budnder
Member
Picked up a small stick off the beach in Captiva last month when I was there with family for the week. Thought it might be too punky, or that I might have to stabalize it, but after drying it out and rounding it off a bit, I found it was hard as a rock. I guess sometimes these things mineralize? I had about 8 inches of wood that I slipped into a clear tube and cast with Liquid Diamonds.
I tried a closed end Caballero, which took 6 inches of the blank, and had something weird happen. The wood was so hard, I really had to push the skew into it to take material off, and then the skew got dull really quickly. I fared much better with a carbide cutter, for getting it close to size. As I was making some final passes with the skew, the "closed end" part of the blank (the one that didn't have a tube all the way in it), "bent" under the pressure of the skew. So it kinda had a bit of a dog leg on the end. Kinda fugly, but I finished it anyway. With 2 inches of blank left, I did a grip Sierra, that also turned hard, but otherwise was uneventful.
The outer part of the driftwood was kinda dark and without much character. The inner bits were pretty cool, but there just wasn't much of it.
I tried a closed end Caballero, which took 6 inches of the blank, and had something weird happen. The wood was so hard, I really had to push the skew into it to take material off, and then the skew got dull really quickly. I fared much better with a carbide cutter, for getting it close to size. As I was making some final passes with the skew, the "closed end" part of the blank (the one that didn't have a tube all the way in it), "bent" under the pressure of the skew. So it kinda had a bit of a dog leg on the end. Kinda fugly, but I finished it anyway. With 2 inches of blank left, I did a grip Sierra, that also turned hard, but otherwise was uneventful.
The outer part of the driftwood was kinda dark and without much character. The inner bits were pretty cool, but there just wasn't much of it.
