If You Can't Start at the Ending, Repeat: One Lesson from Drew Langsner

Several years into my professional woodworking life, I read an older man's account of being hired on at

Pruning Works!

These photos were taken yesterday as I split potential chair parts from the butt log of a northern red oak. The tree had just been felled, and had grown up in somebody's yard. It was almost exactly the same age as I (slightly north of 50), and in one of the short pieces I split, I found a branch that had been pruned off when the tree was about 25 years old. These pictures tell a story (I hope)!

The photo above shows

Build a Workbench in a Weekend

This past weekend was my second “Build a Workbench in a Weekend” class at Highland Woodworking. Five students and I put in two very full, very busy days of work and produced 6

November 10th, 2016: Kiln Visit

Today I left work early to beat the traffic, and did a bit of work on our solar kiln. It has been neglected for several years, and Reed and I both want to get back into the habit of always having something drying in the kiln, either for our own use, for sale as lumber, or as custom drying for paying guests. I put some blocking over the biggest air gaps I could find . . .

. . . and started adding some rolled/pregummed adhesive flashing to the seam where the glass box rests on top of the roof:

More of both remains to be done, then some exterior stain, then some venting so we can control the entry (or exclusion) of fresh air, then mounting the fans, and we'll be ready for the first load in version 4 (or is it 5?) of the old kiln. Maybe I can spend a day out there this weekend and get all the way through that list!

It was a beautiful fall day, and as the sun got low I was joined by an unexpected assistant. Usually these hard-working immigrants are too busy getting run over by motor vehicles to be much help, so I felt lucky to be spared a moment.

Then it hopped off into the underbrush and left me alone with the sunset. When you see the way the tall grass lights up in the raking low-angle sunlight, you see why they call it the golden hour. 

It was pleasant to finish my work and sit on the tailgate of the Nissan, munching a pb&j, drinking some ice water, and watching the November light fade.

Here's to more pleasant, peaceful afternoons like today.

Kiln Rebuild in the Works?

This weekend I had a chance to visit my friend Reed on his farm about an hour's drive from here. Reed has been everything from an advertising art director to a publisher to a woodworker. Before I started my present job at Fernbank Science Center, Reed and I built some cabinetry and furniture projects together, and we also built and operated a solar lumber

Hanging on to Christmas Fun

I was afraid my spoon blanks would dry out before I got to them, which is why I was storing them in a plastic bag full of chips from the carving process. Then I was afraid that fungus would get working on the blanks before I got them finished up, so I decided to wrap them in plastic and freeze them. The idea is that if the wood is below freezing temperature, the fungus will at least slow down until I can carve the wood. Those little white packages, lower left in my freezer, are my spoon blanks:

Will this work? I don't know, it's an experiment. I think it probably will. I know that wood can dry out while frozen (water can sublimate). Hopefully, double-wrapping the blanks in plastic will keep enough water in the wood to be easy to carve, while being frozen will slow the fungus down enough so I won't be working spalted wood (unless I want to, of course).

I'll keep you posted!

A Handplane Jig for Ladderback Chair Leg Tapering

Here's another hand tool jig. This one is more specific than the dovetail paring jig I showed in the last entry, because it's built to help with one particular step in one particular project. I use it to turn tapered square chair leg blanks into tapered octagons when I make the ladderback chair developed by J. Alexander and Drew Langsner. The dovetail jig can be used for joints of different thicknesses and widths, and I can even picture myself using it to fair up tenon shoulders. But this leg-tapering jig is so specific that I doubt it will ever be used for anything but this project.

First I'll show about making and using the jig, and then I'll explain my thinking a little bit.

Make a Chopping Block for Green Woodworking

If you want to get started in woodworking on the lowest possible budget, I recommend what's called “green woodworking” or sometimes “greenwoodworking”. I've talked a little about this already, in this entry about the chairmaking class I took at Country Workshops last summer, and this entry about gathering some ash for my next chair.

One thing you will find handy if you want to start carving spoons and/or bowls from green wood is a chopping block, so you'll have a stable surface for shaping with an axe.

Hock Kitchen Knife Kits

I just put the first coat of finish on this guy:

If you've done much messing around with hand planes, you'll probably recognize the logo. If not, finish reading this and I'll try to start you down the path to enlightenment.

The Toolkit

I mentioned in my last post that you don't have to be interested in making a ladderback chair to take notice of the tools we used at Country Workshops, or to make use of green wood. For the woodworker on a budget, wood from retail sources can be expensive. So, in many cases, you might want to consider splitting logs into useable wood and drying it yourself.

Ladderback Chairs: Refined Results from a Minimal Toolkit

From this:

To this:

 in 6 days. [Part One of Two]

Surfacing Big Boards without a Big Jointer

How do I surface a big board if I don't have a jointer? In this post, I'm going to show you one way to do it. There are many ways to skin this particular cat, but this way works, and the basic principles apply in lots of situations.

Getting some big boards surfaced is the first step in a project that will stretch out across several blog posts:

Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday; I have developed some pleasant rituals for myself and enjoy cooking a big, delicious meal for my family. This autumn, I have been thinking about Everyman (the play they make all the English majors read during the first semester survey of British lit) and, one thing leading to another, my Thanksgiving ruminations focused on memory.

(So far this isn't about woodworking. I know. Please bear with me.)

How did Everyman lead me to think about memory? The play teaches an important lesson that I wasn't ready to receive as a 21-year-old: everything we have will be stripped away eventually. Money, friends, family, health - - Everyman relies on each to pull him through his existential crisis, and none of them do the trick. (If you've read the play recently, you probably realize I haven't read the play in a long, long time. This digression is all about my memory of my reaction when I read it 26 years ago in Craig Kallendorf's class.) In the 1980's, in the United States, the average 21-year-old white male was still in a phase of life that involved far more gain than loss: I was still gaining new experience, knowledge, and skills so that I could “begin” my career. Being told by a medieval morality play that everything I was working towards would be taken away from me was not a welcome message at all! My strong denial stuck with me, for some reason, and I found that as I lived my way through my twenties and thirties and forties, I gradually came to understand and accept the wisdom of Everyman. Seeing the slow physical deterioration and death of loved ones; gaining and losing some truly wonderful friends through career moves and misunderstandings and missed connections; witnessing unexpected losses of life and property among my peers; getting and losing jobs and houses and money as time and chance happened to them all: these taught me that yes, Everyman was right. It's all temporary.

(Still no woodworking! But just another paragraph or two, I promise.)

Memory is something I treasure, now that I have lost some people and places I love. As I cooked Thanksgiving dinner, I thought of all the people I've shared Thanksgiving dinners with. Many of them are no longer in my life. Time and chance does that. As long as I have memories, though . . . but guess what? Memory can be stripped away too. Alzheimer's is in my family, so there's a chance I'll lose my cherished memories. And even if I don't, remember Roy Batty's dying monologue in Blade Runner? “All those moments will be lost in time . . .” So this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for memory.

However, loss of memory has at least two sides. Early this month I was in Wisconsin, in the patch of woods I own. I knew that I had carefully stacked and covered some walnut boards there, about 15 years ago when I still lived in Iowa and had just bought the place in Wisconsin. A friend in Iowa gave me a small walnut log, which I split into quarters and then cut into quartersawn boards on a bandsaw. Every once in a while through the years, I have passed the covered stack in the woods and thought to myself I ought to bring the lumber home and use it. This fall I took action. And what a treat! The stack was in very good shape. I had covered it with pieces of steel roofing to shed water, and I think the fact that the cover overlapped the pile by quite a bit was what saved it.

The wood in the stack was all in good shape! Let's hear it for well-made piles!

And then I found the gift that I had given myself: inside the pile, a couple of pieces of crabapple. 

They aren't big, they aren't the best quality, but I had assumed that all the crabapple I bandsawed back in Iowa had been lost or burned. Apple is one of my very favorite woods. Hard, heavy, fine-grained, and with a glorious color that just keeps on improving with age, like cherry's older, more sophisticated sister. Finding these pieces of wood, probably only big enough to make a couple of tool handles or drawer pulls, was like a small gift I had given myself thanks to forgetfulness. This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for forgetfulness.