100 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
13 comments »
While looking through old Flickr sets, I realized I never made public one in which I slabbed one of the huge Eucalyptus logs I wrestled home from a craigslist ad. The largest of them is over 230lbs. I chose the smallest – probably around 80-100lbs, because I was desperate to see what lurked inside. I have at least a dozen of these things, so I could sacrifice one enormous beast to curiosity, though that said, I did immediately seal up the ends with a few inches worth of Anchorseal, and ...
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120 days ago
by scrappy |
7 comments »
Got on line last night and found a Firewood seller in my area. According to the web site, they were supposed to be open. Got off work a little earlier then normal so went to see if I could aquire a couple of pieces for turning. Add says fresh cut and seasoned wood available. Also: cedar, juniper, mesquite, pine, oak, pecan, pear, ana apple woods available. They sell bundles from a full cord all the way down to “one fire size” bundles.
Figured this would be a cheep way for me to...
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159 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
4 comments »
In a comment by Topamax in this post he made some assumptions, and ran some numbers, and got 188lbs for the largest Eucalyptus log I managed to lift into the truck and bring home from Canoga Hills. I really felt it was over 200lbs, so today I set this up:
It’s just some scrap weathered pine stacked up into a makeshift ramp to my bathroom scale out on the patio, with some 2×4s on the scale to keep the log from pressing its central buttons, or marking up its face. The 2×4...
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160 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
16 comments »
I tried to get in touch with the guy who put the logs out in Canoga Hills to see if there were any of the 5 I had left on my last/first trip remaining, and if it would be worth the 30 minute drive. He never got back to me, but I noticed he reposted on craigslist a few days later that he put 15 more logs out there.
That night after work I headed up. I’d wanted to find metal brackets that turn 2×8 or 2×10 planks into ramps that lay on the tailgate, so I could dolly the logs r...
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174 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
8 comments »
Here are some pics of the haul!
This one shows a ton of Eucalyptus Longhorn Borer activity, just like the much tinier tree I found awhile ago:
with raked lighting here:
This log has something like quilting on two faces:
Unfortunate checking going on here. I’ll have to see how deep it goes, and if it’s all the way through, I’ll have to learn a little something about filling and stabilizing. It would be a shame to have to turn all of these into ...
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174 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
5 comments »
Sheesh. Good thing I have a truck now.
I saw a note on craigslist today (online classifieds) that a guy had put “10 to 15 more” eucalyptus logs out in the alleyway behind his house. LA is all blocks split in half by access alleys big enough to drive 2 cars through (barely). The Google directions were a little wonky (didn’t name one of the roads, had me lost for an hour), and so a 47mi. round trip turned into a 75mi. round trip, and there were an incredible number of cop d...
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180 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
6 comments »
It’s a #2 phillips, based on the seed pods.
In other news, I stuck all the old sets of the tree find and subsequent handlings (ongoing) into a collection here. I also went through and rotated some that were on their sides, added descriptions to some missing them, and finally made everything public, as I’d forgotten to on several, like these:
That’s from May 4th, and shows significant shrinkage of the euc cup. It had been turned and sanded flush with the lat...
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215 days ago
by Woodhacker |
11 comments »
Until recently my lathe experience has been 50 or so pen/pencils, a few miniature goblets, and a couple small 5 inch bowls over the past few years on a Jet mini lathe, enough to want to try other lathe work. This past fall I was fortunate to have the opportunity to acquire a PM 3520B, but due to other work and priorities I’ve not had a lot of time to use it yet…and that’s “killing me”.
So this blog documents what I consider my first significant lathe project. Recently a partially segmen...
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220 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
4 comments »
Previously:Wood IDs #6: Found Eucalyptus tree in LA - part 1 of 3Wood IDs #7: Found Eucalyptus tree in LA - part 2 of 3Wood IDs #8: Found Eucalyptus tree in LA - part 3 of 3
It’s a bit labor intensive getting all the bark and Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer bug excretion cleaned off the Eucalyptus tree I cut up into logs from a nearby neighborhood. It dawned on me a couple weeks ago that I could use a wire wheel brush in my drill press. I’ve used the technique to brush up aluminum ...
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244 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
8 comments »
In part 1 I found a Eucalyptus tree in a nearby neighborhood. In part 2 I cut it up and had a better look under the bark, finding great boring bug patterns.
In part 3, I finally took a 3” diameter piece of the green wood and had a go at it on my Sherline 4400 CNC mini lathe, set up as a manual wood lathe. I’m quite ‘green’ myself at this turning business, and don’t yet have many techniques, experience, and tools necessary, but it came out alright, was a lot of...
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