Got some plum

[joachimM]

The pic is self-explanatory.
Wild plum root stock that had overtaken the scion, and which grew at my kids' school. Saved it from the chipper.

Nice haul, if I may say so.

Guess I'll even use the bigger log for furniture.
Joachim

[bjrogg]

That is a nice haul Joachim. Looking forward to seeing some nice bows and maybe even furniture in the future.
Bjrogg

[upstatenybowyer]

Nice haul indeed! Be sure to read what Tim Baker has to say about it in TBB (2 or 3 I think). It's amazing stuff. Keep shavings too, great for smoking meat! Congrats!

[joachimM]

Yes we do keep those shavings. As a side to my regular day job, I am an arborist, and I work with a furniture designer to save beautiful trees that needed to be cut from being turned into firewood. We try to give the wood a second life, from the garden to the living room so to say.
We mill good tree trunks, dry the wood and customize the furniture to the client's desires, keeping control of the entire process from tree to table.
All the pure (uncontaminated) shavings from the cabinet-making work, we save for smoking. We have lots of sweet cherry, birch, walnut and beech shavings, and plum will be a tasty addition.

But I'm sure to make a number of bows out of this wood!

[DuBois]

Nice score and really cool on saving the wood from being mulch.

[BowEd]

Nice score on the plum!!I smoke a few different things here too mostly meat and brain tan hides.

[DC]

I hope I'm not hijacking. I'm working a piece of Plum. I know it's Plum because I've eaten the fruit off this tree. Nice 1" yellow plums. Anyway I did a bunch if Googling and most of the stuff I find talks about what nice dense wood Plum is. This piece of Plum doesn't look dense, it looks identical to a piece of Bitter Cherry I've got. I can dent both with my thumbnail. The first picture is Plum and the second is Bitter Cherry. Is there maybe different kinds of Plum? Different enough to have very different wood?

[TimBo]

I don't have any experience working plum, but there are definitely a bunch of varieties. 

[joachimM]

You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.

[DC]

I did a rough measurement on the SG and it's around .75.

[gfugal]

How do you measure the SG of wood? Wouldn't you have to know the volume? I can't see how you would know that unless you measured displacement but still it would have to be fully submerged and wood floats. I'm sure there's some simple answer I'm missing.

[Marc St Louis]

You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.

Not the Plum I have ever worked.  The density is about that of HHB, you can barely mark it with your thumb nail.

[DC]

How do you measure the SG of wood? Wouldn't you have to know the volume? I can't see how you would know that unless you measured displacement but still it would have to be fully submerged and wood floats. I'm sure there's some simple answer I'm missing.

Take a uniform piece of wood say 1/2"x1/2"x10". Mark it off in 10 equal sections and number them. Float it vertically in a tube of water with the 1 down. The water level is the SG. I have trouble with Ocean Spray, it sinks

[upstatenybowyer]

You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.

Not the Plum I have ever worked.  The density is about that of HHB, you can barely mark it with your thumb nail.

+1

[DC]

You're confusing hardness and density. Hardness meadures resistance to denting (janka hardness), density is what it weighs per unit of volume. Plum has soft wood, like yew.

Not the Plum I have ever worked.  The density is about that of HHB, you can barely mark it with your thumb nail.

+1

So, that kind of takes us back to the top of the page. Do I have Plum that makes a good bow or do I have Plum that's going to behave like Cherry. And yes, Joachim, I was sorta. I was assuming they went hand in hand, as the wood got denser it would get harder.