A local golf course brought in a couple pieces of recently cut persimmon. A further challenge is I suspect the pieces are branches.
The desire is for a keepsake or two. One seemingly obvious possibility is one or more bowls, possibly live edge. Another idea I have is to bandsaw a relatively thick "flat sawn" board to dry and then turn as a lamp base. A couple spindle blanks would be bandsaw just off the pith for eventual use as a lamp spindle. The third idea again is a flatsawn piece or two, to be used as rustic signs after the wood dries.
I have zero knowledge of or experience with persimmon, especially branches. Can anyone suggest how persimmon dries in bowls or as board stock?
You will want to cut out all the pith. Don't just cut the log down the pith, try to remove about 1/4" on each side. Take off all the bark. Bugs love the stuff and will be all over the log if you leave any bark on. I've not seen any pretty persimmon wood but it does make dandy mallets,
Don, I've sawn a number of persimmon trees on my sawmill and cut up smaller log segments on the shop bandsaw. I counted over 50 persimmon trees on our property and I save every bit of the wood when a tree comes down or has to be removed. I always seal the end grain, but yesterday I trued up a dry 5x5 from someone else and most of it was OK even though it wasn't sealed.
My experience is boards and slabs that are not perfectly quartersawn will bow like crazy due to the tangential shrinkage - I have some 8/4 about 10" across with perhaps 1/2" bow. The thicker the slab, the less warp. The warping did no other damage to wood itself - although warped none of it has cracked. I have pieces from 2" to 4" thick, drying since 2006.
The warping doesn't affect what I do with it since after drying I cut the 8/4 and thicker into turning squares as I need them.
Cut into turning squares for boxes and such it dries well, usually with no degrade other than squares will go diamond shaped.
The pith is generally very small and jet black. If I have pith in the wood it has a high chance of cracking at and around the pith. But sometimes it doesn't. If when cutting into the log I see pith or black around the pith that is not already cracked, I include it in some of the turning blanks and hope for the best. Sometimes the best is wonderful.
I suspect you know persimmon is a type of ebony, sometimes called American Ebony. I love turning it - fine grain, heavy, hard, cuts very smoothly, sands and polishes to glass smooth. I use it for a number of things, such as these boxes, one with some black near the pith that didn't crack.
I only turn persimmon dry - if turned green expect significant warping. Note that persimmon can naturally have a wide variation in color. Some is almost pure white, some with a variety of color, often grey, some has significant figure.
I got some persimmon lumber by mistake in a purchase. It KD dried flat. But it is a dull grey-white color. Black around knots. Not attractive like your examples. I have not found a good use for it.
The weird thing about persimmon, to my experience, is that, while the color of the dried wood is, sort of, a gray-taupe, as Bill says, after being cut, the rough edges of the board turn very light, almost basswood color. I had to plane off about 1/8"~1/4" to get to the normal color. Maybe this was an aberration, having something to do with some kind of treatment by the lumber yard, or something, but some persimmon boards were in a stack of soft maple I bought and neither the seller nor I could tell the boards were different until I started planing.
Persimmon board on top, soft maple boards beneath :
And something I observed that I found interesting was how the black from a small injury, rather than radiating from the pith, was V shaped from the bark in. Since you will probably be harvesting and milling some of those trees sometimes in the future, I’d be tempted to do some experimenting with color enhansment. One thing might be to just smack the bark with a big hammer in the spring when the cambium is most fragile to bruising.
Another probably more effective idea would be to drill some small holes then inject some really fine steel powder suspended in something to flow from a syringe. This shouldn’t hurt your blades and might turn those trees into Macassar Ebony with very little effort or investment.
