Beech drying / checking

[ATH]

That Wiki isn't quite right on a couple of things...
"Although primarily found in dead trees, spalting can also occur in living trees under stress. Although spalting can cause weight loss and strength loss in the wood,'

Let's start with what is happening:
2 different species of fungi are decaying dead wood. When those 2 meet, they draw a "battle line" between them kinda fighting over who gets to decay the wood. That's the black line you see.

The goal is to get to the wood and stop the fungus before it starts to noticeably soften the wood. Sounds like @Njdelaney has a good way to do that.

A couple things I think are misunderstandings in Wikipedia:
1) plenty of spalting in living trees. Remember the wood inside of a live tree is dead so decay in the tree can cause the same thing.
2) living tree doesn't need to be stressed to have spalting.
3) technically, I don't think it's correct to say spalting causes strength loss. It's the fungus doing that. Maybe that's splitting hairs.

I say all that to try to help understand what's happening, not to nit-pick an article.

 

[Njdelaney]

Actually, I had thought that the spalting was in the wood originally.

Did you cut the blanks prior to treating in the garden soil ?
How much was in the wood prior to your treating ?

I put the log in the garden as a whole piece. I saw a little bit of color in there to start but this method always yields great results. If I had given it another 6 months to a year, it would have been amazing but would run the risk of the wood getting too punky to use.

 

[GregManning]

I applied 5 thin coats of Tung Oil to the bowls.

Several surprises for me:

• The contrast of wood color variation did not increase significantly; this may be due to a couple of thin mineral oil coats applied by @Njdelaney after turning the bowls.
• The Tung oil dried/polymerized very quickly (completely overnite). My previous experience w/ a pine step-stool was the drying took many, many days. (This was the same container of Minwax brand, Tung Oil.)
• After the 5th coat, I let it set for ~ 10 min., then buffed it out w/ a dry cloth to create a “smooth/semi-matt” finish.

 

[Njdelaney]

Looks great Greg. Yeah the mineral oil really makes the colors pop initially in a way some other finishes don't, and surprisingly it can actually dry a piece out because it dries up so quickly.