Worms in Dry Cherry

[grwold]

A neighbor offered me some cherry, out of his firewood pile.  I started turning a blank cut from one of the pieces yesterday, and found, among all the worm holes through the sapwood, a living worm.  This wood's been in my garage for a bit over a year, and was in the neighbor's stack for some time before that, so it's quite dry.

Two questions:

1. Should I be concerned about live worms messing up my house (garage storage, basement lathe) or the bowl I'm trying to turn?

2. The cherry's very hard, and I'm finding it tears out easily with a roughing gouge.  Is that mostly an issue with tool sharpness, or are there methods I should know for working around this aspect?

   

[Arlin Eastman]

I have never had worms in my turning wood so I will wait for someone else to answer

[Stwood_]

Worms can live in the outer parts of wood for a long time. Commercially dried wood kills the worms off. Home milled or cut, be sure and remove the bark before storing.
You can turn a basic shape, then put it in a freezer for a week to kill the worms off. Pull it out, let it dry back down to your relative humidity, then finish the turning.

[grwold]

Thanks, Steve.  I may try that on some of the other pieces--but I'll have to be careful, as LOML won't be happy that I'm freezing worms!

I put the rest of the cherry outside again for the time being, but finished up the blank I had on the lathe.  The one worm didn't survive my digging in after it, and I suspect if there were any others, they met the pointy end of the bowl gouge.  Then I took all the shavings out & dumped them.

Here's the result.  Better than bowl 1, but still a long, long way to go.

   

   

I didn't expect to see a wormhole in the heart wood, but there it is.  You can see the two ends of the deep tunnel in the first picture.  I wonder how long it'll take for the worm's (ahem) sawdust to fall out.  Happily, that's the only tunnel outside the now-gone sapwood.

In reading some of the AAW's materials, I understand now that I shouldn't have been using a (spindle) roughing gouge for the initial roughing out of the blank, so that helps some with my other question.  I focused on the bowl gouge today, and the tearout on the outside of the bowl largely disappeared.  However, I need to develop better skills with it on the inside.  Thankfully, a rounded scraper did a very nice job smoothing the interior.

[FrankAtl]

Nothing wrong with that bowl. It looks great especially for a new turner. Now that you've discovered the difference between a spindle gouge and bowl gouge things should get easier.