When a tree comes down, most people get rid of the trunk and branches.

After all, what use is a dead tree? Reddit user captianinsano is not most people. When his parents cut down a walnut tree in their yard, he pulled a portion of the trunk out of their brush pile.

After many months of hard work with lots of trial and error, captianinsano turned that tree trunk into an incredibly beautiful bowl.

Luckily for us, he documented the entire process in pictures, which he shared on Reddit.

It took him a while just to cut the log in half. After finally succeeding in that, he put it on the lathe to round it out. It was then that he noticed the log had some large cracks running through it.

An imperfection like that may have caused many people to give up on the project, but not captianinsano. After months of letting the wood dry, he broke the wood apart along the cracks.


He then took a spare piece of cherry and cut it to fit in between the two pieces of walnut. After careful shaping and a lot of sanding, he had a great looking bowl.

There were still a few imperfections in the walnut, though, so he filled them with crushed malachite stone and glue.

With several coats of finish applied, the result is a truly beautiful salad bowl, all the more beautiful for its imperfections. Captianinsano has shown us all what is possible with hard work.