Mushroom Bird Houses by Robert Rosand (Photo by Robert Rosand. Used with permission)

I was perusing a magazine called Woodturning Design the other day. Why? Well, I have always liked making stuff and I had purchased an old but good-quality wood lathe and some turning tools some years back. Last weekend I actually set it up and tried my hand at it. After some initial failures I succeeded in turning some small but decent shawl pins that my wife requested, using several different kinds of wood.

As I leafed through the magazine, I was pleased to come upon a full length article on how to turn mushroom bird house ornaments. They were very well made. It got me thinking.

Making a Wooden Mushroom

The next day, I cut a blank from a piece of pine, mounted it to a surface plate and started making chips. After about half an hour, I called it quits for the night and had a decent start to something that I hoped would eventually look something like a cep (Boletus edulus), which is kind of what the aforementioned mushroom birdhouses in the magazine looked like (er, sort of).

I am lacking a grinder for sharpening my tools so I had to make do by dressing the cutting edges with a sharpening stone periodically to keep the cutting reasonably smooth. That had me a bit worried since the finish was not coming out very well. But, with a small round nosed tool that I honed up pretty real good and some very light cutting the finish improved to the point where sanding to a final finish was doable.

Rough shaping of the wooden mushroom

The next day I kept at it and after about another hour and half of turning and sanding I had a decent shape and finish. I was pretty well satisfied with it (for a first effort at such a task).

One aspect of lathe work I am far from getting a handle on is the parting operation. So far I have made it hard on myself when it comes to finishing the ends (or end in this case since I did not use a tail stock). This project was no exception, as I had quite a bit of iffy work on a belt sander after I sawed it off the mount before I got the cap into shape.

After a final hand sanding I gave it a coat of Minwax Provincial stain and let it dry over night. After that I rubbed it with steel wool and gave it two spray coats of clear gloss finish. It is  a satisfying first shot at a wooden mushroom and it doesn’t look too bad sitting on the book shelf either.

Wooden mushroom before final finishing.

In retrospect I think it needs another going over with steel wool to better smooth the finish. It is a lot harder than I thought to remove tool marks and scratches once the part is off the machine, so in the future I will use better light and inspect the piece more carefully to be sure it is as smooth as I want it to be before final cutoff.

In all, I’d say I have about three hours of work in it. I hope to make some more of different sizes using different materials. Plastic would be interesting and might even go quite a bit faster, although I have only turned plastic on a metal lathe and I am not sure about how it would go on a wood lathe. Since dimensional accuracy is not required it might work.

I have always thought that a set of wooden models of the various cap shapes would make an excellent teaching tool for the study of basidiocarp pilius terminology and identification.

The final product (for now)

Nice spindle made from spalted wood (noricum/Flickr)

A while back I posted a piece on spalted wood, which is favored by woodworkers because of its interesting coloration and patterns.  Finewoodworking.com recently posted an article, Spalt Your Own Lumber: Just Say No To Brown Rot!, discussing how brown rot fungi can ruin attempts at producing spalted wood.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about white rot – the fungi that cause bleaching and zone lines on spalted wood.  What I haven’t talked much about, however, is white rot’s evil twin, brown rot.  Brown rot grows primarily on conifers, while rot tends to prefer hardwoods.  However, when presented with no other option, brown rots will grow on hardwoods, especially in spalting tubs!

Spalting Good, Brown Rot Bad

Daedalea quercina causes a brown rot of oak (Joseph O'Brien, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org)

The problem arises because brown rot fungi create regions of crumbly wood that can rarely be machined into a quality piece. Not cool.

It might be hard to machine cleanly, and it no doubt has led to the ruin of many an otherwise nice wooden bowl, but brown rot pockets look pretty good in wood used for paneling.

Pecky cypress lumber caused by Stereum taxodii brown pocket rot (James Solomon, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org)

If the wood is harvested at the right time it makes for some good material to work with. If harvested too late, the wood is crumbly, soft or “punky” and isn’t very good. Some outlets sell spalted wood of various varieties. Some patient entrepreneurs  even intentionally inoculate trees with fungi hoping to harvest a bounty of valuable spalted lumber after many years.

I hate to admit it (because of the title) but Spalting, A Fungus Amongus by Andrew Hilton does a god job of discussing spalted wood from both a woodworker’s and a biological perspective.

More on spalted wood:

Spalted Birch Boards

The Spalted Wood

How to Spalt Wood

Spalted Wood (from Fine Woodworking)

How to use fungus to make unique, decorative wood pieces with colors and streaking