Post #163956 by Aaron's Akua on Mon, Jun 6, 2005 12:11 PM

Okay, I’ve pretty much given up on carving a Barney West size log, but I did pick up a nice piece yesterday with the help of some our local carvers.

Carving at the park every day, I’ve gotten to know the grounds people pretty well. The supervisor, Alan, stopped by a while back to let me know he was cutting down a large cherry tree in his front yard. So I stopped by to scope it out one evening. The piece was about 48 tall x 30” diameter, with lots of burl. Now, that doesn’t seem that large, but we’re dealing with cherry wood here. Using this handy log weight calculator, I found out that the log actually weighed somewhere between 700 and 800 lbs.

PolyPop, Spermy, and Riptide "volunteered" to lend some muscle, but all the same we decided to slice the log in half to get it down to a manageable weight.

Here’s the stump.

Alan, the grounds guy used to be a tree trimmer in his earlier days. He borrowed a 30” bar gas chainsaw from a friend, and did all the cuts for me.

We wrapped some bungies around the top then wedged a few wood chips into the cut to keep the cut from pinching or splitting when the saw got down to the bottom.

That’s PolyPop, Riptide, and Spermy in the background, left to right.

Here’s what we wound up with – 2 large slices of cherry burl, ready for a couple of large “against the wall” tikis or masks.

Everybody went home with logs, and the warm fuzzy feeling of having helped out a fellow carver (namely, me). Thanks for the muscle, guys!

And also BIG MAHALOS to Alan for supplying this fine cherry wood to us local tiki carvers (I'm sending him a link to this post).

Cheers,

Aaron

"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."
-Pablo Picasso

[ Edited by: Aaron's Akua on 2005-06-07 13:06 ]