A place for enthusiasts of sticks of all shapes and sizes. We all love a good stick! Is it a walking stick? Light Saber? Gun? Looks brown and sticky? You decide!
Feel free to post sticks to rate, sticks that look like things, memes about sticks, long winded rants about the superiority of birch sticks over oak, anything stick related! Natural sticks are preferred, but modification and ornamentation is also fine.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27100263
Walking sticks
I’ve been using necessary tree pruning at my house as an opportunity to select ideal branches for walking sticks. My self-taught finishing process mostly consists of a bench top belt sander, hand scraper, and tung oil. It’s going pretty well, but I don’t yet know about the long term bark durability and adhesion.
what's the story behind the one on the right?
It’s oak (Q. agrifolia), pruned from an old tree on private land in a mature forest. It’s a struggle to find branches of an appropriate thickness and length that are generally straight enough, at least when considering only what actually needs pruning. So that one isn’t the best shape for a walking stick, but I had slim pickings and was motivated to find a piece to work with. It’s strong enough to be a serviceable walking stick and hold weight while flexing only slightly.
I like the look of keeping most of the bark on, though I hit all the smaller branch points with the belt sander. I only stripped bark in the area where it’s likely to be held, and sanded only lightly. The apparent striations aren’t perceivable by touch as grooves - they’re filled with inner bark that was incompletely scraped, and the color contrast is accentuated by the finish. I put multiple coats of tung oil over the entire stick, including saturating some moss on the outer bark. It cures to a nice finish, although I’ve never seen any instructions that suggest using it on rough bark.
I might see shrinkage and bark separation from the wood over time, but I’m hopeful it will last several years without substantial deterioration. I think the stick dried for over a year before I finished it.
i have sticks from 20 years ago with bark still on/around them. There's no separation, bark is still holding tight
I always use a 50%/50% mix of beewax/wallnutOil
That’s great to hear. I only have experience with a few finishes, but a little reading tells me your combo is popular for wooden food contact surfaces. What else do you like about it?
I think it goes “found cool stick, decided to keep it”.
That's a nice collection!