Pear tree

[Living_waters]

Ok I am gonna have to cut the pear tree down I played in as a kid. Gotta make room for new shop. I have about a 10 to 20% success rate with seasoning peach trees and apple. Want to give this the best chance of making some good bow wood. I have a life time of skint knees and bellyaches attached to this tree.
Weather here is staying below or close to freezing It shouldnt get more dormant then this.
Leave it long with bark on unsplit? Split? debark and seal?

[k-hat]

Wish i could tell ya, but i do know what you mean about that attachment.  We had two huge pear trees i loved to climb in as a kid (long before i knew people still made wooden bows), and have many memories attached to it.  Loved just hunting around for the biggest best pear i could find, rinse it off at the faucet (sometimes!) and chow down.  Oh, AND i drank water from the hose    :eek:    Alas my dad sold the land to a developer and they whacked them down.

Good luck with it, i hope you have something to carry those memories forward when all is said and done    

[LESKEN2011]

I don't really have any experience with fruit trees, but I have seen PatB post about them before so he is one that could probably share some advice. That would certainly be a way of having a memento of the tree if you could make a great bow from it....or two...or three....you know what I mean. Good luck.

[rmorris]

What ever ya do get some to ole Roy, pear typically has a nice pink tint to it.

[Living_waters]

Amazingly a guy called last night and wants to trade a new stihl for some chain link fencing I have for sale, that means my old poulan wont get a new bar and chain it waiting on (worth more then the saw). A friend showed me how to do the turning wood from the trunk (its pretty twisted)gonna rough out the bowls Im making with them and then seal them inside and out with wipe on poly.
Just waiting to figure out how to do staves.
I had some peach staves check really bad all the way through the back after setting for almost two years on my drying rack. They looked perfect then its like they did it over night.

[Pat B]

On a peach sucker I cut a few years ago I sawed out the belly side and bound the sucker to a form for about 8 or 10 months. I didn't have any trouble with checking doing it that way.
  If you can get your plum split down to smaller size and reduced them to floot tiller size you will have better luck of them seasoning without checking. Do seal the emds and if you remove the bark seal the back but don't seal the belly. The moisture has to escape somewhere.

[Living_waters]

Thanks Pat, I may be better off taking them to floor tiller I am hurting for space  at the moment, that would help. Hopefully I will have an update tomorrow. Other tree is a nice straight  hackberry, dont much care for them but will make staves out of it.