Pre Release: An amorous Turkey, poison ivy and cedar coasters

My friend John (of the beer holder fame) and I had been talking about making custom coasters for his various brewed/distilled products from the farm out of some cool wood from the farm. He really admired my Guiness oak coaster and noted that a ancient cedar had fallen near his driveway.

So my wife and I drove over to the farm with my trust tree bow-saw (don’t like to use a chainsaw for this as the chain oil contaminates a lot of the wood, plus super thin kerf). The three of us marched down his driveway into the woods on the side. I started cutting the tree, when john notes “hey, that whole areas has a lot of poison ivy…”


(I do have an excellent cure for it with citrus solvent, and it was gone hours later, but story for another day)

Now to the amorous turkey. There is a seriously weird turkey on the farm, who kind of is a playah with the ladies. Except there aren’t any female turkeys yet (they hatched but are too young) so he kind of picks humans (both genders) and kind of tries to mate. He went after my wife (the vet) and latched on hard to her leg giving a big hickey until she could pry him off. By the way his head/neck check colors from red to white to blue depending on mood (red is love/excited)

Anyway, got two really nice cedar branches (bright red inside and incredibly fragrant).

I mad a jog on my miter saw to cut .25" thick slices (well .223 as it turns out), and while that little block doesn’t look super high tech, the slices are perfect. The wood is quite well dried out already, but does have a lot of oils of course.


I had to put this in the corner of the shop near some stuff since even with the shop vac on full blast through the dust port, cedar dust is shooting everywhere. Smells nice but is a mess.


First 3 brews. I might make the production ones a bit thicker as they tend to crack (not on lasing, but removing the masking). I will put a finish on the real ones. He will host them on the farm website.

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Very nice! No one ever gets all the saw dust from a mitre saw. No one.

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They look awesome! I’d love to know the poison ivy cure, too.

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Awesome! (And ditto me on the poison ivy cure…hubs is terribly susceptible and loves to muck around in ditches.) :grin:

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presumably the citrus oil (which is a tremendous organic solvent) washes off the (organic) urushiol before the allergic dermatitis gets to be too bad; i can’t believe it’s doing anything to the rash itself. works best if you do it as soon as you realize you’ve been exposed.

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Cool.

My dad dropped a bunch of coasters he made from a downed tree that he wants me to put some logo on. So I sure i’ll be trying something similar once i get my GF. Any tips on what settings to use?

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There are others out there I think. Had one where I use to work, did a decent job.

Great looking project!

So with cedar go WAY less than you think. 1%/150 damned near cut through. So these are 1%/300 @ 340dpi all vector.

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The colors on those are lovely!!

OMG about the turkey… :joy: :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: :heart_eyes: :rooster: <-- not a turkey

Wow. Those are truly beautiful.

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Simple, beautiful coasters. The color of the cedar adds a lot. :heart:

All male turkeys seem to be overly amorous. My friend had one the would mount anything moving or inanimate, he just didn’t give a flock. <<HA! Made ya look :stuck_out_tongue:

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@henryhbk and @Jules. Poison Ivy is no joke. I found out I was allergic after it had found it’s way onto my face through secondary means (kinda funny story about that one…). Once the swelling, pussing, and oozing stopped getting worse I definitely looked like two face. My eye, one side of my nose and mouth were swollen shut, and my ear looked like cauliflower. I had to take steroids in order to get it to go down.

So…If you care to share your anti-poison ivy remedy, I’d appreciate saving that and hoping that I never have to use it. But should I need it, it would be very appreciated.

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Yeah, hubs is that allergic to it too. And he made the misktake of getting into the roots on a monster plant when he was cleaning out a drainage ditch. The poison ivy was five feet away against a fence but the roots were in the ditch. He/we didn’t know they are about ten times more toxic than the stuff you get from the leaves.

But we found out. That took months of steroids, creams, doctors …I made the mistake of not bagging his clothes immediately and he threw them in the washing machine and I picked up a secondary exposure from doing the laundry that lasted for just as long. (That was a really fun summer. Boy, were we cranky!) :grimacing:

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THAT is the stuff from my nightmares! And definitely didn’t know that about the roots. My wife has almost no reaction at all to Poison Ivy, so any weeding that has to happen near anything that looks like Poison Ivy is her domain. She obviously takes precautions, but we know that should “exposure” happen, she either won’t get it at all or a VERY mild case.

I’ve also know people who were burning waste brush and found out later that there was poison ivy in the pile. They inhaled the smoke and not only did they suffer from poison ivy on their skin, but in their mouth, throat and lungs as well! That would probably just kill me.

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most people are allergic to it, something like 9 / 10 people; the whole reaction is an allergic response. some people definitely respond worse than others.

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back when I was younger and more able bodied I used to help out a lot cleaning up parks and trails around town. Poison Ivy as a result was an annual occurrence for me.

So urushiol as mentioned causes the dreaded allergic reaction. It bonds very tightly to the skin cells as I recall and is very stable so you can be “infected” a year later by contact with a surface that contains the oil.

That being said there are some great products, Pre-exposure something similar to Ivy-Block. After exposure there are ivy washes that get the oil off the skin and laundry additives for the same. I suspect they are very similar to the citrus solvent mentioned above in action. One product that has been around a long time that I haven’t seen competitors to or even more wide spread knowledge is Zanfel. It’s basically near as I can tell an extremely strong solvent buffered with a lot of scratchy exfoliants. Great for the spots you missed with the other products and rashed up anyway.

Thats the things I’ve had success with. Should anyone need it maybe they can too.

So why the annual exposure on my part? Well part of younger I guess should have been stupider too. I was certain I’d recognize poison ivy and just stay away. But that’s really not just me when cleaning out brush and the like I just dig in and forget good intentions, also some of it is just not looking like you would think such as the mentioned roots.

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OK, [Disclaimer: I am not giving this as formal medical advice, just what I do!] so the biggest problem is the urushiol oil is incredibly resistant to soaps and detergents, and while there is the specific product (Tecnu) I don’t have any, so first off (wearing disposable nitrile gloves) I go to industrial level solvent, and given it is going on my skin I use multiple applications of Zep citrus based degreaser applied copiously, and let it soak in for several minutes (as the directions state). The first couple of times using gloves, I take first a dry paper towel and wipe off the excess, and then the second with cool water. I repeat this a few times, until I am absolutely sure there is not any left. Then just to make sure I wiped it with a citrus based wipe (figuring that fabric is very porous and would remove the last. I then cleaned it again with some water. Then I put some triamcinolone cream on (if you stop it before it really gets inflamed way, way easier); the only problem is that is a high-potency prescription steroid, so most people don’t have it, but even the high potency hydrocortisone cream would likely work.

As far as removing the plant, honestly the best thing is a goat. No, I’m not joking, they love the stuff, and are (like most animals) immune, and totally destroy the plant; our town rents goats (seriously it’s a thing) from a poison ivy abatement goat herder to clear large swaths on public land. Now I will note, that goats do kind of a sherman’s march to the sea thing on any foliage, so they put up portable fencing, but in reality the goats are super happy to munch all that. Just don’t touch the goat…

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We need a goat. (Yeah, never thought that would be something I’d type on a forum.)

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Baby goats in pijamas FTW!

Edit: https://youtu.be/qfxUt9UM0nc

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Namaste. :expressionless:

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