Collecting Maple Blocks

A month or so ago, at least two major snow storms moved through Central Virginia leaving a log of damage in their wakes. In our area, the biggest losses where a lot of evergreens succumbing to the weight of wet snow and sleet. However a few deciduous trees also suffered from the same weight. One of these trees happened to be a large maple in the front yard of one of my co-workers. Just one limb fell off but that limb was close to 24" in diameter. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of this and he had gave away the bulk of the wood. He mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he still had a few big blocks that I was welcome to have if I was interested. Figuring that I might be able to make some turning blanks out of them and gather some firewood for next winter while I was at it.

I took my two older sons with me and went out to his place on Saturday aft to pickup what was there. One of the first things we noticed was that one of the larger blocks where the limb was ripped off the main trunk. showed a rippling effect. At first I dismissed that as being grain distortion at the crotch. However I wandered over to the tree and looked at the huge gash left by the limb falling off and the rippling was as far down the tree as the bark had been ripped off. Even a chunk of the limb a great distance away from the main stem showed similar rippling figure (see the image of the split limb section).

Since we saw a fair amount of similar figure in the much larger chunks I made the decision that I would try to rescue as much as possible from the remaining chunks. Most were between 14" and 20" long and up to 24" or slightly more in diameter. I square off the logs using the chainsaw and on the smaller diameter ones simply split them down the center. The larger ones I split into 3 billets after squaring. Some of the pieces closest to the crotch were fairly ragged chunks so it was a bit more chunky in terms of what I got out of them. There were a couple of crotches as well. I wasn't sure of the best way of handling these, I simply took the outside edges off on the y face of the crotches.

At the end of the day I did my best to paint the ends of billets to prevent further checking as some of the billets already had some checking to begin with. We took one of the billets and used a jack plane on it to try and smooth down one side and see if we could still see the figure. The wood was pretty wet but I still managed to get most of one side smooth and while the wetness caused some discoloration from the plane bottom I could still see the tiger stripping across most of the face of the billet (there was still chainsaw marks so it wasn't perfectly clear). If the stripped figure shows itself across the bulk of the billets then I should have some pretty nice wod for turning or resawing later into board thicknesses. I figure I'll wait a few months before I try to clean any up. 

I got over 20 billets - most are 5"+ thick, others are 3-4". I have at least three that are 3+ inches thick, 14" wide and 18-20" long. One large crotch and another smaller crotch or two.  While I had the chainsaw out I cut a couple of beech logs I had in the firewood pile to create some billets that I can slice up later. I wanted to have some 2" thick beech for making some tools like carving mallets or the like. A neighbour cut down 3 beech trees back at Christmas so I managed to scam all the wood from them - most as firewood but I also have a two 4' lengths of beech about 10-12" in diameter that eventually try and cut up on my bandsaw.

It looks like I may need to splurge and buy the riser kit for my bandsaw to get a taller cut so I can slice up some of these billets into nicer boards that are good and wide.

Its too bad that I didn't realize that this limb had come down much sooner. There might have been an opportunity to get some really nice lumber out of it. Not sure how I would have gotten it home but I certainly would have tried. I hope the maple survives, it was a majestic tree.