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Sadly, not every log or bit of lumber that lays on the ground or in the forest turns into a spalted lumber candidate. There are many reasons for this and finding spalted logs or lumber takes a bit of a unique set of circumstances for it to actually occur and to become something as you can see in my video where I chose some logs that "looked" like they might have some spalting in them, but when finally cut, had very little.
Exotic Spalted Wood with a Bandsaw Sled
Sometimes logs or wood can rot and not show any real signs of usable spalting ... wood gets wet and just rots so in order to get spalting it does need some ideal conditions, fortunately, I live in an area, the Pacific Northwest, where those conditions occur often, quite naturally .. but not always.
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Saving money on lumber can take on many forms and when some lumber prices jump in price like what has happened over the past couple years, 2020 and 2021 where we have seen many lumber prices climb very high, it makes us even more aware of how we need to be particularly careful in our selections of wood and how we work with it.
How to Save Money Buying Lumber
This video and article are meant to give an overview of many of the things woodworkers can do in acquiring wood and using wood that will help save them money. For much more detail on this topic there is a 6 part series on how to save money on wood where each episode is independent of the others so you can pick and choose which ones are more specific to your situation and benefit from the details of those articles and videos ... see below for an overview, pick just one topic and give it a try ...
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Making your own spalted wood is one of the things that woodworkers can do with their own wood in their own woodworking shop to make highly attractive wood, and sometimes even salvage some pieces of wood that are otherwise unusable. For those who are not sure what "spalted wood" actually is, it is the slow breakdown of wood caused by fungi, that will eventually cause the tree or wood to rot completely into the ground.
Making Spalted Wood in The Workshop
Spalting is the first step and if we get the wood and dry it before the spalting makes the wood too weak, we can often end up with some beautiful wood that can consist of different colors and often outlined by a series of lines. Depending on how much work you put into the process of spalting your own wood, the success can vary widely.
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There are many people who enjoy working with wood - sheet goods - like plywoods, medium, and high-density fiberboard, and more. If you select quality products, you get nice flat material, sometimes you can purchase it with already applied veneers such as Oak, Maple, Walnut and so on, and what's nice, you can cut it to whatever size you need, you don't have worry about grain matching during glue-ups, twisting and warping boards, running our of enough material to do the job, knots in the wrong places ... the list is endless.
Watch it on Youtube: https://youtu.be/3oOsHZMlcX8
Those are just a few of the reasons that some people like working with sheet goods ...