Uses and Advantages of Wet Wood

Today I'm here with Spike Carlson the wood master and Spike has brought in some really cool stuff. This is a piece of water pipe out of Sillwater, Minnesota. So, Spike, we're calling this wet wood and this is crazy, I can't imagine a water pipe ever being made out of a chunk of wood. What's the deal here? Well, picture of it, you know, you come over to a new land whether it's the U.S.

or any other place and you need some water pipe and you don't have clay, you don't have steel, you don't have plastic. You have what you have to work with and that was wood. Wood water pipe was really something they found on every continent. They dug up 400 miles of it in London. This is from my hometown of Stillwater just a few miles away.

What most people think about water and wood, they think of rot but as long as the wood stays perpetually wet and doesn't get subjected to oxygen, it will last and last and last. I think wood pipe's a perfect example of that. This is just a short section of this but how long do you figure this pipe was when they made it? Yeah, they were usually eight-foot-long sections and there were a number of different joinery systems. This one was just king of a basic male, female system.

This is an example of one where it was just kind of a coupling. So this would have slipped on. I mean that's pretty intuitive. Yep. And then another one there and off we go.

And again, wet wood swells up a little, it would make the joints tighter and as long as the water kept flowing through these pipes, that wood would stay solid. How long do you think, some of this stuff being underground, was lasting how long? Are we in hundreds of years? In London the stuff they dug up had been in use for a couple hundred years and they dug it up a couple hundred years after it stopped being used and most of it was in really good shape. Wow, that's incredible.

Yeah! Now, we've been talking about wet wood. This is an example of wood that was wet. What's the deal with it? It's quarter sawn white oak, that I know.

Where's this stuff coming from? This is from Lake Superior, again, it's the story of wood when it stays submerged in water will stay pristine, in fact, even get more beautiful with age as it stays down there. This is from a company called, I think they used to be called Water Logged and then changed their names a number of times. They pulled this stuff up from the bottom of Superior. It's beautiful old-growth stuff.

It has a look that a lot of other wood doesn't have. So it's stuff that, as they were taking logs out of northern Minnesota, booming these logs down the lake, every once in awhile, a log would get away, get waterlogged, and sink to the bottom. And that happens more than once so pretty soon the bottom of Lake Superior is littered with logs. And not just Lake Superior, but this kind of salvage is coming up out of the Mississippi, out of lakes and rivers, really all over the country. Yeah, down south they figure about 10% of the logs that were heading to wherever they were never got to where they wanted to go and they wound up on the bottom of lakes and rivers.

And provide some cool characteristics like Spike said. Old-growth stuff. I know a lot of instrument makers, a lot of luthiers seek this stuff out because there are just physical attributes to this wood that you pretty much can't even get today. Yeah, and sometimes they'll absorb certain minerals and get a different tinge to them, it's just beautiful stuff. You pay for it, though.

Well, yeah, they're very proud of their product. Yes, yes! Well, quite a bit of labor in sending those scuba divers down and getting that stuff. Speaking of proud of their product, I've saved the piece de resistance for last. I'm not gonna say the name right, what is this stuff called?

It's called corey wood. Corey wood. I've heard it pronounced different ways. This particular piece of wood is from New Zealand. A gentleman by the name of Dave Stewart goes into boggy areas and there'll be a little stump or something coming up and he'll get in there with a backhoe and wiggle it and he says if the ground for an acre around moves, he thinks he's got a pretty big log.

The scale of logs that are coming out, how big are we talking? They're anywhere from as big as 150 tons are some of these he's pulled out. He needs backhoes, he needs Cats. The things is that they're not only large, it's extremely old wood because it's stayed submerged. They've done radiocarbon dating on this wood and found most of it to be 25 to 50,000 years old.

Is this particular piece I have my little pinkies on, you think this is 50,000 years old, maybe? Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, that's what science says. Again, when it comes out, it's about 100% saturated and so there's a long process in getting it dried out but you can buy it in veneers, log form, big table burls, the whole works.

Well, this is absolutely beautiful stuff and all of this stuff, it's cool and kind of crazy to think that, left dripping wet, that wood can have that kind of life, that it can last and last and last. Like Spike said, the key is either bone dry or dripping wet, it's when it's moist that you start to get into trouble. This is, in particular, a beautiful piece and I really wanna thank you for giving this to me. Yeah, yeah, no problem. And you gave me that horse, so that was a good trade.

Oh it was a good trade, I'm very happy. All right, thanks a lot, Spike, great information. Okay, George, thanks.