than the rest of the… Continue reading Mosaic dish: stabilized, mold-cast, turned and epoxy finished