Juniper Root

[steve_g]

Does anyone here have experience cutting Juniper root? I need to do some inlay and don’t have enough material to practice with!

Steve

[myxpykalix]

oh man that is almost too beautiful to do anything with! Its funny how mother nature is a great artist herself! That is a beautiful piece of wood:)

[chiloquinruss]

I have done some juniper but not the root as you shown. All I can tell you about juniper is that it becomes very unstable once cut. I have juniper for some outdoor signs here locally. I start with a stable piece say 48 inch by 12 inch by 2 inch thick. If I'm very careful and choose a slender font and maybe just a routed edge border I'm OK. If I attempt to do a relief around the lettering making a raised letter or logo, the wood starts to release its tension and it goes all kinds of different directions. All of this is using very dried wood. Like I said this is not using the root, just regular juniper lumber. By the way, that is just one beautiful piece you have to work with. Russ

[steve_g]

Thanks for your comments guys, I’m really surprised at the lack of information I’m coming up with on the web! I can find lots of “art” pieces using tree roots but almost nothing regarding the process. The University of Oregon has done a lot of work promoting the use of Juniper as a species in commercial lumbering, but if I read between the lines of some of their papers I’m hearing Russ’s experience repeated.

Regarding tree roots in general I found one oblique reference to “alcohol” drying but no further explanation of the process, and another reference to “RF” drying which I assume to be microwaving it.

The piece I have is ½” thick and I guess I’ll re-saw it giving me two shots at it. It’s going to be an accent in a cane handle.

Steve

[feinddj]

You are talking to the wrong group. You need to find wood turners. They search for roots and burls.

It will move. A lot. the trick is to let it move and then machine it. Some species such as madrone are prized for their color and how much they move.

I haven't cut much juniper myself. There are lots of opinions on drying wood. Most people end up cutting as thin as they can, letting nature take its course and then returning to make it nice and round. Some just let it move. Alcohol, soap, ovens, microwaves have their pluses and minuses. The faster you dry it, the more it will crack. Some woods will check now matter how fast you do it.

David

[steve_g]

David:
Thanks for the tip… I was able to find some useful information on the wood turner’s sites.

Steve

[steve_g]

Working with Juniper root

I thought I would share my recent experience working with Juniper root, I’m sure these observations could extend to other tree roots as well… but my experience was limited to Juniper.


It has to be dry. Machining or sanding wet root only results in fuzzy wood.

Air drying can take a very long time. I air dry lumber harvested in the urban forests of Dallas 1 year per inch of thickness, the Juniper root I ended up with was basically an 8” cube.
Alcohol drying was a new discovery for me. This drying method involves submerging the green wood in a high percentage alcohol. Rubbing Alcohol isn’t good enough, use the stuff you get at the paint store to mix up shellac with. Alcohol absorbs the water from the root just like it does from the gas tank of your car in the wintertime. The rule of thumb here is a few hours per inch of thickness … I did mine about 48 hours. Wood saturated in alcohol machines and sands just like green wood… fuzzy. The idea here is that the alcohol saturated wood will dry faster than water saturated wood, it still has to dry… just not as long. Weeks not years.
RF drying, or using your wife’s microwave oven is one method suggested by others. Wood turners use this method for bowls. They will rough a bowl out, zap, rough, zap, etc. The idea here is to try to end up with a round dry bowl. This method is intended to counteract the woods tendency to warp, split, check, twist, shrink, and any other word you can use to describe the bad movement of drying wood. There are a lot of stresses in root wood as growing underground is hard to do, soil must be moved rocks gone around and moisture sought out. Accelerated drying using Radio Frequency methods seemed to bring out the worst in these forces and in my limited trials were not satisfactory.
Cutting the root sample into thin veneer pieces was suggested on a woodworking forum as one way to counteract some of the internal stresses. I cut a portion of my juniper root into 1/8th inch thick sheets. The thin sheets were spread out on a piece of MDF to dry but required attention several times a day. They would cup up in the center (maybe that’s cupping down?) and so I would turn them over until it had reversed its warp and gone the other way.
What worked best for me… for my purpose (inlay)… was a combination of methods. I sliced a chunk of root that had been soaked in alcohol into 1/8” slices and pressed them between blotter sheets in a book (like you dried leaves as a child).

Some of the interesting colors/inclusions are caused by things other than woody growths. In my case some were caused by stone and very hard clay embedded with aggregates. The root had completely grown around them so that even the recommended power washing was not adequate. It’s a very quick way to ruin a $80.00 band saw blade!
The more interesting the grain patterns and colorations, the more problematic the wood. Some of the most interesting patterns and colorings in my piece were caused by several individual root branches being so crammed together as to appear homogenous. The dried sliced parts wanted to fall apart where they had actually been separate roots, rootlets, branches or whatever is appropriate nomenclature for this physiology.
Veneer obtained from juniper root is very fragile; the grain is constantly swirling, reversing, on end, vertical… you get the idea. The grain does not contribute to its strength.
I tried several types of router bits to see what cut the cleanest… up cut, down cut, straight, various flute geometries, speeds, and climb vs. conventional. What finally yielded consistent results was gluing the veneer to a sacrificial piece of Baltic birch plywood and cutting out the desired inlay with a conventional geometry down cut bit using a .005 onion skin pass. The cut veneer was glued into its pocket with the plywood backer still attached. This made it very easy to get even clamping pressure. The backer was removed after complete curing of the glue by belt sanding. I did not try other methods of attaching and removing the sacrificial backup wood.

In conclusion, I have to say that there is nothing “production” about the process, your time investment has to be a labor of love for beauty, craft, the unusual, or knowledge. I also feel that the alcohol drying method “stole” some of the richness of the colors of the wood. This may be fact or psychological due to the deep red leftover alcohol.

At this time, the resulting cane handle inlay seems anti-climatic. However I do have a good bit of raw material for more inlays and a method that works predictably.

I welcome comments about others experiences with root, burl, green or unusual woods.

Thanks

Steve

[myxpykalix]

THe end result is beautiful. The only question is, was it worth all the effort?
Looks like it was!:)

[beacon14]

Thanks for taking the time to report your experiences.

The finished inlay may seem anticlimactic to you since you labored over it for hours (days?) but it sure looks good from this angle.