Singing The Blue Pine Blues

[WDH]

I had some root rot in one of my plantations.  The root rot weakens the trees, and the bark beetles swoop in and clean up.  Then, the ambrosia beetles realize that there is a party, and they show up.  After a bit, the longhorn beetles show up to clean up what remains.  The ambrosia beetles bring in a blue stain fungus, and all kind of hades breaks out.  Soon, down here in the heat, the needles all fall off, the bark falls off, and then the tree basically rots from the top down.  It eventually falls over and the rot fungi finish the deal. 

But, if you catch it right, all the party goers are there with the fungus, and funky things happen to the wood.  There are cool holes and a nice blue stain from the fungus.  It is often referred to as "blue pine" or "denim pine". 

So, I was cleaning up the devastation in one of my plantations, this one at 29 years old, and the plan was to cut the lumber to make lumber drying pallets.   Some of the wood was really blue stained and full of beetle holes.  No problem for the pallets.  Put it in the kiln, dry it, sterilize it, and make pallets.  Well, some of it was really nice (at least from a crazy woodworker's perspective).  So, I put in an ad for some "Rustic Blue Pine also known as Denim Pine".

The response has been very good, mostly women calling.  They like the blue color.  I have 3 or 4 waiting for the next kiln load to finish.  From chicken waste, make chicken salad (kinda of an old saying). 

I am making a 6' bar top for one customer, and they chose "blue pine".  It is turning out nicely. 



 

Also, popular right now are "Farm Tables".  Anybody else seliing wood for "Farm Tables"?

[Magicman]

A majority of the SYP that I saw is "beetle killed" and blue.  Matter of fact, one job this week will be singing those blues.   8)

[WDH]

But, you just saw em and leave em all blue  :'(. 

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

But, you just saw em and leave em all blue  :'(.

You said you weren't gonna say it.  ;D

[Magicman]

But the truth will set you free.   8)

[WDH]

DanG.  I slipped up.  I will do better next time.  Too tired from messing with blue pine to think straight. 

[Magicman]

Blue Pine makes Green. 

[Bruno of NH]

i think the rustic look is the in thing right now.
that pine would make a nice farmers table .
Jim/Bruno

[21incher]

That blue pine top is amazing. I have never seen it before. Does it stay that color or get darker after aging a couple of years?

[Jim_Rogers]

I was told that light color wood darkens with age and dark color wood lightens with age.

Don't know what the blue pine will do, we'll have to see.....

Jim Rogers

[hackberry jake]

Very nice!

[petefrom bearswamp]

Nice danny
WP here just seems to get partially blue with most of the wood still white.
makes a nice contrast.

[WDH]

Don't know what the blue pine will do, we'll have to see.....

Jim Rogers

I don't know either.  I just wish that I had a shed load of it.  More calls today. 

[pineywoods]

Reckon you could figure out a way to cultivate ambrosia beetles ?

[WDH]

I have been thinking about what to do when my supply of just dead and dying trees are gone.  I guess that I could cut them down and let them lay on the ground with tops on for a month or so. 

[chet]

I was told that light color wood darkens with age and dark color wood lightens with age.

Don't know what the blue pine will do, we'll have to see.....

Jim Rogers

The paneling I made and installed in our mud room has a lot of "Blue Pine" in it. It's been up over 25 years and still looks the same.

[WDH]

There is a real data point.

[Magicman]

I will probably be sawing some Blue Pine tomorrow.  It is either a lightning or beetle killed tree.

[hackberry jake]

  I just wish that I had a shed load of it.

I read this a little too fast the first time and thought WDH was heading towards the woodshed.

[Warped]

Nice danny
WP here just seems to get partially blue with most of the wood still white.
makes a nice contrast.

Exactly what I was going to say. It doesn't "color" the whole board for me, and it certainly had plenty of time, unless the pine borers work faster around here? Also had it spalted to what would be considered rot and it never reached this amount of blue. Unfortunate....

[WDH]

The amount of blue varies from 5% to 90%, depending on the tree.  For the bar top, I picked out the bluest of the blue, some of the 90% blue stuff.  On average, there is maybe 30 - 40% blue. 

[isawlogs]

 The edge og my new kitchen table has " bleu stain " I chose those two boards just for there look. 

  You can see in the pic the darker colour of the edge ...

 

[WDH]

Lady wanted a blue pine door, barn style, to go between a bedroom and a closet.  It will be a sliding door.  They are really popular now.  So, I made her a barn-style, blue pine door.



 

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

I gotta hand it to you on this one.....this is pretty cool. 
Of course I feel at home around barn doors any way.

[barbender]

A lot of nice looking work with "junk" wood! I've read that blue stain fungus only affects sap wood, so it stops when it reaches hardwood and I have seen that to be true in my logs. I think young southern plantation pine is likely almost all sapwood, so the blue goes all the way through.

[WDH]

Yes, all sapwood at the age of these trees, which is about 29 years of age. 

[Bruno of NH]

Nice work !
Barn doors are in !
Jim /Bruno

[21incher]

Nice door. Is the main panel glued up or floating?  I built one like that years ago that I glued up and it would warp as the seasons changed because of all the different grain directions.

[Bandmill Bandit]

 

 

This pic is part of the kids remodel project in the home they Bought in May. ALL the wood for this fire place and a wall in progress right now came from a large tree on their mobile home lot that I sawed up a couple of years ago. I think I posted a video link of the sawing of that tree.

I was quite surprised how much blueish grey we ended up with in this aspen.
It is finishing up real nice.

Will post a few more pic of completed project when they are available.
 

[WDH]

Bandit,

That is a nice use of some wood with character.

21,

The panel is glued and it floats in dado grooves inside the frame.  The groove is 1" deep, and the panel extends 3/4" inside the groove, leaving a free space of 1/4" on each side for seasonal movement of the panel. 

[mesquite buckeye]

I like it. ;D 8) 8) 8) 8)

[drobertson]

Not sure what weight it carries, but have heard from ole timer wood workers that the blue in pine and the associated (rot) is a myth, one customer loves it and buys all I have when I get it. It is most definitely a work of art in my view. 

[WDH]

I sell all the blue pine that I can get, and right now, I am about out.  I have some older logs that have had the bark fall off.  I sawed some and there is some blue ranging from 50% in the outer shell boards to almost none in the center of the log.  So, I am helping nature out a bit to get more blue.  I have tried several approaches to make the logs bluer all the way from just sawing and leaving the lumber dead stacked for a while in the summer heat, from sawing cants and leaving the cants stacked outside under a tree for four of five months, but the best so far has been to let a dead pine stand on the stump for a good while.  I did try once to cover a stack of fresh sawn pine with a tarp, and it worked pretty good, but I don't think I left it under the tarp long enough.  

So, I am trying that approach again.  The boards already have some blue, so I know the fungus is there, so I stickered the boards off the sawmill onto a pallet.



 

I put the pallet in a part of the yard that will get full sun all day and tarped it.  I will let it cook in the heat and humidity for at least three weeks, maybe four this time and try out this recipe.  I believe that you get better results by stickering than dead stacking because stickering lets the hot humid air get between all the layers and give the boards maximum exposure under the tarp.  That is my hypothesis.

The time that I stacked the cants worked OK, but not nearly what I wanted.  These cants were sawn from fresh logs, so they had not been inoculated with the fungus by ambrosia beetles when first sawn.  After sawing and stacking, the ambrosia beetles did get in and leave those signature black lined holes, but the amount of blue was not what I wanted.  Here are the stacked cants.  I watered them once a day to keep them wet for about a week or so.  



 

They stayed stacked like this from mid-July to mid-October.Then I sawed them.  About 85% came out like this.



  

Not bad, but not what I wanted.  About 15% came out like this.



 

Now this is more of what I am looking for.  Here is a project where my blue pine was used as paneling in a Church Youth Center.  



 

This is the goal.

[caveman]

I sawed 15-20 slash and llolbllollly logs Wednesday afternoon that gave up quite a bit of blue pine.  They had been sitting around a bit too long.  They have a great color but they also have some borers in them.  They are sticker stacked and I'll see what they do over the next few weeks.  If they don't turn out well, I got a good workout on the Accuset II which paid off yesterday and today when sawing dimensional lumber.

Coincidently, Jmoores uncle needs quite a bit of blue pine to do the inside of his cabin.  I hope what I sawed Wednesday turns out decent.  Most was sawn at 1"x8".

[YellowHammer]

I'm hopeful you guys crack the blue pine code, because my results have been as erratic as a one eyed drunken chicken.

The one thing I did find is that if I don't dessicate the big pine borer grubs enough in the kiln, the ants will come get the leftovers.   :D

[Southside]

Again with the chicken reference.... :D

[barbender]

You fellas still haven't figured out, that the best way to get pine to turn blue, is to try not to!😁

[Woodpecker52]

fine line between blue stain and just plain ole bug infested!

[WDH]

Cooking in the Georgia heat.  



Barbender, I think that you may have the key to the whole issue.  I am trying too hard to mess it up ;D. 

[YellowHammer]

I got it to work correctly once, maybe twice in a as many years.  Deep blue colors, no bugs to speak of, and 
I sold it before I knew it.  Tried it again, and again, and well, again, and never as good.  

I even went to the log yard and marked all the pine logs that were deep blue on the end.  I thought I had it made when they were loaded on my trailer and driven home.  How hard could this be?  When I cut them on the mill, the blue only went about a foot from the end.  So then I had wood I couldn't sell as blue pine and couldn't sell as clean pine.  So I just turned it into pallets.  What a dud.  

[Bruno of NH]

This time of year my fresh cut white pine blues right after I mill it almost.
The winter cut pine wont.
Blue .
If I peal the bark on the pine the bugs stay out of it.

[WDH]

You want the ambrosia beetles with the little black holes for character. 

[caveman]

What moisture content are you drying your pine for interior use to, 6-8%?  Most of the pine logs I have now (above water) have 10-12" heartwood and the sapwood is iffy so I doubt I will get much usable blue pine out of it.

[WDH]

8% is the target.  4/4 for pine furniture and paneling and etc.  I don't deliberately saw construction grade pine lumber.  Too cheap to go buy it at the store.  I do cut some custom beams, but they go out green, not dried. 

[caveman]

Thanks, Danny.  John and I are going to provide his uncle with some pine to do the floor and walls in his cabin. 

[WDH]

I bet it will be nice.

[LeeB]

These have been down about 6 months. Free, just come get them. I'll see I f can get them if he still has them when I home. Said he would have another pile like that this winter. Might be full of beetles by now though.




 

[Southside]

6 months might mean they were cut too early.  The sap needs to be flowing before they will stain.  I have had winter logs sit for a long time and then when I cut into them there was barely any stain at all.  

[LeeB]

Actually, that would suit me too. I need some construction lumber. Mostly why I'm interested in it. But, if it's blue I am more than willing to turn it to green.

[stanmillnc]

What kind of premium do you guys charge for blue stain pine boards or slabs? Or do you just sell it for the same price as your normal SYP?

[WDH]

I sell mine for $2.42/bf which includes 7% sales tax. That is sawn 1 1/8" rough, air dried to 15%, kiln dried to 8%, planed to 1" or 15/16" (whichever cleans up). I figure that my kiln drying and finish planing are worth a value add of $1.25/bf as I am small and not a high volume processor.  Air drying is also a value add over green.  I figure that value add at about $.25/bf.  

So with $.16 sales tax, $.25 air drying, $1.25 kiln drying and planing, the base price coming green off the sawmill would be $.76/bf.  However, these values represent a combo of all the value added steps.  If I were to saw green pine 4/4 boards and sell right off the sawmill, I would be at a minimum of $1.00/bf.  I will not crank up the sawmill and saw any of my pine logs for less than $1.00/bf. 

[Magicman]

I have been told that true blue stain is bacteria introduced by Pine Beetles into live trees. This bacteria travels laterally through the tree which cuts off the nutrients thus killing the tree. 

We are mimicking this "natural" blue with mildew which is bacteria which feeds on the sugars in a warm moist environment.  It would be difficult at best to get mildew to travel through a cant so saw it and dead stack it.

This is exactly what I did with the "Cabin Addition" wall paneling.

 


 
Live/healthy trees were felled and sawn producing the majority of this lumber.









I only left it for ~3 weeks and got the texture/amount of blue that I wanted.



 

Same with the flooring.  I used the clear boards where I knew that the rug/couch would be.

[Peter Drouin]

In NH you can't give it away KD or not.

[WDH]

OK.  An update.  I left the pine under the tarp all this summer.  I uncovered it to put it into the kiln and it looked like this:



 

After kiln drying, I started planing it.  About 4 or 5 layers down from the top, it looked like this:



 

Here are some planed boards.  Turned out about 50% to 75% blue.  Pretty good on the whole.  However, I hit a home run with the ambrosia beetles.  Every board has a good many of the pencil lead size black lined holes, giving this wood a beautiful rustic look in my opinion.



 

Some of it I quartersawed to get the linear grain.



 



 

The blue was satisfactory, but the ambrosia beetle holes are just right.  This wood does not have any of the pencil eraser sized pine sawyer beetles holes, just is peppered with the small black ambrosia beetle holes.  Whatever I did right, the ambrosia beetles loved it.  

It has been a brutally hot summer here.  Dry too,  Lots of stress has weakened a number of my pines and the Ips beetles have killed about 20 or so.  Most of it older natural timber.  On some, all the needles have fallen off, and on the rest, the needles are rusty red and beginning to fall off.  I am sure that the ambrosia beetles and the blue stain fungus are in them doing their thing, so I am hopeful for more of the good stuff naturally produced.    I also cleaned up about 30 logs that Hurricane Michael blew over last October.  I can see from the cut ends that they have laid there all summer and blued pretty well.  I will be sawing those in a week or two.

Have a customer coming over to look at the blue pine for a ceiling in a house being built.  Odds are that I will run out of stock again pretty soon, but the dead pines and the Hurricane Michael pines should give me several thousand bf that I can saw and dry in the next little bit.  

[WDH]

Sawed some more blue pine.  This tree was a natural old growth shortleaf pine that the pine beetles killed.  It stood on the stump last summer and I harvested it early this summer.  This is some of the bluest blue pine that I have ever sawed.  Got about 100 bf from this tree. 



 

Note that the heartwood does not blue.



 

[Bruno of NH]

Very nice Sir

[Peter Drouin]

I can't give that blue stuff away.

[WDH]

One of my best sellers.  I suspect that the heat and humidity here kick start the ambrosia beetles to really give the wood an old rustic look that is currently very popular.  Not on a high volume commodity scale but a small scale retail scale. 

[customsawyer]

Beautiful lumber. It's always amazing how much difference there is from one log to the next.  

[WDH]

Yes, the variation between boards is what makes it unique.  Have a customer doing an accent wall with random length boards with offsetting joints kinda like a running bond.  Will run the boards horizontal from floor to ceiling.  He is waiting for a load to come out of the kiln in the next few days.