Day18: chainsaws and color

Woke up early (for me) this morning to make the drive out to Boyce Thompson Arboretum with my friend Kevin.  They had let me know a couple of weeks ago that they lost a couple of Arizona Ash trees in a storm and wanted to know if I wanted some of the wood.  I talked to their business manager on Thursday to make sure the wood was still there and that I was still welcome to it.  He checked with a couple other employees and informed me that the wood was still there and some of it had already been cut into manageable pieces and moved behind the workshop with the remainder of the wood still in the bottom of Queen Creek Wash.

Kevin and I arrived around 8:30 in separate vehicles and headed straight to the workshop.  There we found about 15 pieces of what we initially believed to be Ash but we were amazed by the color.  It was raining lightly and I only needed to fire up the chainsaw long enough to trim branches off of a few pieces.  We then decided to talk to my contact at the Arboretum before heading down to the wash to take a look at the rest of the wood.  Luckily they let us use one of their golf carts to drive most of the way, what we found were several large sections of Ash but they clearly were not from the same tree that we found behind the workshop.  The wood in the wash had no color at all and the bark was completely different.  We quickly determined that getting the wood cut, out of the wash, and into a vehicle was far more work than we wanted to put in today and we both had more than enough wood already loaded.

Back in the parking lot we simultaneously came to the same conclusion, the wood from he workshop was not Arizona Ash, it was Sissoo (Dalbergia Sissoo) also called Indian Rosewood or Shisham.  It's a true Rosewood from the same family as African Blackwood, Kingwood, and Cocobolo.  We'd both turned Sissoo before and recognized the bark as it's used frequently in landscapes around the valley, including in both of our neighborhoods.

Most of the pieces are 10-12" diameter and 14-16" long with the exception of the piece on the far right, it's a huge crotch piece about 18" across and 17" tall. I plan to tackle on half of it tomorrow.  Several of these pieces will be headed to the Arizona Woodturners Association to be distributed among members willing to donate a finished piece back to the Arboretum, I plan to do the same from some of this wood as well as some Honey Locust previously salvaged from BTA.

I also decided to play a bit more with color this evening.  The finished piece is shown to the left.  This is a piece of Quaking Aspen that was turned, sanded, textured with a needle scaler, airbrushed with cobalt blue, lightly sanded again, and then airbrushed with lemon yellow.  The rim was the sanded smooth to eliminate stray color before the bottom was finished.

The outside of the piece was left natural.  I left it a bit thicker than I normally would just in case I really hated the color and wanted to start over.  8" diameter, 2.5" tall.