Ambrosia Maple Bench

In the summer of 2021 my new portable sawmill arrived. It took three of us a long nine hour day to put it together. I knew I wasn’t going to get to use it much that summer as I was engrossed in a couple of other large, time sensitive projects. Months earlier I had cut down a number of trees. One of them, a maple with about a sixteen inch stem had a lot figuring in the cut butt end. I thought it was likely spalting. Milling logs is often exciting, it’s the old Forrest Gump thing “it’s a box of chocolate; you never know what you’re going to get”. So I cut off about five feet of the maple log and put it on the mill. It did not disappoint. We cut four or five slabs that were all different and all wonderful. Even though all of the slabs in the picture below came out of the same five feet of log, none of them look alike. But, they all were heavily figured and fun to look at. It was different than spalting and I wasn’t sure what it was. After doing some research I found out that it was Ambrosia Maple. Ambrosia Maple is not a tree species but a result of infestation.

Ambrosia beetles are small, about a quarter of an inch long. They bore into their host tree and cultivate a fungus in the tunnels. They bring the fungal spores with them and excrete the spores into the “galleries”. The beetle only eats the symbiotic fungus. Who knew? It is the fungus that that colors and figures the wood. So it is almost impossible to distinguish Ambrosia Maple looking at a living tree. It is true that the beetle often attacks stressed or dying trees, which was the case with mine. The bottom line is that Ambrosia Maple is hard to identify, it’s mostly a question of luck.

This April (2022), I decided to do something with my favorite Ambrosia slab. I picked the bottom slab in the picture above, the one most outboard on the tractor forks. I had originally planned to put in a welding shop as a companion to the woodshop. I had worked as a welder in my twenties while I was going to college. I had hoped to fabricate things like table legs for my woodworking projects. The cost of the equipment and the age old problem of where to squeeze in a metal shop proved to be too much. Happily there are some very nice fabricated metal legs available online. I found a set I liked and ordered them.

Ambrosia Maple Bench Side View

I planed and sanded the top (many times, many grits) and left the bark on the live edges, I like that look. Maple bark is segmented and has some raise and curl… think a flat corn chip. I didn’t think applying urethane with a brush would work well. I found a clear coat for wood product made by Rustoleum® and sprayed many coats on the bark. It worked well. Maple tends to be very pale, almost stark looking. I applied a honey gold stain to give the bench a warmer glow. The top had several small bore holes from the beetles that needed filling. After much agonizing as to what color fill to use; I tried a blond filler. The bores are in the darker figured wood. I hoped the fill would look like twinkle lights in the tree like fingers of the Ambrosia. I thought it came out cool.

This bench is not for sale, sorry it’s a keeper… but, I have another fifteen feet or so of the same log, there will be more benches or coffee tables to come.