DuPage River Woodworks

My brother in law and I were walking through the woods on my in-laws farm in Indiana, looking for some wood I could use for turning. The emerald ash borer has done quite a bit of damage in that area, and we found a dead ash tree still standing, around 10" diameter, perfect to take down and make some bowls. We took the tree down, cut it into 4' lengths, and loaded it up in my car. As I was milling up the logs into bowl blanks with the chainsaw back in Chicagoland, I found some really nice spalting throughout the wood, which was surprising given the tree was still standing, not laying on the ground. Spalting is a discoloration of wood caused by various fungi, many times leading to some nice black lines throughout a piece of wood, and it's pretty common on wood left on the ground for any extended period of time.  I was able to get 14 bowl blanks from that one small tree, 9 were rough turned and left to dry before turning again to final dimension. 5 bowls I turned green, turni...

When my wife and I first moved into our house in 2017, there was a massive buckthorn tree in the backyard. Buckthorn is an extremely invasive shrub in the Midwest, and we knew we were going to remove it, but once we cut ours down, I realized the wood was gorgeous. I couldn't bring myself to burn such beautiful wood, and I had been doing woodworking for years so I wanted to create something out of it, but I didn't know how to go from an assortment of small logs to any finished product.  I started looking up ways to use logs and other ‘unwanted’ wood, and quickly realized a lathe was the way to go. Some of best wood for turning is logs and offcuts that you find and salvage, not wood purchased from a lumberyard. You can literally go from a log, to a finished, functional piece in less than an hour (depending on what you're making). Most importantly for me, I'm able to use wood that is destined for bonfires, wood chippers, or just being left to rot, and turn it into somethin...