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Harvesting Burls One of my greatest
joys is “bagging the big burl.”
It has the joy of the hunt to it, because the really good burls are
quite rare, and you need to have permission to harvest the tree when you do
find it, which is unusual. I have a
number of ways to find burls. Sometimes
loggers will sell them to me directly.
Sometimes I get calls from people or talk to them at shows and they
have burls for me.
Often they don’t
know what they have so I have to sort through their information to find
exactly what they have. Then when I find
the burl, I have a big cutting job ahead.
This burl, which is boxelder, is very close
to the ground and I carefully brushed away the dirt from the lower edge in
order to cut as low as possible without dulling my chain too badly. This was a very
fine grained and beautifully spalted boxelder. I cut it into
smaller pieces in order to haul it home and because I need manageable chunks
for my lathes too. But I try for the
largest quality pieces I can. When I
cut them, I look for “fault lines” in the bark that indicate that
there is a crack or a bark inclusion between two burls that have grown
together. That is an obvious place to
cut. I often use cardboard circles of
various sizes to lay out the best way to cut up the burl. What a rush! |