The Door is Almost Done

It's been a while since I've posted anything wood shop related, probably because it takes an exorbitant amount of time for most things to happen. This is a function of assimilating incredible amounts of new information and of the attention to detail and near-perfection that our instructors expect of us. More than 100 hours later, the front door of my jewelry cabinet is almost done. If everything goes according to plan, I should have it glued-up tomorrow morning. The door has seen a number of mistakes and repairs. In this order in the photos below, I had to 1) repair the slot that I cut into the wrong side of my frame member, 2) saw off and reaffix a poorly shaped tenon, 3) glue a shaving to fatten up a poorly fitted tenon, 4) patch tear-out on the end of my redwood panel. And after all that, I (almost!) have a door.

The door, pre-finish

Sight down the top of the rail. Do you see the repair?

New ends on the tenon

Shaving on the tenon

Tear-out in the bottom right-hand corner

Sunday Hike

I went hiking with three friends in the Angelo Coast Range Reserve. The Reserve has changed shape from a hunting and gathering ground for the pre-historic Cahto people, to a homestead for European settlers in the 1880s, to a wilderness resort for wealthy San Franciscans, to a nature respite for a manufacturing family (the Angelos), to a protected reserve owned by The Nature Conservancy and administered by UC Berkeley. Now there are a few research stations and miles upon miles of beautiful trails and incredible trees. We saw madrone (the wood I'm working for my project), bay laurel (incredibly fragrant!), douglas fir, tan oak and black oak. We also saw lizards, giant doves and lots of berry-filled bear poop. 

Madrone

More madrone

Black oak

  

Sunday Bike Ride

Today I rode Little Lake Road to Caspar Little Lake Road just outside of Mendocino. It was a beautiful day for a beautiful ride, although the dirt road through Russian Gulch State Park was somewhat a surprise to me and my road bike. The paved section was rough enough--I hit a pothole so hard going speedily down a hill that my water bottle flew out of my bottle cage and broke and my tool bag flew off the back of my bike, even though it was securely velcroed in place! 

I took a mid-ride detour down to the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse where I saw a young buck in the meadow. It was nice to jog the mile-long path after biking. My legs were already warmed up and ready to go.


I hope you all don't get tired of photos of ridiculously beautiful coastal scenery and impressive trees, because that's about all there is around here.

Noticing the Small Things

There are certain things I've noticed because I do the same thing at the same time almost every day. Here's a truncated list:

• It's harder to get up at 6:30am because it's dark until just before 7:00am.
• The morning sun on the eucalyptus trees that line my street is shifting, and has almost disappeared altogether.
• A woman walks her tri-colored mutt to Otis Johnson park at 8:30 each morning.
• A plump elderly woman and her marmalade cat and scruffy dog stroll past the school at noon every day.
• The sun is now setting almost before I can make it home to enjoy the day's last rays.
• The moon has been absent from the early night sky for the past few days, which allows me to smell the fragrant trumpet flower as I grope my way to my front door.
• The Milky Way is slowly moving closer to the horizon. 
• The ocean has been exceptionally pacific the last couple days.
  
  

These are things I notice because detail comes to light when life is boiled down to a series of repetitive actions. I'm also starting to notice the absence of certain things, like the voice of the mockingbird or the cactus wren, which I heard plenty in LA. 

Wood, Precious Wood

The woodworker has a special relationship with wood. There's a deep appreciation and respect for the look, the smell, the feel, the way it planes, the color and the grain pattern. The Japanese believe that wood's beauty comes from the beauty of the soul of the living tree. I'd say I have to agree. Last Thursday a few classmates and I drove two hours north to a small town called Redway to meet Dan Primerano and view his private collection of wood. 

Dan gets most of his logs from fallen trees in the forest or through friends and acquaintances that clear their land. He mills his own lumber on a hydraulic mill and stacks it for a few years to dry. He has an impressive array of claro walnut, black walnut, madrone, eucalyptus, maple, chestnut, and many other local and exotic woods. The intent of the trip was to purchase some eucalyptus for a classmate's project and any other wood that one of us couldn't walk away without, but it became very clear that Dan was not willing to part with most of his wood. He was too emotionally invested in each and every piece. He did, however, spend four hours with us talking about his furniture and his wood collection. He allowed us to rummage through the stacks, and pull boards down to plane on them to expose the beauty of the rough lumber. In the end, my classmate found the perfect eucalyptus for the legs of his project. It's colors are the pink-blue-white of a rainbow trout.

On the way back, we stopped at a nice deli and had lunch in Garberville's town square and then stopped off at a beautiful swimming hole to spend some time in the water and the sun.

Admiring the view from Branscombe Road

Lily the cat helps out at the shop

Michele planes a piece of madrone

Dan explains the milling process

The hydraulic mill

Time for a swim!

Fog fills the valley

Life is Routine

For one of the first times in my 29 years, life is very routine. I wake up at 6:30am, do some work around the house, and then go to class from 8:30am to 5:30pm. Mondays I go to yoga, Wednesdays I go to swim practice, Thursday evenings are drawing class and Friday evenings are Elephants (a weekly party at the wood shop, named after the pilsner beer Carlsberg Elephant). The nice thing about the routine is that it allows me to notice small variations that can be very pleasant surprises. On Monday after yoga I saw a group of my fellow yoga-goers gathered around the trunk of a car. A woman from class was selling a nice chevre cheese she makes from her goats' milk. I bought a log, and it is delicious. It's especially tasty on Wasa crackers with ripened on the vine tomatoes fresh from a local farm.  

Sunday Afternoons

Sundays in Mendo are a little strange for me. I spend 6 days a week, 9 hours a day in a small wood shop with 24 other people. Sundays I have entirely to myself in a secluded town where I don't know anyone outside of school. It's an exercise in extremes. Today I had a nice talk with Mike, went to the Albion farmers market, ate a donut muffin covered in delicious, crumbly cinnamon sugar,  biked through some back roads, and then watched the sunset from my back porch with a glass of wine. Now I'm cooking papas bravas. Tonight I'll take a hot bath and spend some quality time with my paperback mystery. All in all, a nice day. 

I biked about 15 miles through big trees and beaches. Here are a few photos.

I am Super Excited about my Project

I've spent almost a week now thinking about my first project, and I have a fairly solid design concept. I've also selected my wood. I'm building a jewelry cabinet out of madrone, which is local to northern California. The idea is that the cabinet will be elegant and subtle--a place to showcase jewelry. The collection it houses is meant to be small, well-organized and well-loved. A woman (or man) will be able to see her (or his) favorite pieces neatly displayed in a single glance. No clutter or junk.
 
College of the Redwoods presents a way of working that's new to me. Rather than execute a rigid idea, your design, function of the piece and the wood play off each other in a fluid process. The project evolves as you work through each step. It's liberating to work this way, but also unnerving when uncertainty strikes.

I originally set out to make a cabinet with a solid, coopered (slightly curved) door, but I found the perfect piece of madrone...well, perfect except that it isn't quite wide enough and it's maybe a little too subtle. This gave me the idea to do a frame-and-panel door instead. The panel will be a showy piece of redwood burl, and it will be offset to one side. After cutting into my madrone, however, I realized that there's a lot more color and grain graphics in the wood than I had originally anticipated. Now I'm back to decisions about the design and use of the wood. Do I want to go ahead with the frame-and-panel, which is a cool concept but detracts from the madrone? Or do I want to showcase the more subtle (but not too subtle) beauty of the madrone?

Here are pictures of my wood in various stages and a drawing of my cabinet design. I'm also throwing in a random picture of tonight's sunset over the dunes. The sky was beautiful, and there was even a rainbow!

    

Breakthrough

I was finally able to wrap-up the exercises that were preventing me from moving on to my first project. Yesterday I completed my coopered door, half-blind dovetails and through-wedged mortise and tenon. Here's a photo of the three trouble makers.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the tall board of wood is slightly curved, or coopered (like a wine barrel, which is where the term comes from). It started as a solid piece of wood. I cut it into four pieces, took some material off of each edge, glued them back together into an arc, and then used the coopering plane I built to scoop out the insides into a smooth curve. 

Now that I'm done with my exercises, I've moved on to my first project. I'm still very much in the idea phase, but look for more to come soon!

Get Your Ducks in a Row

I've had a bad week. Nothing I do is seeming to come together, despite hours upon hours of hard work and concentration. My bad week culminated in me jamming my pinky finger into a fluted bit on the horizontal drill press (think sharp, metal points spinning at 700 RPMs). Oddly enough, when this happened I was thinking to myself, "How bad would it be if my finger or hand hit the bit?" As it turns out, not as bad as you might think, but bad enough. The blood finally forced me to take a step back instead of trying to jam through what I was doing. Fortunately, this incident and my bad week have helped me to learn a number of important lessons.

First off, frustration does not help. You can't fight what you're doing or your problems will only get worse. If you don't see signs of improvement, you need to step back to figure out why. And if you can't figure it out yourself, ask for help. I asked my affable instructor, Greg Smith, for his sage advice. He told me to get my ducks in a row. In this case, I should check all my reference surfaces to make sure they were flat and square and make sure that my tools were sharp, very sharp. I learned that I need to think systematically about where the problem might be, not assume that I'm doing something wrong. As it turns out, the problem is normally in the tool!    

Yesterday was somewhat better. I spent the day getting my ducks in a row--organizing my space and tools to create a good work flow and sharpening, sharpening, sharpening. After school I went to the pool where I ran into an impromptu swim team and then met Greg's chickens. He sent me home with two eggs, which I ate immediately. I feel much more ready to get through my half-blind dovetails and through mortise and tenons today. Thanks, Greg! (And thanks to Dixie and Professor Chaos for the delicious eggs.)

Dahlias are in Bloom

The Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden is nestled next to the Pacific Ocean. The mild maritime climate makes it a garden of all seasons, bursting with dense coastal pine, fern-covered canyons, camellias, rhododendrons, magnolias, conifers, heaths and heathers. But the crown jewel of them all is the dahlia garden. Lucky for us, the dahlias were in bloom when Mike and I first arrived in Fort Bragg. We enjoyed the blooms' wild colors and shapes, and just couldn't take enough pictures. Here are a few of the best for your viewing pleasure. 

Photo by Mike Manville

Photo by Mike Manville

SawStop

The CR wood shop got a new table saw, and it's a SawStop! The SawStop uses a safety system that stops the blade within 5 milliseconds of detecting contact with skin. It's incredible technology. Check it out in this time warp video, which shows footage of the saw's inventor sticking his own finger into the rotating saw blade!

Alex's Pear Tree

Alex is one of my classmates. He sits two benches up from me and is a likeable guy with an easy sense of humor. For four generations, his family owned a pear orchard in Ukiah. They had approximately 30,000 trees on 200 acres. Sadly his family lost the property to the bank in April, and since then a potential new owner bulldozed many of the trees to make way for grapes. Alex was able to grab one of the felled trees, which he brought to school to mill. His great-great grandparents grafted and planted this particular tree nearly 100 years ago.

Pear wood can be an incredibly beautiful wood for making furniture or woodwind instruments. It’s a fine-grained hard wood that ranges in color from salmon to peach. The tree Alex brought in looked from the outside like it might be checked the whole way through—that is, it might have imperfections in the wood that made it less than desirable. But there was only one way to find out—with a chainsaw and an Alaskan mill.

An Alaskan mill is a device that holds a chainsaw horizontally so you can cut a tree into slabs. It was quite a process to get the mill set-up. The log had to be secured and stable and the mill had to have a broad, flat reference that was parallel to the tree. Set-up also involved lots of standing around and contemplation with cigarettes and coffee. After about an hour and a half, Alex and Co. were ready to cut into the tree. As it turns out, the wood is quite pretty. It's nice to know that his family's history will live on in a dovetailed box, a wall cabinet or perhaps a piece of furniture.

See for yourself. Here are a few photos of the affair and video of the first and second passes, if you're really into it. Alex is the one operating the chainsaw.

Paisley Moo

Photo by Mike Manville

She might look sweet and cuddly, but don't let those liquid chocolate eyes fool you. Paisley is an alpha dog. Many people think they have an alpha dog, but mostly they don’t know what that means. Paisley is truly an alpha. If you give her an inch, she’ll try to take a mile. She recently went to our trainer Steve Brooks, battled him all weekend long, and is now on a super strict training regime. This means no food unless she’s working for it on her walks and behaving well. (Don’t worry, we’re not starving our dog. I say we, but I mean Mike because he’s the primary care taker of the beast while I’m in Fort Bragg. Thank you, Mike!) It’s a system of incentives.

Mike has made a break-through with the dog, and she remains very well-behaved. However, in an effort to do some in-house eating last night, she managed to eat two bouillon cubes. This led her to being insanely thirsty, and she drank her entire water bowl. This is turn overwhelmed her little dog bladder, and she woke Mike up at 3:45 in the morning going bananas. He took her outside and she peed for about 30 seconds. Poor dog. Poor Mike.

Glass Beach

You’ve probably heard of black sand beaches, but have you ever heard of a glass beach? Fort Bragg is home to one of the most unique beaches in the world. In 1949 the area around Glass Beach became a public dumping ground. Residents would pitch their garbage—including cars, batteries, old clothing, and household garbage, which included lots of glass—straight into the ocean. Some 20 years later, in 1967, the North Coast Water Quality Board realized the error of their ways and planned a new dump away from the coast.

In the meantime, Mother Nature has pounded away at the refuse and deposited tons of polished glass back onto the beach. The occasional lucky visitor will still find remnants of the beach’s past in the form of a rusted spark plug or some other oddity, but mostly what you’ll see are thousands of pieces of glass sparkling in the sun (or fog). Visitors beware, collecting is strictly prohibited. 

Photo by Mike Manville