Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => Bows => Topic started by: joachimM on March 28, 2017, 03:26:07 am
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The pic is self-explanatory.
Wild plum root stock that had overtaken the scion, and which grew at my kids' school. Saved it from the chipper.
Nice haul, if I may say so.
Guess I'll even use the bigger log for furniture.
Joachim
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That is a nice haul Joachim. Looking forward to seeing some nice bows and maybe even furniture in the future.
Bjrogg
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Nice haul indeed! Be sure to read what Tim Baker has to say about it in TBB (2 or 3 I think). It's amazing stuff. Keep shavings too, great for smoking meat! Congrats!
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Yes we do keep those shavings. As a side to my regular day job, I am an arborist, and I work with a furniture designer to save beautiful trees that needed to be cut from being turned into firewood. We try to give the wood a second life, from the garden to the living room so to say.
We mill good tree trunks, dry the wood and customize the furniture to the client's desires, keeping control of the entire process from tree to table.
All the pure (uncontaminated) shavings from the cabinet-making work, we save for smoking. We have lots of sweet cherry, birch, walnut and beech shavings, and plum will be a tasty addition.
But I'm sure to make a number of bows out of this wood!
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Nice score and really cool on saving the wood from being mulch.
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Nice score on the plum!!I smoke a few different things here too mostly meat and brain tan hides.
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I hope I'm not hijacking. I'm working a piece of Plum. I know it's Plum because I've eaten the fruit off this tree. Nice 1" yellow plums. Anyway I did a bunch if Googling and most of the stuff I find talks about what nice dense wood Plum is. This piece of Plum doesn't look dense, it looks identical to a piece of Bitter Cherry I've got. I can dent both with my thumbnail. The first picture is Plum and the second is Bitter Cherry. Is there maybe different kinds of Plum? Different enough to have very different wood?
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I don't have any experience working plum, but there are definitely a bunch of varieties.
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You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.
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I did a rough measurement on the SG and it's around .75.
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How do you measure the SG of wood? Wouldn't you have to know the volume? I can't see how you would know that unless you measured displacement but still it would have to be fully submerged and wood floats. I'm sure there's some simple answer I'm missing.
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You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.
Not the Plum I have ever worked. The density is about that of HHB, you can barely mark it with your thumb nail.
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How do you measure the SG of wood? Wouldn't you have to know the volume? I can't see how you would know that unless you measured displacement but still it would have to be fully submerged and wood floats. I'm sure there's some simple answer I'm missing.
Take a uniform piece of wood say 1/2"x1/2"x10". Mark it off in 10 equal sections and number them. Float it vertically in a tube of water with the 1 down. The water level is the SG. I have trouble with Ocean Spray, it sinks
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You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.
Not the Plum I have ever worked. The density is about that of HHB, you can barely mark it with your thumb nail.
+1
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You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.
Not the Plum I have ever worked. The density is about that of HHB, you can barely mark it with your thumb nail.
+1
So, that kind of takes us back to the top of the page. Do I have Plum that makes a good bow or do I have Plum that's going to behave like Cherry. And yes, Joachim, I was sorta. I was assuming they went hand in hand, as the wood got denser it would get harder.
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Don't confuse dense/hard with elastic. Elasticity is a more useful property when making bows
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I have two plum bows here at hand, both I consider pretty good bows, but the wood I can dent it easily with my fingernails. So hardness may not be important at all.
They are elastic, I can tell you that!
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I was thinking of leaving the bark on but with my OS bows it's not if but when the bark pops off. Does the bark stay on Plum bows?
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Baker says if its a sapling the bark will stay on.
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Baker says if its a sapling the bark will stay on.
It might come off if you dont sand it down a bit to thin it. Had this on two branch bows.
Rub with oil to avoid cracking of the bark.
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What a HAUL! I, for one, am jealous....
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I got some purple plum, I was told a Japanese variety. Wood is heavy and not soft to finger nail, but rasps/shaves easily with Sureform like yew. (property of grain?) I dried it with bark on and sealed ends - no checking and started tillering - no moisture packing up the rasp. I decided to remove bark and was surprised by weight of removed bark (aka bark was still wet). Continued to work it and back started to check while working it (within 1/2 hr) . Stopped, sealed it and checking stopped.
Very dense, very elastic, hard to dry with bark on.
Just wonder Joachim M - how big is big log and why can't it be used for bows? (sorry I am green...)
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Baker says if its a sapling the bark will stay on.
It might come off if you dont sand it down a bit to thin it. Had this on two branch bows.
Rub with oil to avoid cracking of the bark.
What kind of oil? I'm thinking anything that hardens, like tung oil for instance,would moke the problem worse.
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What kind of oil? I'm thinking anything that hardens, like tung oil for instance,would moke the problem worse.
When wood (or bark) dries, it shrinks and becomes stiffer but more brittle. This is responsible for cracking. Oil is intended to replace the water or to avoid the bark from drying out completely, thereby avoiding the shrinking. Since oil hardly evaporates, it makes for a more stable bark. I wouldn't expect hardening oils to make this worse, but I might be wrong.
There's nothing wrong with rubbing the bark from time to time with a bit of olive oil.
J