doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Spalted Wood

Someone mentioned box elder in another post. I work a lot with fancy woods for rifle stocks, pistol grips, and knife handles. Some of the most beautiful are the spalted woods. These are woods high in sugar content like box elder, maple, myrtle, and hackberry. Spalting is usually black lines or circles caused by fungus after a tree or part of a tree dies. When more than one fungus starts eating dead wood, the dark lines form when two different types of fungus grow into contact with each other. They form a "wall" of dark lines...rather like the French Maginot line.
An interesting thing is that the fungus color (sometimes red, yellow, orange, purple, blue, and green is color fast. One researcher at Oregon State University is traveling all over the world looking for different color samples. She wishes to develop techniques to mass produce these permanent colors. They can be seen in 500-600 year old parquet furniture which was once of many colors with now only the stable blue/green fungus colors remaining.
She has a short class on how to produce spalting, the proper water content and temperature to keep the wood and sells different funguses..
I've made some really neat materials for my products.

Pete

How does rotted wood affect wood strength, say in a gun stock?...Geo

NOT a knock on spalted wood for stocks; some are beautiful. I just honestly wonder about their strength?

Early splat does not affect wood strength. Advanced does. If you use the thumb nail test you can see the difference easily. In Maples when you see dark lines, blacks and blues lines, it is still very hard but when you get into diffuse colors, the lighter colors like orange, tans or greys the wood becomes very soft.

You can still use it for stocks if you impregnate those areas with resins under high pressure and high temperatures. But cutting one of those stocks is a copper plated [censored]. A smart fellow will not take on the job. A dumb one will only do one if he ever gets that one done. It�s a lot like carving endgrain ebony. Possible but extremely difficult to do well.

I have a couple tiger spalted Myrtle blanks which are very nice. Never found the right project to use them in. Someone will be happy with them when my wife has that yard sale after I�m gone.

I have a piece of spalted walnut on my lathe right now. In this case, it is pretty soft so I hardened with some wood hardener. It does not require high pressure or vacuums or anything to use it.

I would avoid spalting in the stock's head or wrist but in the butt or forearm, it might be a very nice feature.

On a lathe project a little super glue does a decent job of making punky wood solid. I�ve turned dozen of bowls and hundreds of pens with a little CA help. Even does a good job of fixing blowouts. A resin impregnated stock would be stronger than the original wood. That�s part of the problem. It�s a bear to inlet, a real problem to checker and does not take finish well in some cases. But I did a 11/87 stock in extreme splated Maple Burl that was superb to look at and a nightmare to do. One per person, me, is more than enough.

hah! On my lathe I just snapped off the spalted foot of the bowl. CA didn't help, but then I'm not very good with a lathe. Not very good at all.

BrentD, I noticed your new tag line:

Don't support abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, profane posts.
Keep your donation in your pocket.

Were you thinking of "abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, profane posts" made by you? Or were you thinking about those made by your friend SDH-MT?

Or did you simply screw up and come to the wrong website? This is Doublegunshop.com ... Not Double-Standards-Shop.com

I can't imagine why anyone would give you the time of day while you are running your immature and pathetic campaign to financially damage this forum, but there's no accounting for taste.

Spalted wood? Any pics?

A lot of predator and custom duck call makers use spalted wood for their call, makes a very nice looking call.

The spalted red maple that I have used is very soft. Here in pine country "blue" pine is only used for paper, blue is an early fungus.

bill