If you are near good brown trout it might be best if I inspected it in person!
I'm sure something could be worked out. I'm in the Central North Island, about 2 hours up from Taupo. If you're into trout fishing, I'm sure you've heard of Taupo. I do my fishing a bit closer to home though, on a small river called the Waipa. Can be quite challenging fishing, but it holds a fair stock of both rainbow and brown trout. Got a nice 3lb brown on a dry-fly cicada imitation a couple of months ago, don't think I've managed to get out again since. Duckshooting season and the Roar (Red Deer rut) seemed to get in the way
. Anyway, back to the walnut tree:
I'm starting to get a better idea of where the blanks maybe should be placed. To take it back a couple of steps though, where do you actually start cutting with a tree like this? Assuming we've excavated the root ball with the tree standing, cut the major roots, pushed/felled the tree over, what do you do then? How do you subdivide the tree so that you can, for instance, cut the boardsawn blanks from behind that cut off branch, get quartersawn blanks along the line of that main limb to pick up the curl, and line the blanks up with the root curvature to get that grain flow through the pistol grip? It would seem to me that you'd have to do some general sectioning first, to allow you to get these blanks free as they were cut.
As I said before, I haven't yet talked to the sawmiller. This might become more apparent to me once I have. All I've done previously is hand-slabbed small trees with a chainsaw, which is in a whole different league to what we're talking about here.
While I think of it, here's another question. I've been told that it's very important to mill the tree before the sap-rise in spring. Do you have a comment on this?
Savage2005 - thanks for the extra warning about the pith, I'll watch out for it. Nice bowl you've got pictured there by the way. I do a bit of wood turning myself from time to time, but nothing major.
