The Titanic

                 The Titanic

My wife's uncle had a small piece of property in Wenatchee, Washington he was cleaning and developing trails on.  He wanted to make it park like, a place he and JoAnn's aunt could come and relax after a days work in the orchard.  I asked him if I could help and also take some of the wood to my shop for my projects.  He was more than glad to get the help and get rid of some of the pruned material  I was particularly interested in the Black Locust which is a hardwood with a lot of character.  I worked quite a few hours with him and gathered a sizable pickup load to take to my shop.  The wood was green so I coated the ends of each piece with hot wax to keep the piece from developing splits caused by drying too fast.

It was many years before I got back to working with the wood.   We moved several times with job changes, but I made sure my collection of woods always moved with us.  The wood was well seasoned when I got ready to use it, and we had moved to Arizona so this dry climate further reduced the moisture level in the wood.  I wanted to display this beautiful wood on a large, interesting shape.  The photo above shows the cross-section pattern of the wood while the top surface is covered with 3/4 inch boards of Black Locust.  A metal band around the base and metal lining of the slit in the top adds contrasting material to the piece.



































                                            Titanic

    This second photo, seen above gives more of a side view of the piece so that the image of a ships prow as the vessel is going down is suggested.  l  this fits the Titanic title. A better view of the wood segment that cover the lower portion of the piece is afforded by this second photo.  good sized limbs were used to produce these slices.  A word about the tree, Black Locust, indicates the original trees grew in the eastern United States but over time were propagated in the west.  Reference information had this to say about the wood.

• Bark: Dark gray brown tinged with red, deeply furrowed, surface inclined to scale. Branchlets at first coated with white silvery down. This soon disappears and they become pale green, afterward reddish brown. Prickles develop from stipules, are short, somewhat triangular, dilated at base, sharp, dark purple, adhering only to the bark, but persistent.
• Wood: Pale yellowish brown; heavy, hard, strong, close-grained and very durable in contact with the ground. The wood has a specific gravity 0.7333, and a weight of approximately 45.7 pounds per cubic foot.

         A medium sized Black Locust tree

More detail can be found on my art at my website <www.apatchablue.com>