Obelisk raising class

The Browns, of Handdhouse, led a class last semester on the techniques used during the 1800s to lower, transport and raise the obelisk that is now behind the MET in New York City.  Built in Egypt, lowered onto logs and rolled into a ship whose waiting hull was left open, workers sealed the hull, sailed the ship to the new world, opened her back up again and rolled the obelisk through the streets of New York to its final resting place.  There is debate today about the monument staying in American or not, as there is about many old ‘acquired’ objects like it, but our class focused on replicating historic technology to scale, and we did.  We didn’t get to a trial run, but it was certainly interesting to work small-scale, and to think about forces and weight and dealing with that engineering side of things in a structure, something I don’t get to do at the scale I usually work in.

Wave bed

Stacks of 2x4s, domino-ed and glued together and then ground down into the shape you see here, fitting the contours of my body so that I may lie in it comfortably.  Unfinished.

Refinishing

I was hired to refinish two pieces of furniture for a local artist, mostly involving cleaning up the pieces, matching stain color, and giving it back a sheen where I’d taken it off.  Shellac was a good friend on this project.

Wood stacks 1

Part 1 of my wood stacks study.  The rotten walnut log I had would lose any magic it had to look at as soon as I took a tool to it, so I resorted to simply slicing it up.  Definitely struck a chord, as many people got excited when they saw it, and it started me on a miniature lumber yard idea, a trend which I’m still following…

Wood stacks 2

Finished

The schoolhouse has since become a museum, and the townsfolk apparently have collected all sorts of items from the town’s past, and more museum space was needed.  So in came the TFG to rebuild the barn based on similar-era barns in the area, the be as much like the old barn as possible.  Using weather marks on the side of the school house the leaders were able to figure the barn’s height, and its position from the old foundation, and developed the plans.

These Guild projects often turn into a great retreat from life in the “real world,” so much that it seems the world has never been so simple and perfect.  Hard work, good food, fun company and sleeping under the stars.  Alas, it’s rarely so simple nowadays; though I suppose that is part of the magic of the modern world.

Into the Wilderness

And yet the projects are about building, primarily, and about the nature and work of wood.  And that’s, in the end, the best of them after all.  The day-to-day is working with something at the same time unforgiving and peaceful, hard and soft.  Nostalgia, maybe, or simply innate tradition, I suppose wood will always have some sense of history, that working with it will feel like dipping into some old-world pool of sweat and dedication.

Progress

At the end of it, woodworking is a labor-intensive thing, and with our power tools and electricity we motor through posts and beams and braces with ease and speed unimaginable to the pioneers of the old days.  But in my own attempts to mimic the hand-tool worker, I’ve grown appreciation and awe for those men whose job was much less glamorous than the pieces that he’d make.  In the end, it’s hard work, which is itself a major reward, and a large part of why I keep attending the Guild projects.

Dedication

These projects are always full of fun and excitement, but for me the reward of a finished building pales in comparison to the experience they provide in their making.  The work itself is what I’ve grown to love, and will love to continue every chance I get.

Permanent

Finished

Next up was a rubber mold of something, cast in two materials.  Mine was a pair of axe-head bike pedals I made out of wood and held together for a single brush-on mold.  It worked well, I got one cast in plaster (not shown) and one in Smooth-On white plastic.  I’ll need to add some texture for traction before putting them on a bike.

Last was the multiples project.  Demanding only because of the amount of time it felt like it would require, I stressed and hurried the process.  Originally I was going to make a fridge-magnet planter, made out of plastic packaging from a padlock.  Because of its shape, I had a 4-part mold, but rushed it and so didn’t do a clean job at it.  Consequently, the mold wouldn’t seal when I put it back together for pouring, and I lost about 6 out of 9 attempts, wasting my first batch of Aqua Resin I’d bought off a friend.

A mad night later I’d concocted – with that same friend – a new plan, cutting a piece of birch bark into a birch leaf shape, bulking it up with clay and casting that in alginate.  I poured plaster in that and left it in a drying cabinet in the ceramics wing.

The next day I came back and shellacked it all day, pouring its rubber mold that night.  The following day I returned to measure the amount of Aqua Resin mixture and accelerant needed for each cast, and got a nice minimal amount.

By the end of the day, I’d finished my 15 casts and came back one more afternoon to do minor clean-up on other things before the deadline 2 days later.  Et voila!  15 birch-bark-leaves for …. whatever you want to use ‘em for.  Definitely learned some lessons during this phase of class as well.

The very first thing we did was made a mold of our faces; groups of three or four making molds of each others’ faces that we’d have to cast in two different materials by midway through the semester.  My final casts ended up being plaster because it was easy and cement because no matter how I tried baking bread in a plaster mold it never seemed to come out.

Next up was hands and/or feet, and I even attempted my girlfriend’s back, shoulderblades to butt, but the mold slipped and deformed and I was left with something unacceptable for class, but usable in another final project, so things turned out alright.

All in all, I definitely feel capable in moldmaking now, having gone through a rigorous routine of work-wait-work-wait-work-wait-work for nearly every piece done for the class.  Even today I was thinking about how to modify a tool using the knowledge gained from the class.  More on that later, hopefully .

If you get the chance to learn about moldmaking and have any interest in making things, I’d go for it.  It’s not necessarily something I’d had ideas for before getting into it, but I can imagine things much more doable now because of learning the processes and whatnot in class.

Butterfly valve; photo from http://www.dynamicvalves.com/

The rod acts as a pivot for the sheet metal, allowing it to spin around inside the chimney, blocking and opening the passage.  The other end of the rod we welded to the end of another piece of thin sheet metal, to act as a lever that would open and close the valve.

Next we attached one finger of a rubber glove (not pictured) around the nozzle of an aluminum water bottle with a rubber band, and set it on top of the box. We welded a bit of rod onto the opposite end of the rod for a counterweight, to help bring the lever back down again once the fire had cooled.  With a little water in the bottle, we were ready to begin the experiment.

Our Theory:
The fire in the box would heat up the water in the bottle, eventually inflating the rubber glove finger.  The finger would push up the lever, eventually overpowering the counterweight and rotating the valve in the chimney such that it would close off the passage to smoke.  Effectively the only passage for air to the fire, this would also seal off its own oxygen supply, causing the fire to die down somewhat.  Eventually, the water bottle would cool enough to de-inflate the glove, rotating the valve back open again and allowing air back through the chimney and into the fire, where the cycle would begin again.

Check out a video of it in action:

It mostly worked, although the glove ended up catching on the lever and over-inflating.  The glove then stretched too much and was punctured around where the rubber band held it onto the bottle.  But we got about halfway there, and we were satisfied with that .

Joints come together

We left on a Thursday morning, arriving just in time for dinner, and spent three full days working on the structure, scribing and marking, cutting and fitting the joinery, and parts-assembly and transporting the stuff to the site.  We didn’t have time to see it raised, but it was an awesome time nonetheless.

The structure stands

I’ve grown a love of Timberframing since my experience in Poland, and though it’s not something I yearn for, every time I go on a project I’m reminded of how simple and pure and great life can be when we work hard together, and create something at the end of each day.

Woodworking has become a passion in many forms for me, from furniture to historic restoration, maybe because it’s nostalgic, historically important, but it’s also personally satisfying, and invigorating to make something with my own hands, to craft something that becomes part of someone’s existence.  It’s interesting to see the shift of my attentions from entertaining people with my film/video work and into a more direct connection by making objects for them, and wanting to make change and do good through this process.  I often wonder how it can make a real difference in lives already so full.

Cadets, Art Students and Craftspeople

Elements

Working Together

Roughing Hands

to Build

a Friend

a Structure

a Home

Upholstery?

Joinery of the inner hidden box-shelf

I designed it so that there’d be a hidden shelf inside the main body of the footstool, held up by pegs.  Once you released those pegs, the shelf would drop and hang out of the body, letting you store whatever goodies you wanted kept secret.  Then you’d simply raise the shelf again and re-insert the pegs.

The secret inner shelf

Since making the stool, and even during the process, I thought about using drawer runners and other things that would help give smoother, more even movement and locking, instead of the quick drop that happens now once the pegs are removed.  Alas, food for thought on future projects.

4 matched legs

What was really fun, though, was learning the lathe for this.  I’d asked to learn it early in the semester anyway, jumping on an opportunity to add a new tool to my repertoire, especially if I continue on in the furniture route, and was pleased to discover that it is very fun, and pretty simple once you get a feel for it.  Now I just need practice .

Leg mortises

The joinery was pretty simple, just tenons into the legs and the inner box has pegs that fit into groove inside the outer box, the grooves stopped near the bottom so it doesn’t drop out.  The seat is removable (another note for future projects: research upholstery before doing it!)

Upholstery?

One of the things I’m probably the most proud of, though, is that all of the sides are made from old 2×4 pieces.  I had a bunch of scrap pieces around 2 feet long laying around so I squared them up, ripped them in half and laminated 3 together to get the 8 panels I needed for this thing.  Yay for re-using materials!

Recycled lumber

Lastly, as I’ve done in the past, I wrote an Instructable on the making of this piece.  They’ve got a furniture contest going on right now, so I submitted my piece.  I got award another Pro membership (seems to be the norm, I’ve gotten one for the last 2 things I’ve submitted too) and this got on the front page of the site.

The Finished Footstool

I tried to make this one approachable (moreso than the photomanipulation one, for example) by splitting it into “If you know” and “if you don’t know” categories, addressing each step in simplified terms for experienced makers, and then in more detail for those who needed some more detailed explanations.  My only complaint is that you can’t organize Instructables into a more straightforward step-by-step way, using images inline with the text so that you can outline steps and then show the images of those steps right there in the body of the text, similar to the Make Projects site.  It’s closer to the way I think through a project, so it would be more helpful laid out in that way, instead of having to read a chunk of text, scroll back up to its corresponding image(s), decipher what’s what, and then find your place in the reading below again.

It was a fun project, got a great response, and certainly taught me some new things.  The rest of this semester in terms of woodworking, I’m going to make some simpler things, and learn how to take care of tools and cultivate good work ethics and habits.  Plus, I’ve got all those other classes….

Tools of refinement

I tried the carefully planned approach this time, with straight lines, diagrams of joints and everything.

Last year, I made the bookshelf.  And what a treat it was to choose wood, plan, prepare, construct and finish my own large piece of furniture.  And it’s very happy with its current living conditions .  This year, I’d come up with the idea early on of somehow making a rock-and-moss table, which would be simply a small side table or coffee table with glass sides and top.  I’d attach two small reservoirs on either end of the table, to be kept full of water, and run tubing – the kind used in small animal cages or fish tanks – along the underside of the lid of the table, with holes cut in it along the way for water to drip onto the rocks and moss inside, keeping them moist and the moss alive.

It would be an awesome feat not only to build something to withstand that, but to execute and use it in my apartment.  But maybe another time.  This assignment had to two parts for its guidelines:

1. Precious object
2. Historic precedent/box style

Essentially, we had to choose something significant to us, a style of box from history that we admire and that relates somehow to our object, and create our interpretation of that style in a form that fits our object.  Some people made locket boxes for their pocket watches, or vertical Chinese pottery boxes with adjustable shelves.  I decided, since I’ve been experimenting with cooking so much recently, to use spice boxes and tables as reference to make a garden box for herbs that also functioned as a table, frankly because we didn’t have a coffee table in our apartment yet and I wanted to make one.

Pulling images from all over the internet, I chose the bottom left as the strongest influence, and went from there.

In the end, that’s almost what I made, short of it being deeper and with a hinged lid.  From approval on, the project really was more a matter of figuring out dimensions on all of the matching pieces, with the legs partially inside and out of the frame, and the top being a completely separate piece I had to then place quite exactly.  Not to mention I’d never used hardware before and made a few holes for some hinge supports that ended up not working with the inset legs.

No gaps!

Creator-griping aside, I am very pleased with how it came out, and excited both to have worked with joinery again, and to have added glass to a piece.  Both side and end pieces use two tenons into mortises in the legs; the bottom is luan that fits into a grove around all of the side/end pieces, and is cut to fit around the legs; the top panels are glued together with two dominoes at each joint, the glass simply fits into a groove around the inside of the lid and the whole thing hinges on 2/3s of a piano hinge.

This project has sparked a bit of interest in how wood finishing works, what to use on what, so that may be something I’ll experiment with in future projects.  Of course I do still have to setup and plant the herb garden in this thing, so maybe I’ll get to that first .