When we first moved to this piece of land in 1991, there was a fairly large cherry tree at the bottom of our driveway with Queen Anne type cherries. There was no sign of a graft and wild or escaped cultivar cherries are ubiquitous here. The neighbor kids back then used to climb this tree for the fruit as there were no low hanging branches. Birds ate most of these.
Three years ago this tree started leaning to the left. It got to a threshold where it could easily fall onto and block the driveway during a windstorm. The tree is huge (the trunk is about 2’ in diameter at the base) and this tree would do some damage and injury to anyone driving underneath it. Here was another thing to worry about especially on winter nights. We made the decision to have our friend Keith Gates (American Tree Service) and his crew remove it.
We’ve known Keith and his family for years. I used to haul his two daughters Katie and Jessie along with my daughter Lila to preschool. They all attended school in the North Kitsap Options Program - this was sort of an alternative school embedded within the Richard Gordon Elementary School just south of here. Parent involvement including teaching and fundraising was heavy. Katie and Lila then went to Westsound Academy for high school while Jessie went to the one in Poulsbo where she could pursue athletics. Katie now works as a teacher in Olympia. Jessie married a lovely musician in Africa and is now raising a child of her own. Isobel, the mom, is one of the most creative people we know. Sadly Keith and Isobel separated but remain close friends.
There is always other tree work to do as well. A large Alder almost landed on my firewood shed. Nancy had been stockpiling large pruned branches adjacent to the driveway. The Parrotia Tree on our walkway had 4 trunks and we wanted to reduce it to two as it has long smothered one of our columnar apple trees. The Cedars along the driveway were making it impossible for the UPS driver to come up the driveway so he was leaving packages down by the street. All of this got taken care of yesterday and we have a large chip pile as one result. Parrotia is also known as Persian Ironwood and is one of the woods used for Zurnas! So I saved three chunks of considerable diameter. Lilac is a rather warpy wood but has an interesting grain and smells like the flowers so I saved the trunks from the one by the shop that now has a single trunk headed upwards rather that that plus two that were about 30 degrees to the Horizon.
The big project was the Cherry Tree. Instead of tying up more bandwidth one can see the process on my Facebook Page not to mention everything else I have posted there at https://www.facebook.com/casey.burns.906/photos_by
A side benefit of yesterday is that I did the roundtrip between the workshop or house and the base of the driveway at least 10 times. Round trip is about 800’. Thus I got my exercise in, which included a bunch of standing as well. Had I done that before knee replacement surgery, I would have been sore for weeks. My knees feel normal. I’ve been increasingly and way too sedentary since my knees started going bad at about age 55. One of my goals this winter is to simply exercise more now that my knees are now mostly not bothering me. Yesterday was a good jump start. Keith made fewer round trips - he’s about to go in for a new ankle.
Today’s exercise as soon as it gets light is to start hauling what wood I can lift up the driveway so that I don’t lose it to someone who thinks its a pile of fiewood free for the taking. Actually anything over 8” is being saved for another worthy purpose. The main trunk averages 20” in diameter and was saved as an 8’ log. The fork split into 2 pieces. Then 5-6” sections of the secondary logs were also saved (2 pieces each) and then everything else went through the chipper or was cut to firewood length (18”).
It will be a long haul, bit I am going to attempt to render most of this into wood blocks used for Mokuhanga, or Japanese Wood Block Printing. There is a wonderful book on this by the New York artist April Vollmer (see aprilvolmer.com ). One of the best suppliers for tools and materials is McCain’s Printmaking Supplies in Portland Oregon. See imcclains.com There is much online video tutorial about this and I suspect that this artform is really in a bit of a revivalist explosion. Here is a very good example:
I myself have wanted to try this like forever. I plan to render some camera lucida -drawn artwork of sand dollar plate structures that my friend Rich and others draw, as well as some artwork myself. It would be an interesting modern process of CNC carving the blocks.
Traditionally mountain cherry in Japan was used. Our local wild and escaped cherries may also work. Like the rest of the supply chain this raw material is in short supply or simply a type of unobtanium. A quick look at McClain’s online catalog shows that they are out of many of the wood-based materials including “cherry plywood” where a thick veneer is glued to very stable Baltic Birch plywood. Thus this wild tree may end up being a great resource for many, for a little bit of income for me. Also, I will use some of it for this purpose.
These large logs are sized well for horizontal bandsaw milling. Fortunately the logs are conveniently on the driveway, where my friend Alden Hackman can bring his trailer and we can winch these onto it, and saw these into 1” thick or 3/4” thick planks on the bandsaw mill sitting in his driveway. These will then be brought back here and stickered somewhere for a 2 year drying cycle (this type of wood is used wet in the printing process so it doesn’t need to be droed to the degree of instrument wood). Some will be accelerated by kiln drying or keeping in my greenhouse of on the radiant floor under the furniture. We’ll end up with a big pile of potential blocks.
I’ll be going through the smaller stuff and seeing what I can render with a splitting froe, as well as my bandsaw. Some will end up as firewood due to branches. I am fortunate that there is little or no heart rot. There is a big split in the main trunk that has been there for some time and so we will lose some of the largest cross section wood. But I suspect I will have enough to play around with.
Finally I have to get these large rounds a little more off the driveway so that we or someone visiting doesn’t plow into it. All the ends need to be painted as well and the large rounds need to be blocked off the ground. I suspect I’ll be working on this all week, a few hours each day. Exercise!
I am glad that we are doing this now, since birds will soon be nesting in trees. They lost some perch near the house, where they’ve been populous due to our porch bird feeder. But there is plenty left to go around. Also, this is the point in time when the wood has the least amount of water. As soon as the leaves start budding the time is up. Water is heavy.
We also lost one Eastern Grey Squirrel nest. I do not regret that. I need to catch these invasive buggers or we will get no fruit or nuts this summer. They are also eating out of the garden along with voles and the occasional wood rat.
For the last 12 hours this post has been at rough draft stage. Today I had some great talks with people. Wes at machinablewax.com regarding the best wax to use out of their selection for the lost wax casting method of making the glass flutes. Cast Glass Forms wanted me to send waxes that melt out easily under steam We recommended their orange wax for machinability. It will melt out at 240F. Their F99 is almost identical in machining properties but is less viscous and would melt out better. almost no residue is left - even if some remains to be burned out later. This is very important as the residue can promote devitrification. So I guess I’ll be doing the casting in-house. I’ll be able to machine the insides using my current methods and even the outsides, though I am eager to rough in holes and fluting on my Snapmaker CNC. Theoretically I can even ferrule the wax together and do a preliminary tuning and voicing!
Last call was a messenger video with my friend Rob McMahon in northern Japan. He gave me a tour of his pretty house near Niseko with its killer view of Mount Yōtei just 6km to the Northeast. Its like Shasta City and Shasta in terms of proximity. Yōtei resembles Mt. St. Helens before the 1980 eruption and last erupted in 1500 BC. Its smaller at 1898m versus the pre-eruption elevation of St. helens at 2950m. Yōtei is a lovely cone and I think I will start training to climb it for if and when we go visit Rob and Natsuko, and paleontological friends in Nagoya southwest of Tokyo.
The most fun video call however was with the great Galician instrument maker and musician Oli Xiraldez. He and I are equivalent in terms of our ability to comprehend each other’s native tongue. I can easily read and write Gallego assisted by Google Translate. Same with Oli and English. I can usually comprehend 25-75% when spoken to me. Speaking it is entirely a different matter. Oli seems to have a better edge with English. We have decided to make this a weekly get together as we both need a speaking coach.
It was fun to see Oli
s workshop and instruments and other things and share mine. We discussed much technology, techniques, works in progress, data, ailing friends, the Pandemic. I ordered a new Bb chanter to match the ones he recently made me in other pitches, in blackwood with olivewood ornaments. I’ll probably send him one of the resin glass flute prototypes in return. This is how we have done it for years, usually using friends as instrument mules. Kevin Carr just received the previous one in boxwood which I traded for some of his wife Josie’s art work. Now we have some language practicing to prepare until we get together next week and we’ll show what progress we’ve made in the workshop, and other fun!
There were other calls such as to Kevin Carr and Michael Hubbert, lots of emails, and then giving a local wood turner some all of the tree crotches and other wood I’ll need. This included a large (for the species) and fine grained Vine Maple crotch that he will turn into a nice serving bowl for me. This piece was cut in the early 1990s by one of the Seattle Woodturner members.
Then the last thing to do today was to set up the wildlife camera on the pile of wood. If there are any lookyloos or wood poachers I will catch them in the act (unless they take the camera too). This wood is heavy and part of me wondered if I would be better off if someone hauled it away. However I do want to honor this tree by rendering it for a higher purpose. Some of that will also be wood turning blocks.
This is still a semi-first edit but I’ll send it out finally - then go to bed - and most likely have more to report tomorrow - possibly on both this and Facebook platforms. First I am about to go dissolve my brain with TikTok videos or Northern Exposure. We already watched the Duck Flute episode (“Things go extinct”). That was the one where I was a technical director.
Stay Safe! or not and have just a mild case of it and end up with potential super-immunity. Only for the ones without co-morbidities.
casey