Hunting Spalted Wood Treasure

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- Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

Today, I'm joined by Kevin Cook.

He's a forester for Stone Valley Forest, which is part of Penn State University, and today, we're talking about spalted wood, not just spalted maple as some people have heard about, but spalted wood in general.

Spalted wood is fungal pigment staining in wood, and it can look all different ways.

It can be small, narrow zone lines.

It can be colored sections in the wood.

It's really fascinating the way fungi can add their pigments to wood and create beautiful figure in the wood, and it's something that people really enjoy seeing, and it's very valuable.

So forest landowners may be interested in harvesting spalted wood on their property if they have that opportunity, especially if they know someone with a portable mill, and then you can turn around and sell that wood, or you can use it yourself in woodworking projects.

Kevin, you've done this before.

This is not new to you, cutting out spalted wood from logs.

Tell us about the type of logs that you use to make this with.

- Sure, Sandy.

Today, we've picked out some logs that are lower grade logs.

We don't like to try to get spalted wood on higher grade logs.

We want to be sure that we have a good value in our saw logs.

So we'll sell those, but with a marginal log that has low value as a fresh cut tree, we can increase the value of that tree if it can have spalting in the lumber.

So we'll take those low grade logs, and we'll let them age on the ground or in other moist conditions.

Today, we've retrieved those logs.

We're gonna saw 'em up, see what we can find.

Hopefully, they've aged long enough that they have spalting, but we're really not sure at this point.

So we'll see what we can find.

- It's sort of like a hunt sometimes to find spalted logs and to guess that maybe they're spalted.

So let's see what we get, and then we'll come back and talk about it.

(machinery rumbles)

- Well, Sandy, we had some surprises today sawing up these two logs.

The first log was the sugar maple log, the bigger log.

It started out showing some really good, black lines throughout.

That is the spalting, and that is the zone lines of the fungal fruiting, but we got some good pieces off it with some live edge on those pieces.

We saw with the second log, the soft maple, that it had more golden zone lines in them, and it seemed to be that they were more pronounced around cut branches that were pruned off as the log was being processed.

So that might just be an entry point for it to move in faster than the rest of the log.

- What do people look for if they're looking to buy spalted maple in terms of price?

How do you gauge the price on maple that's been spalted or other woods that are spalted?

- Sure, well, since it is such a customized product, it takes a lot of different processes to get you an end product as lumber.

It does increase the cost to the end consumer to have that product finished, and installed.

It's hard to get a wide slab dried flat with the different spalting.

You might not get the figure that you're desiring, or there might be cracks that have to be filled with epoxy.

All the are aspects of it that are unique and kind of have to be embraced for what they are.

- Yeah, we've discussed a little bit earlier that it's a little bit like paying for a work of art, isn't it?

Every piece is unique.

Every piece is different, but a landowner may find they can make a little money selling spalted wood, can't they?

And you have done this yourself in the past.

You've sold spalted lumber that you've cut.

- Yes, and depending if it's dimensional lumber that's sawn outta the logs or if they are live edge slabs with the bark edge still on the board, It can be hard to measure the board footage in those boards.

So sometimes, they're just sold as a unit price per slab - Per piece. - or board.

For the landowner that is having a timber sale done on their property, they might be smart to hold back some of those low grade logs to try to get spalting in them.

They could be selling spalted logs directly to woodworkers.

You can get that spalting done by nature by using a couple of different methods to facilitate and increase the speed of that spalting occurring on the logs.

- Well, Kevin, I wanna thank you for joining me today and teaching us about spalted wood.

It's a fascinating topic.

I appreciated your bringing the sawmill out here and cutting up these logs.

These were his personal logs he was sawing up today, and they were sort of a gift to you as forest landowners to learn a little bit more about spalted wood.

So thank you, Kevin.

- Yes, thank you, Sandy.