First Black Locust Harvest
After spending some time in this black locust grove, selected two for harvest to become handrails on stairs to studio. This one fell exactly where I planned.
After spending some time in this black locust grove, selected two for harvest to become handrails on stairs to studio. This one twisted on me due to doing the second cut too high and at an angle. Had to drag out with rope and mower.
After dragging them out of the east woods to this spot under Grandmother Oak, I set up saw horses so I could strip the bark standing up. The shorter one was about 30 feet long and the other another 3 feet or so. Diameter at the bottom about 6 inches, and at the top about 2 inches.
The bark on the black locust peels off very easy. The draw knife made it even easier. This time I simply put the stripped bark into the oak house grove as mulch. I think it safe to assume that since black locust is a nitrogen fixer, that means the bark will have nitrogen in a form that can be used in the soil level. Just tossing it on top of the leaf litter already there means it will be years before the nitrogen actually becomes available.
I think perhaps next time I will make an effort to get long even width bark strips and see what kind of rope they might be twisted into. Or perhaps a basket. As you can see, neither one is perfectly straight, and both have a number of branches that still need closer cutting.
The length I will need is a bit over 13 feet, here I've cut them down to 17 feet to give myself enough extra to work with.
Seemed like a lot of bark for just these two slender trees. Here I've finished my outside bark stripping and have cut out the sections I want to finish into the handrails.
Moved them into the workshop after cutting off about 10 feet from the bottom end of each one and the tips off the tops, leaving me with 17 foot long poles. Bit of a squeeze working with them in the shop.
Turning the top ends of the two into walking sticks.
Smoothing out places where branches came out and shaving down to smooth surface. Lot of work with knife held vertical as a scraper, but on the knotty areas, needed to use grinder with circular rasp.
Shaping and smoothing out the end. Notice the crack. It's not very deep, and there are several more of these along the length.
I cut some brackets to mount the railing on, but haven't worked out how to cut them at an angle to the railing fits on them. Considering cutting notches in the rail itself. Problem is that the angle won't be the same at each mounting place due to the crookedness of the rail. On the other hand, it's not all that cooked. On the third hand, however, simpler to simply use a heavy iron screw bolt and attach directly to 2x4 in wall next to stair way.
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