The Woodshop Shed

Wormsloe Southern Live Oak Bowl #1

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


My wife and I took a trip to Charleston, SC, and Savannah, GA, in April 2022. On all our travels we like to visit architectural salvage places to look for interesting wood. On this trip we visited “Re:Purpose Savannah” (https://www.repurposesavannah.org). It is a women-run nonprofit that dismantles old buildings and salvages old growth trees that have come down, then provides those materials to artists and builders while preserving the history and provenance of their source.The director, Mae Bowley, showed us the last board from a branch of a famous tree (5th photo shows me, Mae, and the board). The tree is on the “avenue of oaks” which were planted on the Wormsloe Plantation in the late 1800's. Wormsloe is now an Georgia State Historic Site, so these trees are protected, carefully maintained, and can't be cut down. However, a storm broke a large branch off of tree #238 (see 4th photo) and Re:Purpose Savannah was called to salvage it. They slabbed the branch, which was as big as many whole trees, and had this last piece still unsold when I got there.Sadly, I couldn't take the whole board with me on the plane back to California, so they cut about a foot off of each end for me. I made this bowl from the top end of the board as seen in the 5th photo, and gave it back to Mae to thank her for her hospitality to us and for her passionate energy to preserve Georgia's history and support women in the construction and woodworking trades. The bowl I made from the bottom section I am keeping and will post soon.This piece had a very rotted knot in the center that I had to stabilize with epoxy before I could start turning. It also had a dry-rotted section of sapwood I had to stabilize with CA glue. I filled the rest of the cracks with a combination of epoxy and black grout (sandless grout won't bleed into nearby wood fibers like dye's can). Then top-coated with a several coats General Finishes Arm-R-Seal.

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