Rotten Maple on a Journey… (plus a wicked cool slideshow)

Rotten maple on a journey to become the world’s most stunning cue sticks. IMHO, etc.

The vid shows a quick look at a pile of spalted curly maple that is now ready to stabilize. I’m testing another way to stabilize wood that might allow me to make single piece butts out of spalted/stabilized wood.

To get the room in my kiln needed for the longer test pieces, I decided to cut a bunch of slabs down to 1 1/2″ turning blanks and store them elsewhere, now that they’re bone dry. That’s the wood in the video.

I also cut a some very crazily-figured black cherry, some ordinary old walnut, and paper birch, which will all complement the new sticks in various ways. Some of the sticks will be one-piece, so the only complement will be like: “Holy shit! You’re beautiful!”

The wood for my first one-piece butts is birch. (Several blanks are foam-light and blank-white, making them capable of absorbing and showing crazy amounts of dye. Others have a lot of the speckle pattern I like so much, that I only find in birch, and only in the rotten sapwood. See last image below.)

The only thing about being a one-man shop that sux is that I have to do everything. So even though I’m pumped about making the new sticks, I have to finish last week’s project, in which I did the completion/prep work for six sticks that are now ready to finish, shine, and list as completed on the site.

I’ll be updating the website with new images and videos all week.

PS

I didn’t include pics for two more cool things I’m working on: more sassafras (enough for 3 sticks with a ton of bark in the grip) and devil’s club. You know, those spikey ten foot poles that shoot up and die every year? Turns out, the wood inside, once dried, is very white, fibrous, and plain. Which will make it very interesting for dyes. All kinds of cool stuff going on….