2! 2 Posts in 1.

 Lots of pics for the visual people out there.

Rented a truck and trucked down to Paso Robles in Central CA to pick up some wood.  The winery table is going to be made from trees that came from the land the winery owns.  Real nice land to table story there.

So it's not quite the way Evan's sawmill stacks wood, that's ok.  It was covered, so it's got that going for it.  And it's authentic as hell, coming from the dry, dusty and hot as hell in the summer Paso, so it's got that going for it too.  And I know it's going to be beautiful wood under that grayness.

Mike the measurer totaling up the board feet.

Got it back to Oakland and saw that the wood had some borer type insects inside.  I wrapped the stack in plastic and set off some fumigation bombs inside.

Let it sit for a couple weeks and opened it up.  Fresh little piles of sawdust so that approach did not work

Moved the stack down to an urban sawmiller 5 blocks from me that has a bug killing kiln.  They bring the temperature up to 180F/82C for a couple days.

Picking it on Friday.  So I think I'll do some actual work on that project then and put down the below project for awhile.  I'm at a natural stopping place anyway.

Kitchen cabinets.

Look at how big the pores are.  I cut to final width a door and this is the offcut.

Fresh two part epoxy filling a knothole.  We are currently in the trend of allowing for defects in wood that a couple decades ago would have been unacceptable.  Who knows, a hundred years from now they'll be shaking their heads at us trying to figure out why we thought splits, cracks and holes were considered beautiful.

For the past week, I've been making the handles.  I cold forged round steel giving it at texture, each handle was done from a different thematic philosophy.  Wrapped them in copper wire that came from when the studio was seismically upgraded a couple years ago.  This was either pounded on after it was wrapped or before.  I decided to do each one, one by one rather then on a "production line" approach. 

This part of the handle finished.

Threaded inserts in the handle holders.  This will be how they are attached to the doors or drawers.

Textured up the other side using this type of chisel.  Kept a broken polishing stone right next to where I was working and honed the edge after each one.  Such a big difference from razor sharp to being r a z o r sharp.

Each received a dipping into some super blonde and put in the "drying rack".

Throwing them on the handle parts as they become dry.

18 handles mean 36 handle holders.

 

Drilled then drove in a copper nail, cut off the head and peened it over

 Handles done.

Friday, I'll move from this small scale to a much bigger scale of flattening the big Walnut slabs.