Mulberry platter

[aquan8tor]

Here's an 8" dia. x 1.75" tall mulberry platter; I turned this a couple months ago, but just got around to putting a finish on it recently. Its got a bit of burl in it, but not nearly as much as the surface of the log suggested. Oh well. I guess I turned most of the burl figure away. I sanded it to 400, then coated and wet sanded it with boiled linseed oil to pop out the figure in the wood, then Minwax antique oil varnish, followed by several coats of paste wax.

 

[ray benson]

A pic of the mulberry around here. Did you only use the lighter portion of the wood?

 

[aquan8tor]

No, I've just kept it out of the light. It is very bright yellow when first cut, then quickly turns dark deep brown/red with strong UV exposure. Its interesting; when I was cutting up the trunk I had to powerwash the pith area to get some ants & rot away; in the time I left the pieces to dry before sealing w/wax, the top side of the pieces turned visibly quite darker than the underside. This took less than 1 hour. This was an unusual mulberry; it was pretty old, and was almost 30" in diameter. Its hard to tell from the pic, but it was about 50 years old. The rings are uneven in the very base of the trunk, but it was a young tree. It stopped fruiting a few years ago, and about 1/2 the crown was dead. I took it down for too cheap for a friend, but got a lot of good turning wood & firewood out of it. The stump was pretty ugly; I was trying to get it as close as I could to ground level, but there was a bit of metal & concrete post not visible in the photo; the light area was what I cut off of the hinge about a week after felling the tree. The wood darkened within an hour or two from bright yellow to the orange-red color you see in the photo.