You know, blacksmith and I may be able to whip up a couple homemade shovel heads for these purposes......
That would be epic Scotty Overkill! I have a very strong desire to pound steel. I think someday I may have to scratch the itch. A while back I watched a video of a guy making a knife from a RR tie. Awesome! I'm also addicted to the show Forged In Fire.
Those are some absolutely beautiful handles! I can't wait till me and Scotty Overkill come across a few pieces of wood like that. If we do he was saying about use building some muzzle loaders. Hummm now just to fine the perfect tree.
Don't forget, we dropped that sugar maple off at Tonys. It had a lean to it, I'm betting it's got some curl in it....
Since this thread popped back up... My coworker walked past at work a few months ago carrying a piece of firewood and hollered "here try this" and opened my van door and threw it in. It was a split that came from the stump/first round of a maple his neighbor had taken down. He saw some curl in it and thought i could use it. So i let it dry a couple months and made this and gave it back to him. His eyes lit up. I told him to give it to his wife for a candy dish. He said he'd keep an eye out for more cause he knew he had split a bunch. A few weeks later he called me and said hey ima stop over and drop some wood off. Said he found some more of those pieces. I think there's 5 more.
Wow! That's awesome Tim. I just can't bring myself to throw pieces like that in the fire because I know their potential.
Sweet Tiger Stripes. I see a lot of that in the flared bases of big red oaks. Maple is a more utilitarian wood tho due to the closed grain.
Not sure when that was Tim but the last time that I remembered being present milling a sugar maple (it's been long while) I remember being disappointed. The last sugar maple that we cut had a lean and Scotty did a quick check and there was no curl. That wss back in the springtime.
Those are rhe planks drying in my shop, there is some light curl along the edge of them, but not much. blacksmith and I have two big sugar maples to take down in Tyrone, they look promising for curl wood...
Am I reading yall correctly, that there are indicators that tell you a tree may have curl? Such as lean? Any others?