Monday, February 13, 2012

Time to surrender

You can stack and sticker and level. You air dry and pile weight on top. You band it and stack it on top of other piles.You do everything you can think ok to hold movement to a minimum.
Then you open the kiln doors and start unpiling wood. BOIGGG. Sounds like something Wiley E. Coyote would have happen.  You put 2500 feet in the kiln and put thousands of pounds of weight on it. But nature has a way of messing with your head. The pictures above are of a few pieces  of flame birch. They look like the yellow brick road in the wizard of Oz. I have one that is a half round. If I had one of those round top windows, I would not have to steam bend it.
This is some wonderful figured birch. But sometimes, whatever you do is not enough. I chopped these into shorter pieces. Then I chopped the shorter pieces into shorter shorter pieces. I ran a face over the jointer. I then moved some of the pieces to the scrap barrel. Sometimes you just need to know when its time to surrender.

I have a lot of new stock that will be going into the kiln in the next week or so. I will be taking some shots of stuff before then, I hope. Let me know if you are looking for anything.