Phil Holtan’s March 2025 presentation to our club was a great success. The presentation covered procuring, sectioning, mounting and coring bowls from burls using the McNaughton coring system. Phil covered a lot of the do’s and don’ts of the process as well as what ‘gotchas’ can come up. Here he is coring a bowl on the outside of the mounted burl which he prefers in burls like these. This gives him the maximum control of the most valuable larger cores.
The demonstration started with a discussion of burl procurement, then how you might section it to get the most value out of it. Here is the demo burl, procured by Dan Brandner’s son, Heath, who works in the log procurement industry and runs across burls frequently. This burl has been sectioned and placed back together for instructional purposes. Phil likes to use cardboard circles to visualize where he might get a blank from for coring. He can then estimate what value he can get from the burl and back figure when making an offer to purchase.
From the burl he had marked above with the 10″ disk, he turned 5 nested bowls with amazing burl pattern and figure as shown in the gallery below.
He followed that with turning a dried cherry burl piece into a bowl with the opposite orientation. That is with the inside of the bowl to the center of the tree, vs toward the bark as it was with the nested bowl coring process. He showed how a dried burl is not conducive to nested bowl coring because it has dried and hardened up quite a bit. But the result was a demonstration of the different pattern achieved within a cherry burl in the other orientation.