Anyway to avoid this splitting

[SteL]

I'm totally new to turning. The other half surprised me with a lathe for Christmas. She'd seen me watch Matt Estela turning his mallets on YouTube. She didn't realise that you can't just start using it with no tools or equipment! Anyway I got some tools a few other bits to give it a go and enjoyed it. I've just chopped an apple tree down in my parents so have loads of wood. It's completely saturated, though. The first thing I turned was a mushroom. That was quite easy, so I had a go at a small vase that turned out very rough in retrospect, but at the time was a masterpiece to me...

Then the following weekend I had a go at a bigger vase and I was much happier with it.

I wasn't happy with just using my pillar drill for the hole, but couldn't access that part of the vase, so I had a brainwave to create a tenon and buy a chuck (this is deffo axminster's business plan)

The chuck arrived and I go to finish off my plan only to find the wood gods not being nice to me at all...

Obviously this is beyond fixing, but what caused that to happen so quickly? The little ugly one hasn't got anything like that going on. This cracked one was from a tree next door cut down about a month ago and he had it in the shed to dry.

The only big differences between the two I can think is I finished this one on the lathe, the other one I did days later and they're obviously different species. One is slightly less saturated. Also the apple tree came down about the same time, but has just been left to the elements. I think the tree he cut down was a cherry blossom tree.

Cheers

 

[Phil Pascoe]

If you use timber with the heart - pith - in it it will split 99% of the time.

 

[Tris]

That and the fact apple is a pig for splitting anyway

 

[SteL]

Agh, so it's not really feasible to use branches to turn anything because they'll all have the pith running through? That's a shame because they're almost the right shape to start with! I'll look at cutting down some of the thicker stuff and leave out the pith.

Cheers

 

[Stigmorgan]

Agh, so it's not really feasible to use branches to turn anything because they'll all have the pith running through? That's a shame because they're almost the right shape to start with! I'll look at cutting down some of the thicker stuff and leave out the pith.

Cheers

Not while they are still green (green is the term for wood that has recently been cut/is still wet) green wood is 99.9% guaranteed to split, especially fruit woods, if you store the wood and let it "dry" (wood will almost never be fully dry, the term dry refers to the woods moisture level acclimatising to its surroundings) it's best to keep your branches etc as long as possible and seal the ends to help slow the drying process, there are huge amounts of videos on YouTube about preparing and storing wood.

 

[Agent_zed]

The other thing you can find with wood that isn't perfectly dry is that you turn it and when you come back to it you find that it has become oval shaped or has a bend in it.

I made a spade handle out of some ash, but it wasn't perfectly dry and stable. It but I would have liked to have done a little more work on it but it had bowed. Luckily I had pretty much finished it so I could just finish a bit of sanding and shaping by hand.

I'm no expert so hopefully I'm correct in saying that you can turn green bowl blanks and then leave them to dry. You just have to leave enough thickness so if they ovalise you have enough material to make it round again. I got this info from which shows what happens if you don't leave enough. I'm not sure how an hour of watching someone try and rescue a bowl from a bad blank is interesting but I guess that's what happens when you start wood turning.

 

[Inspector]

The only thing you can do is drill out the pith while the wood is wet. After it is dry re-drill it round and put in a plug of the same or a contrasting wood.

Pete