Can this massacred Walnut log produce hidden gems? 💎🪵

Welcome to my backyard. 

Today we’re going to be cutting up this walnut that my buddy Eric brought me. It’s got a lot of crotches and goofy things, so we should have a bunch of figure and weird features with this log. 

With the log laying on a flat plane, it’s even more apparent how strange and goofy it is. I’ve got some finangling to do to get it positioned to cut.

Here’s a quick peek after the first cut. As I always mention when I cut walnut: it looks green now, but as it sits and oxidizes, it will shift from green to the more brown-purple color we associate with walnut.

All right, let’s see what we got. Some crotch figure, some compression figure, and a metal inclusion. 

I’m going to send Eric a picture of this and tell him he screwed up my saw. 

A lot of clear walnut throughout this next slab. 

There’s a bullseye with some figure here on slab three. This is going to produce some pretty big slabs, because we are already at 36 inches on one end and 50 inches on the other. 

So back when the log was still whole, it had those furrows on top, which makes for some really vivid and interesting grain right up the center of the slab.

There’s some crotch figure showing up here, which unfortunately has a chainsaw cut through it.

As for the buttress down here, you can see some compression coming through.

These slabs are getting big! 51 inches through here, narrows down to 36 inches and splays out to 45 inches at the end. This would make a really good single slab table.

Look at all this! We got a nice chunk of crotch figure, a lot of width, a unique shape, a bark inclusion… just beautiful. 

Here you can see all the rippling of the figure as it emanates from the junction of those two limbs. Plus the nice straight grain lines really add a nice background to contrast with that rippling crotch figure. 

On the last slab, there’s some more quarter sawn grain, and you can see the pith line. 

This yielded some really amazing and awesome slabs. I wasn’t totally sure this was going to work out, because you never really know what condition you’re going to get from salvaged logs. Thank you, as always, for joining, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the saw mill or anything back in the shop, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking.