Cleaning natural branches and logs

Hey everyone I just wanted to quikcly share with you a couple of methods you can use to clean wood. (note: this is for wood you have found in the wild and wish to bring home and use, not wood that needs to be cleaned becuase of degus)

I was recently given a collection of large stumps and branches by a friend who is a gardner.
 (These are the stumps, I did not get chance to photograph the branches as I was busy getting ready for work, but I will share these another day) (These stumps are all from an oak tree)

So as you can see it was a nice varied collection. I have some that I can use upright as posts for them to stand on and some smaller thinner peices I can use to line the cage or bridge a gaps between ledges.

However all the peices were dirty and needed cleaning, there is not often a problem with freshly cut wood as the tree's natural defences should deel with most parasites and infections. My peices had been fell for quite some time, leaving fungal infections on the wood.

The first task was to scrub away any dirt and infection, I used warm water, fairy liquid and scratchy spounge. This part takes quite a long time from my experience. After this I boiled the kettle and poured it over the wood to remove any remaining dirt and fairy liquid (I had to boil the kettle about 5 times before I was done). Finally I put the peice into the oven and baked it on about 150 degrees. This is the important part now! Please, please keep a close eye on it the hole time it is in the oven and please seek parental guidance also. While my stump was in the oven it did give off smoke but never caught fire. after about 10mins I removed it carefully and left it to cool. 


Getting the log wet then baking it in the oven helps it to go rock hard.


The finished product should look something like this.

As you can see it is very clean and the wood is now more of a golden brown colour as opposed to the creamier colour before it was baked.


The other option you can take is to use a plainer to remove all the bark and then just scrub and hand dry the wood, this is a method I used on some of my branches, I will be sure to share pictures of this shortly.



Thanks for reading, have a nice weekend!


Smithomatic