Weeping Willow

[Chris357]

Well here's my frst question:

The guy next door was cutting a large Weeping Willow down last weekend. Not wanting to miss out on free wood I went round with a chainsaw and reduced it to a useable size in fairly short order.

The question is do I have something worth turning or plenty of firewood for the stove next winter?

Chris

 

[Paul.J]

I got my hands on some Willow a couple of years ago that i saw been put out by an home owner while we were coming home one day,so i put a few logs in the boot.
I then asked the same question as you have now and was told that it very soft and wooly to turn.and difficult to get a good finish on.
After about a week my logs started to sprout new chutes,and after a couple of days they were quite long.So i decided to cut a piece up to a round blank and noticed while i was cutting it how wet it was,because they absorb a lot of water,and as said how wooly it was.So decided there not to bother with it and dumped it.
I believe it's not much kop for burning either??

 

[Bodrighy]

As Paul says it is possibly one of the wettest woods you can get. It can be turned but it is awful stuff that is totally unpredictable in my experience and as for firewood. It may be OK for kindling in a year if you split it up now and keep it somewhere to dry out but it burns so fast it gives little or no heat.

pete

 

[Chris357]

Thanks for the answers guys

Span a chunk up this afternoon......

Does anyone have some oilskins I could borrow!!!!!

I quite like working with green wood so a little moisture is no surprise, but this stuff is like turning a sponge, there is sap everywhere.

What a shame as there is some real colour in it

Chris

 

[coille]

Chris
Usually sap everywhere means you are working with spring or summer felled willow. As yours has been winter felled the sap will have been down so it should behave a lot better than spring or summer felled wood. It should actually give you the impression of being a fairly dry green timber like ash or birch and in common with these timbers it dries really fast and without much degrade so you can get quite sizeable chunks ready for working with real quick. Like the dry timbers it is a stable timber in use - it shouldnt warp much. That said, there are hundreds of different sub species of willow and vastly different growing conditions that mean huge variety from one to another - selecting trees to be suitable for quality timber is a real skill and if you take pot luck at it there will always be winners and losers.

But I would say give willow a chance - you will almost always get it for nothing and its easy to dry ( and you wont break your back!) - you can sometimes get gorgeous pinky-orange colours and impressive flame figure (you can buy it as a decorative figured veneer) - the last willow I got was like that but I dont get offered it enough - most tree surgeons just think its not going to be worth bothering with. It does need sharp tools but you can work it up to a good enough finish. Its feather weight properties are incredible and whatever you make out of it should use that as a strength - maybe a huge urn or something if you are turning it, or a picture / mirror frame for cabinetry.

My advice would be to forget about working it wet and cut some sections up into blocks of various sizes, paint the ends and wait a year or two - it should work a good deal better.

Pat

 

[Paul.J]

Have you got any piccys of what you have turned with the Willow Pat
The stuff i had,had got some nice colouring to it when i grabbed it,but it seemed to fade after a day or two :?:

 

[coille]

Na sorry, never turned anything out of it, it was some years ago, I think I made a simple bookcase out of it and there may be some old fashioned photographs of it somewhere in storage in the loft but it was before I started using a digi camera. Haven't tried posting a link yet on this forum but try this

http://www.capitalcrispin.com/willow.aspx
or
http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/ ... willow.htm

the strong colour will fade as it dries but should come back with the right polish - try oil or shellac. As it ages the contrast between the different colours will diminish.

Pat

 

[Paul.J]

Cheers Pat.
Certainly some nicely coloured/figured Willow in that lot :shock:
I like the Black Willow bowl

 

[Chris357]

Thanks for the advice.
I,ll treat the ends, put it under the bench and come back to it in a year or so.

Chris