Calling It Good

The tail side of the dovetail.

Ok, so the tails I decided after some deliberation, to cut on the WoodRat.  Took some experimentation to do it since the weight of the wood exceeds the capacity of the WoodRat.

They make this large high speed steel dovetail bit with an elegant slope to the cut.  In solid wood it just cuts so nice and easily.  I did hog out most of the cut first with a straight bit and came back with the dovetail bit to sliver off the angle.

 It came out beautifully.

The pin side of the dovetail.

The white tape method proved to be workable so I employed it on the pin side as well.

There are many methods of hand cutting and I don't always do it the same way each time.  But this time I did it like this.

This is a handmade rip Dozuki from Hida Tools in Berkeley.  

I committed to cutting to the line rather than wide of it and sneaking up on the line with chisels.

After the saw cuts I roughed out the top portion with a chisel to about a 1/16" from the back edge.

Sharpened the chisel for the final cut to the finished line.  Roughly halfway through the top side.

Flipped the board over (with the help of Paulie) and did the same to the bottom.
Got ahold of Paulie again and he biked back to flip back with the good side up.   Initial test to see if the pin side aligns with the tail side.

Surprisingly not much fiddling to do.

I usually don't do a total dry fit as it's hard to get apart most of time.  So I push it in a bit to see if it will go.  And I'm calling it good.  Will glue it up on the jobsite.

Starting on the Crux

Glued the two halves together yesterday without much drama at all.  Center joint came out very nicely aligned so it won't be needing much work there to level it out.

But up to now, it's been a lot of grunt work of jointing and ripping and planing and drum sanding the pieces.  Now comes from the fun part.  Was over at John's place last night overlooking the city having a few of his craft made cocktails which was nice but my mind kept coming back to dovetails.  Dovetails.  And so for the next couple days this will be the fun part of the job.

The jumble of clamps that had just finished their task.

Marking out. 

It was decided (not by me) to have this even block look of spacing. Also trying out a tape method for visual ease.  Often times it's hard to see layout lines on dark wood.  And I'm not taking any chances of cutting the wrong portion.

Tattoo This

On the back of your dominant hand....."Measure twice, cut once"

In addition to all those things they teach you in kindergarten, you know, "play nice, look both ways, naps in the afternoon are a good thing", they should also teach "measure twice, cut once."

Came real close to a major fuck up on the walnut island top. But I ran through all my numbers again, double...no.. triple checked the template sink cutout and found an error in my ways.  Nearly committed a sin.

Ok, I admit I burned an inch in my original calculations but as I discovered today, the template that was supplied with the sink also contained an error.  The full sized drawing did not match the written measurements on the sheet.

Like Chick Hearn liked to say, "No harm, no foul."  Caught it in time.

Measuring things just like my kindergarten teacher should have taught me.

The Long and Wide of It.

The walnut island top I'm making is wider than than my machines can handle so I'm gluing it up into two pieces.  Here are the two top halves after they've been run through the drum sander.  Each of these are 18" wide by 15'+.  The piece on the right has a cutout for where the sink is going.  There should be minimal work to be done on the center joint hopefully if I spend the time to align it right during glue-up.
Half the job of working these long and wide pieces is just in figuring out ways to move them around the shop....well, the temporary shop as it were.  To run a 15'+ board through a machine you have to have at least say 17' in front of the machine and 17' behind it. 

June today

White life seeds snowed blowed
Open grave cut straight pine box
Six sided dirt star.

Bushido Bucketlist

Today I thought of my friend George Wuerthner.

I've been using a bike to get around in the Bay Area for decades.  Just seems like to way to go what with traffic and parking and exercise and wind/weather in your face.  And it's free!  Riding in the most hair raising traffic in San Francisco is pure freedom because I'm not afraid to die.  Right now.  Right this instant.
Today could have been one of those days.  Jumped on my bike to go and pick up some supplies for the walnut island (see post below) and a red van blows through a stoplight.  This was a close one but I was able to stop just inches from her.  Her window was down and I said "What the hell are you doing?" She showed nothing on her face as she turned the corner and drove off. The van in the back was covered with those christian fish logos.
But it didn't bother me, I didn't take anything personal.  Not upset in the least.  If it were to be my day today, so be it.  I'm good to go.

To me, this idea of a bucketlist is a form of consumerism.....like these things you do or the places you go that you check off before you die are "somethings."  They're almost objects you desire to own.
Me. For me it's always been before I die, I am to learn the lessons that I am suppose to learn.   (And re-learn many of them over and over.)

One of them is paying no nevermind (as my mother used to say) to death.  To be ok with it, not to fear it but to embrace it for it is the last big experience we all go through.  Birth/Death.  There is no separation.

To paraphrase...with great license... The Bushido,  I could not die by the bicycle because I AM the bicycle.






Ok...I'll let that one sink in for a bit.




So I'm biking back after getting my supplies and George pops into my head.  Back in the fall of 1970 I was living in Missoula Montana going to school, so was George.  He and I decided to go backpacking into the Bitterroot Mountains for the weekend.  This was spur of the moment.  We threw some crap in our backpacks, hitchhiked down and got on the trail pretty late on Friday.  I hadn't eaten much that day.  Now you all don't know George like I know George but he's an absolute bull when he hikes.  Charges up mountains like they're flat, hikes for the day on a teaspoon of oatmeal (ask him about his trip where he only took oatmeal to eat) and handful of gorp.  Well, we had an unforeseen snowstorm overtake us...Shit we were young, we were dumb.  Who checks the weather?  Further up the mountain we hike, the deeper the snow was.  George was way way out in front of me.  I mean way out in front.  I was struggling, didn't bring much in the way of foul weather stuff, I was wet, I was shivering.  I decided to lay down in the snow and go to sleep.
George for reasons even today doesn't know why, he turns around at some point and tries to follow his tracks back down.  It's getting dark. He finds me unresponsive covered in snow.  By happenstance there is a hunter's camp not too far from where I was that George found.  A tent was already set up.  George drags me down to the tent, lights up the wood stove, feeds me and brings me back to life.

I'm almost home now and going through another intersection,  a black van is waiting for me to cross.  He is waiting for me.  We catch each others eyes,  I make a sign with my hand to say "thank you, I'm sorry I made you wait", he dips his head in acknowledgment.  On the door is a hand lettered sign "Life is Beautiful."  Not quite believing I turn around as I bike by him and it's there on the passenger side as well.


Since I should put a photo in here, and somehow this relates....  A couple days ago I'm talking on the sidewalk with Rhonda, the woman that lives next door to the west of me.   A black feather falls from the sky and lands between us.

ps...don't have anything against people with bucketlists...to each his own.

The Old Fashioned Way

I emigrated to Canada during the mid-ish 70's to Vernon, British Columbia.  Eventually I hooked up with a construction company that was owned by a Dane and employed all Danes...except for me.
Sven and I were a crew of two.  We were the crew the owner used in the high end jobs mainly because of Sven being an unbelievably talented carpenter.  Sven had gone through his apprenticeship before the portable power tools had arrived on the scene.  His hand skills would blow your mind.

 Sven  liked me so he tried to teach me his ways about things.

He had me buy a 5pt rip handsaw and then told me to re-file it to a 5pt crosscut saw.  Of course by hand.  Sucker cut like crazy and you could get the job done in 30 seconds that would take fifteen minutes to string an extension cord if you wanted to use a skilsaw.

He once used a section of a tree as the central support of a spiral staircase and with minimal layout and with a chisel and hammer he mortised in the treads and wound them up the tree...like in a day!  The next day we shaped a curved handrail.  This is with minimal tools.

The intrinsic dangers of Schnapps after work on Fridays.

Sven, when we would discuss how to do something would invariably say, with his pipe in his mouth and smoke coming out as he spoke..."The old fashioned way......it's the best way."  And he would grab some hand tools and go at it.

One of his big lessons was both spiritual and practical in a way.  Every time we transitioned from the rough framing on a house to inside trim work, we would take a half a day and work on our tools.  Handsaws would be re-filed and re-set, chisels and plane blades would be sharpened, motorized tools that needed maintaining would be attended to, the job site cleaned up.  It really was a nice way to switch yourself over from big rough movements to movements of finesse.  It slowed you down, it re-calibrated you.  Centered.  And of course the tools were sharp as tools are supposed to be.

With the West Oakland place in construction right now, I've moved everything out, all my tools and stored them outside.  This was a hard thing for me to do out of respect for them.  But I tried to take all the necessary precautions so they wouldn't suffer any damage from being out in the elements.  Anybody who has been to my shop has seen my signs "NO LIQUIDS ON THE TOOLS."  I've always wanted to add "even for a nano-second" but I thought that to be too much.

So when I unfurled them to bring them back in for this walnut island job somehow during the winter rains, water had come into contact on the table saw.
No way was I going to start a job like this with rust on cast iron.  I pulled a Sven and spent a half day taking care of all the cast iron surfaces.  It needed to be done.  Out of respect.

It was a pretty cool rust pattern though and I'm thinking of trying to duplicate it on some metal for a photographic background.

This is a European jointer that came with beds so roughly ground and not flat and twisted that I took the machine apart and had the two beds Blanchard ground.  A Blanchard grind produces this circular pattern.  It's flat now...and smooth as a baby's ass.

The bed with some automobile polish on it.

The circular Blanchard middle pattern that I never tire of looking at.

And taking the time to lay out how the boards will be layed up.  My way of using tape.

Thank you Sven.

Dovetail Waterfall

First wood project in the new West Oakland space.  I've been putting off taking on anything wood related until I had upgraded the electrical.  I ended up temporarily hardwiring a couple 220 extension lines directly into the panel so I could run the machines.

This will be a 15' walnut top for a kitchen island.  What will set it apart will be what the architect is calling a waterfall and I'll hand cut 36" of through dovetails to attach the top to the waterfall.

Of course more visuals to follow as it comes together.

Ken and the architect doing some figurin'

And looking at grain orientation and stuff like that.