Why I Oughta...

Our neighbors to the West were having a Walnut tree limb taken down recently and the tree guy who was doing the work was the same one that gave me a bunch of Ash firewood almost three years ago to the day.  At that time - and in this post - I called it all Ash.  But, now that I look back, it is clear that they included some Walnut in the mix, too.   They tossed (just like last time) a number of rounds of wood over the fence and I stacked them up in a spot to figure out what to do with them.  You can see that pile above - and you can also see that some of the pieces required a little bit more cutting with my chainsaw.   Now...knowing that this is Walnut gave me pause.  Sure...I could store it, process it, split it and burn it.  But, it also has woodworking value as Walnut.  So, I decided to select a few pieces to pull out and store separately.  I texted with my brother-in-law (a woodworker and carver) about if he'd want some of the...

Last Fall and this past Winter, I made my first batch of Black Walnut stain using found walnuts in my backyard .  I made a slurry and let it stand for a few months, then bottled it up with a 1:1 ratio of filtered slurry : rubbing alcohol .  I gave away a couple of pints of the stuff to family and one of my brother-in-laws gave me some feedback:  See below. Note to future Jake:  Collect and use more walnuts and reduce the rubbing alcohol by 50%.  Use 2:1 walnut slurry:rubbing alcohol this time. Something else to add to my 2022 to-do-list .

Back in November, I posted a couple of photos and talked about the process of turning a collection of Black Walnuts into a homemade 1 scratchmade wood stain.  In that post , I laid out the steps from collecting the walnuts to bottling the stain - and about midway is where we pick things up in this post.  Six weeks of macerating in the five gallon bucket with a little bit of evaporation ended up yielding about 3 gallons or so of material.  A quick stir with a stick every once in a while and I had a thick, black syrup.  Along with a mass of walnut hulls and bits. I grabbed a piece of cheesecloth that Nat had on hand and a couple of rubber bands and donned a set of disposable gloves.  Knowing this is, indeed, stain, I opted to deal with the process out in the yard.  You can see the setup below.  The five-gallon bucket on the right, topped with cheesecloth strainer.  A smaller, one gallon finish bucket in the middle and a couple of pints of rubbing ...