GEF Assembly ...

Not much time for woodturning this week.
If you want to see what I'm up to you'll have to check out my enviro blog here and look at the GEF Assembly posts.

Avocado Pear wood ...

What a wonderful 'windfall'!

A good friend of mine, Ken Turner, also a member of Waterfront Woodturners, let me have this wonderful bole. He has a 'treefella' friend who let him know about it after a job he did in Newlands. Ken and I went to collect from the pavement after work.

The log had been left there for a couple of days and showed no signs of splitting at all. However to be honest it has been pouring with rain all week so that is hardly surprising.

I spent this morning cutting the log. I can only just lift the piece in front but the larger piece at the back is way too heavy. You should gather from the comment above that the pith was somewhat off centre. I cut the bole to keep each of the blanks symetrical with respect to the pith so I ended up with one thicker and one thinner bowl blank.

The Avocado Pear wood seems wonderfully dense and fine grained. I doubt whether the beautiful pink colour will last but we will see.

This will definitely be a job for my Kelton coring system. I should get at least 4 to 5 nested bowls out of the two large bowl blanks.

See also these links:
Avocado;
California Avocado Festival;
Avocado facts.