Question about green wood

[BHuij]

In our last windstorm, a limb from one of the bradford pears in my neighborhood fell. It has enough meat on it to make some small bowls (maybe 3-4" in diameter or so).

I've never really messed around with green wood, but I understand I can't just chop up the limb into blanks and go full steam ahead, or the bowls will warp and probably crack over the next several days in my super dry climate.

I think my workflow for these will look something like this, but I'd love someone with more knowledge and experience handling green wood to correct me if any of this seems off:

1. Cut up the wood into bowl blanks
2. Rough turn the bowl blanks
3. Put them all into a plastic garbage bag with a lot of the shavings, and close the bag
4. Allow to sit in my garage for a couple of months or so, until it hits in the neighborhood of 12% moisture content. Note that my garage probably gets into the 90s during the summer months on most days, and only drops to about the 60s or 70s overnight during those months.
5. Final turn/finish as time allows

 

[duncsuss]

1. Buy some Anchorseal
2. Paint any cut ends of logs with it
3. Cut one of the logs into bowl blanks, cutting out a slice from the middle that removed the pith
4. Anchorseal any blanks that you will not turn today
5. Rough turn a blank leaving a uniform wall thickness of 10% of the bowl diameter
6. Anchorseal it
7. Repeat for as many blanks as you can rough turn
8. When the Anchorseal is dry, put the blank(s) into a paper supermarket bag. Not plastic, you need it to breathe slowly - plastic usually results in fungus growth.
9. Write the date on the bag (or on the blank). I like to put one bowl per bag, because I also keep track of the weight loss (due to evaporation) so I can see when it's stopped losing water.

If you can't get Anchorseal, a couple of coats of latex paint has close to the same effect, but I've always had best results with Anchorseal.

I weigh my rough turned bowls in grams using a digital scale, usually wait a week between weighings. As you might expect, they lose most water at the beginning and after a while it slows down. I normally wake till I have 4 identical readings before finish turning the bowl.

 

[duncsuss]

Also - "a limb" usually means the pith will be off-center. To minimize distortion as it dries, do not try to get two same-size blanks. Best results are when the end view of the growth rings are symmetrical (meaning you have one larger, the underside of the limb) and one smaller (the top side of the limb).