Many people ask about where and how I get my wood.

The answer is that it comes from all over the place, and most of what I use is local to Manitoba. I never ignore the sounds of a chainsaw in the neighborhood, and friends and family are quick to advise me of a tree that has come down. The people at the Lee Valley store, where I teach woodturning, often send inquiries to me. And many people find me through this website.

I always go and look, but as I have so much wood I often cannot use what I find. I often haul chunks of wood back and offer it to the club members for turning, and sometimes it comes along at a time when I need wet wood for teaching.

When someone looks at a finished piece, they have no idea of the amount of work that goes into harvesting the wood in the first place. After reading this page, I think you will have a better idea.

Here is a pile of Ash logs cut up into starting blocks. These are wet and very heavy, and one needs to have a strong back to throw these around and get them up on the lathe. A couple have already been turned round. With a pile like this, I drill a hole in the top of each one, where the bowl will eventually be hollowed out, and mount them on the lathe on a screw chuck with the tailstock brought up to the bottom for security. Then, using a roughing gouge I come from the tailstock side, cutting across the grain (from the tailstock center out) until the bottom is rounded. Then I switch to a ½" gouge, still cutting across the grain to round out the top part of the bowl and to make a tenon for the #3 jaws of my Stronghold chuck. After all the blocks are turned round and the basic outside shape is completed, I mount each blank in my Stronghold chuck and use the McNaughton bowl saver system to carve two more bowls out of the center of each bowl. Thus, each block turns into a large, medium and small bowl. Hey - woodturners are a frugal lot and hate to waste wood. By coring the bowls I get a salad bowl, a chip bowl and a nut bowl from each block.

This is just from a couple of the bowls. You can see some rounded blocks in the foreground that have not even been hollowed yet. After doing a few of these large bowls every joint aches and the shavings still have to picked up, bagged and hauled out. They are excellent for compost.

Shavings fly everywhere around the wood when I turn wet wood. Some of them even end up getting suspended in the air on a light cord.

Lots of shavings to pick up and haul away. Its a lot of work to haul the wood down the stairs and then take the shavings back up the stairs again.

Here are a couple of the large bowls roughed out and ready to take to the garage for storage.

This was the end result from the five blocks I started with. I only made ten bowls, opting to core each block only once and not making any small bowls. The five large ones are 15" or more in diameter and the smaller ones about 12". Now these will be coated with sealer and set aside for a year or more to dry. Generally, I do most of the roughing in the spring and summer months and they go on a shelf in the garage over the winter. I do not put them in bags unless I want them to spalt, in which case I put them in a plastic bag and watch them carefully. If I decide to spalt the wood, I make sure every bit of mould is washed off with Clorox before I put them on the lathe, and then I always wear a high quality mask when turning the spalted wood.

			These two photos show some of the beautiful scenery in Manitoba where the birch bowls below came from. The photos were taken at White Lake, in the Whiteshell area about 100 miles north and east of Winnipeg. This is beautiful cottage country and it is where our friends, Larry and Sue have a cabin. The next few frames show the birch blocks and bowls that I got from Larry when a storm downed some large trees.

			All told, I came home from Larry's cottage with 5 logs about 18" in diameter. This photo shows just one of them after it was split in half. Each log half becomes three bowls, a large salad or popcorn bowl, a mid size salad or chip bowl, and a small nut or serving bowl. This is done by "coring", or using a long curved blade to cut a small bowl out of the center of a larger one. I have a set of McNaughton coring blades that allows me to get 4 cores from each blank. The bottom photo here shows the shavings created. These are beautiful shavings for compost, although I often dry them and bag them up to give to folks for fire started for the fireplace.

Manitoba Birch Salad Bowl, 14" to 16" in diameter. All my birch salad bowls are finished with Danish Oil on the outside and are buffed and waxed. The exterior is maintained with an occasional wax and buffing. Tbe interiors of all my salad bowls are finished with "Tried and True" double boiled linseed product from Lee Valley Tools. The interior is maintained by wiping out with a dry cloth or paper towel after use and then putting on a generous layer of olive oil before storing away. The olive oil remains rancid free for a long time, although not forever. Our salad bowl is used often enough to avoid that.

Manitoba Birch Salad Bowl, 14" to 16" in diameter. All my birch salad bowls are finished with Danish Oil on the outside and are buffed and waxed. The exterior is maintained with an occasional wax and buffing.

Manitoba Birch Salad Bowl, 14" to 16" in diameter. All my birch salad bowls are finished with Danish Oil on the outside and are buffed and waxed. The exterior is maintained with an occasional wax and buffing.

Manitoba Birch Salad Bowl, 14" to 16" in diameter. All my birch salad bowls are finished with Danish Oil on the outside and are buffed and waxed. The exterior is maintained with an occasional wax and buffing.

This bowl is one of the mid size bowls, of a size that it could be used for a 2-4 person salad or for chips, or light snacks.

This is what a huge Manitoba Maple tree looks like when it falls over. A wet spring that softened the earth, a giant branch hanging off the side and a strong wind toppled this tree in my cousin's yard. Her father, my uncle, planted the tree 85 years ago along with several dozen others. Some of its neighbors can be seen in the background. At any rate, much of the upper part of the tree had been already cut up and hauled away, but a large part of the trunk and the stump remained.

As you can see, this is a huge tree. The bar on the chainsaw is 30" and it barely reached the center of the upper part, coming at it from both sides. Some of the figure in the wood can be seen in the end grain. In this photo I am cutting off the small spar before tackling the largest part. The 30" bar did not even reach through the smaller branch.

The upper part of the stump was very difficult to cut. The wood seemed especially hard and dense (a fact that became apparent once I had the heavy upper piece freed) and it took forever to cut. To make matters worse, I forgot to bring my wedges to the site and had to make do with an axe that my cousin had in her shed. But it really helped as it kept the saw from binding.

Here you can get a good view of the size of the upper, main trunk of the tree. When it finally came loose I was able to push it off the small trunk and it hit the ground with a resounding "thump". It took the full strength of two people to tip it on side so it could be cut in sections.

A little surprise ended up in the crotch of the stump. I knew that, just as the piece began to come loose, that I had hit something as the chain began to "skate" rather than cut. In a lot of old trees one can find nails, staples and pieces of fence wire. It only takes an instant to dull the saw chain and you can tell right away that you have hit something. Well, in this case it was the rock you see here, about 6" by 3". Here it is lying on the lower branch of the crotch. The upper part is the large part shown in the previous photo. That rock was probably placed in the crotch of the young tree as long as 50 years ago and the tree simply grew around it. I played in that yard many times as a little boy and, who knows - I may have been the one to put the rock there.

Some of the pieces lying about the site. Most of the logs are cut into sections on site to make them easier to handle and load on to the truck. Sometimes I plan the pieces I want to make right on site and draw them on the wet wood with a grease pencil. It makes sense to make the cuts there to make later cutting decisions easier and to minimize the shavings in the shop.

This was my helper for the day. Kira is a 5 pound black Pomeranian and she had a wonderful time that day running about the yard, finding little pieces of wood to chew on and play with the cat in the yard. Karen, my wife, is on the other end of the leash.