Hand tools and figured woods

The last load of firewood came, astonishingly, with quite a large amount of flame birch, a kind of curly grained, shimmery yellow birch wood. I’ve been saving whatever pieces I see, either big ones for a woodturner friend or smaller ones for my own purposes. Something tricky about figured woods seems to be that they can’t be carved with ordinary knives, planes, and so on, as far as I can tell—do this and the grain starts to split. I have had success with files and saws so far, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.

How do you work with these difficult but beautiful woods?

Wow, just today I was cutting firewood when I noticed one of the logs had a heart-shaped cross section. So I made some coasters.
No tools needed besides a bow saw. These can be used for a lot of things.

Daphne Rose wrote:Wow, just today I was cutting firewood when I noticed one of the logs had a heart-shaped cross section. So I made some coasters.
No tools needed besides a bow saw. These can be used for a lot of things.

That’s lovely! I should have said woods with curly or unusual grains—there are a lot of kinds of figures, like spalting, that aren’t as difficult. Although different places I look have different definitions so I’m not sure. I think the heart may be spalting?

On a similar vein there is a piece of eastern redcedar/tree juniper that has this lovely lavendery color, and also has spalting. Strangely, it was the perfect shape for a banjo neck when split. According to one of the definitions this is also the wood’s figure. Unfortunately it seems to fade after a month or two but I’m not sure if there is some way to preserve or seal the color in.