"What's spalted maple?"
Good question, I'm glad you asked.
Say a nice maple tree falls in the woods. If there isn't anyone around to hear it, that means no one's around to pick it up either. So the maple tree just sits on the ground for a while. Unheard, unseen, unloved.
And the ground does a very unfair thing to fallen trees: it allows fungus to grow. Fungus is the agent of decay. Boo fungus!
Well, maybe . . .
So the maple tree that no one heard fall sits on the ground making friends with his new neighbor, fungus, as best he can. As fungus sets in and works around in the tree trunk, the wood of the tree forms discolorations and the famous black lines that we consider "spalting." I think the maple tree is trying to make himself unattractive to his new neighbors, but it doesn't work.
The trick with getting a spalted log milled into gorgeous (and solid) wood for you and I to work with is timing, luck, and hard work. The fungus filled log has to be sawn up before the wood actually undergoes decay, which is a difficult thing to time because different areas of the log will decay earlier than others. To get that right, you first have to know that there's a fallen maple tree out in the forest somewhere with a friendly fungus growing on it. If you remember, there was nobody around when the tree fell; so you've got to be lucky enough to find such a tree in the first place.
We'd really prefer it if these trees would make a sound when nobody is around. Something like, "Hey guys, I fell over. And I'll be spalted in about 6 to 8 weeks. I'm right here by the road" would be ideal. Sent by fax or email would really help, too.
Instead, we work our lucky streak as long as we can. And we hit a hot one:
A little over 1000 board feet of incredible spalted maple showed up this week. Though the boards are short (24" up to 48" or so), they've been cut, trimmed, and sorted for exceptional figure content. Just a few months ago, these boards were a full log sitting on the ground ready to decay, totally unloved and unnoticed. Until now.
