Daninvan
ArboristSite Operative
Email came in from a friend on Thursday, introducing me to a friend of his who had a line on what was allegedly a black walnut. This guy had heard about it from a woodworker friend of his who had done a project for a guy who knew this lady who knew someone rebuilding a house where the walnut was located. Wow! Six degrees of separation between me and this walnut?
Walnut is not very common here, although it does grow readily, but a lot of what was planted here over the years was white walnut, or butternut I think some of it is also called. Much less interesting wood. The only thing we had to go on was a photo of the tree on facebook.
The leaves on the ground looked like the shape of walnut leaves, but more importantly, we could also see on the ground the 'leaf stems' (I don't what their real name is) that the leaflets attach to which is pretty dead giveaway of walnut. 'Pinnately compound leaves' is what I have read.
It turns out that due to a communications error my contact had sat on the offer for a week, and the log was now open to any and all on a first come basis. This all got figured out on Friday, so we decided to be safe we would meet at 9 AM on Saturday to mill it up.
Saturday morning arrived absolutely driving rain, windy and generally miserable. We met at the house in New Westminster, a nearby suburb of Vancouver. It was a 1940's bungalow which had been neglected for many years and now with the huge influx of foreign money into the Vancouver housing market was now probably worth a million and was to be torn down and replaced with what our American neighbours disparagingly but appropriately call a McMansion.
There were at least four large trees on the property cut down, including quite a large Doug fir in the backyard along with, what we were able to determine quickly when we got there and saw it, was indeed a black walnut.
So we geared up (I had three layers on my legs and five layers on top) and started in on it. The rain was so bad and the humidity so high that the lens on my phone's camera got cloudy and a lot of the pictures I took wound up hazy as a result. Here's my new buddy displaying bad ergonomics and cutting up a short but pretty nice piece.
We cut up a couple crotch pieces and a couple of clear but fairly short sections of some of the branch wood. There just weren't any nice long sections in this tree. I know the pith was off centred and there is likely a lot of reaction wood in there, but to paraphrase the Canadian band The Northern Pikes, "A guy like me doesn't get many walnuts". So we went at it.
So by the end of about 3 1/2 hours in the relentless rain we had 15 slabs, most 2.5" thick but a couple at 4". I took 3 and the buddy took the rest. I also lopped off a couple rounds for my bowl making buddy. Without a doubt the wettest and dirtiest time milling I have ever had, I gave up on my glasses they were like looking through an aquarium, I swear my gloves weighed several pounds each from the rainwater they absorbed and my hands were prunes.
We are going to go back on Monday for round two, to get the big crotch and hopefully a few more slabs. Can't let any walnut go to waste! Would be nice to catch a break in the weather though.
Walnut is not very common here, although it does grow readily, but a lot of what was planted here over the years was white walnut, or butternut I think some of it is also called. Much less interesting wood. The only thing we had to go on was a photo of the tree on facebook.
The leaves on the ground looked like the shape of walnut leaves, but more importantly, we could also see on the ground the 'leaf stems' (I don't what their real name is) that the leaflets attach to which is pretty dead giveaway of walnut. 'Pinnately compound leaves' is what I have read.
It turns out that due to a communications error my contact had sat on the offer for a week, and the log was now open to any and all on a first come basis. This all got figured out on Friday, so we decided to be safe we would meet at 9 AM on Saturday to mill it up.
Saturday morning arrived absolutely driving rain, windy and generally miserable. We met at the house in New Westminster, a nearby suburb of Vancouver. It was a 1940's bungalow which had been neglected for many years and now with the huge influx of foreign money into the Vancouver housing market was now probably worth a million and was to be torn down and replaced with what our American neighbours disparagingly but appropriately call a McMansion.
There were at least four large trees on the property cut down, including quite a large Doug fir in the backyard along with, what we were able to determine quickly when we got there and saw it, was indeed a black walnut.
So we geared up (I had three layers on my legs and five layers on top) and started in on it. The rain was so bad and the humidity so high that the lens on my phone's camera got cloudy and a lot of the pictures I took wound up hazy as a result. Here's my new buddy displaying bad ergonomics and cutting up a short but pretty nice piece.
We cut up a couple crotch pieces and a couple of clear but fairly short sections of some of the branch wood. There just weren't any nice long sections in this tree. I know the pith was off centred and there is likely a lot of reaction wood in there, but to paraphrase the Canadian band The Northern Pikes, "A guy like me doesn't get many walnuts". So we went at it.
So by the end of about 3 1/2 hours in the relentless rain we had 15 slabs, most 2.5" thick but a couple at 4". I took 3 and the buddy took the rest. I also lopped off a couple rounds for my bowl making buddy. Without a doubt the wettest and dirtiest time milling I have ever had, I gave up on my glasses they were like looking through an aquarium, I swear my gloves weighed several pounds each from the rainwater they absorbed and my hands were prunes.
We are going to go back on Monday for round two, to get the big crotch and hopefully a few more slabs. Can't let any walnut go to waste! Would be nice to catch a break in the weather though.
