Hidden Treasure

Last year, I posted about my penchant for acquiring free wood to use in my wood work and turning projects. Because, I'm a cheap bastard, and free wood is the best wood. Well, a friend of mine (yes, I have two of them) brought me some free wood that he got from his work. He is a truck driver, and he goes through a large quantity of dunnage/cribbing in his job. He says he burns a lot of it for fire wood, and asked me if I wanted some.

I've gotten caches of cribbing before, and it is usually old oak 4x4's. They look pretty nasty at first glance, and they do usually have a lot of cracks in them, but sometimes they will clean up nice and surprise you. My copper inlaid bowl was made from a piece of dunnage.

I ran a few of the smaller pieces (2x4's) through my lunch-box planer just to clean the surface up and have a look at them. My biggest surprise was that only about 1/3 of them were oak as expected. The rest were maple, and many of them were spalted or ambrosia.

The above picture doesn't do this piece of ambrosia maple justice. The coloration is really striking in person.

And this lovely piece of spalted maple was hiding inside a piece that had some nice color, but outwardly showed no signs of spalting. That is, until I decided to re-saw it into 1/4" thick planks for making runes. Now I just have to decide what to make out of it ;)


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