Harvesting urban lumber

This is an exercise in delayed gratification.  I have two more years to wait for this urban lumber harvest to come to fruition.   But the hard work is finished.

About a year ago, this tree fell in my neighbor’s back yard, crushing her cinder-block garage.  The tree finally gave up in the rain-saturated ground.  Luckily nobody was injured.

With my neighbor’s permission, I began the process of harvesting the tree for use in furniture. 

The tree trunk was on average 48″ in diameter - much larger than the deck of a portable bandsaw mill - so I had to split the log into quarters. The process was slow at first, but once I discovered this 30″ chainsaw available for rent locally, I got the job done.

Plan A involved bringing the bandsaw mill to the logs, but we soon discovered that the quarters were each as heavy as the average log, and much more awkward because of the geometry.  It was on to Plan B, which involved renting a skid steer loader and hauling the logs to the sawmill. 

These were the narrow boards, believe it or not.  I brought the first 15 boards, the widest of the bunch, home from the sawmill the night before.  The widest boards were well over 20″ wide.

I unloaded five boards and got them stacked before I gave up, exhausted.  I got up early the next morning, stacked the rest of the boards from the first load in the driveway, and drove back out to the sawmill to pick up this load.  It was one of the few times in my life when I was relieved to have some narrow boards to work with.

Finally, with a little help from my brother-in-law, I got all the boards unloaded and leaning against the back of my garage workshop.  The moisture content of these boards were enough to make the wider ones very difficult to manage. 

There was a long piece of iron, like a large nail, several inches long and coiled inside one of the four logs.  This caused staining on some of the boards, and ruined a few saw blades. 

It’s hard to feel bad about it, because there was so much good lumber out of it.  I’m looking forward to experimenting with the stained stuff. 

One option would be to ebonize it, but I can also picture a more postmodern approach, making use of an Arts and Crafts design vocabulary appropriate for quartersawn oak, but tinting the pieces blue with a dye.  This might make for interesting children’s furniture, or even a hip update on a Stickley design. 

Don, the man with the sawmill and my go-to guy for urban lumber, asked me if I’d do it all over again.  “I think so,” I said.  That was before I finished unloading.  Still, I’d have to say yes.  It’s an amazing sense of acomplishment, taking the wood from tree to lumber.  Hopefully I’ll have the chance to see it the rest of the way through the lifecycle.  Knock on… well, never mind.

Here it is, all stacked and ready to air-dry behind my workshop, a time capsule to be ignored and forgotten until summer, 2010. This should be enough oak to last me several years.

Update:  Cross-posted at Moseley WoodWorks.

Keep the comments coming

My apologies if you’ve tried to leave a comment recently.  The comment spam filter has been more strict lately, and I didn’t realize I had legitimate comments in the spam queue.  I think I’ve caught up. 

Let’s keep the conversation going.

Exploring with the new router

I almost made it to Friday.  I purchased my new router, a Porter-Cable 895PK, and it arrived Wednesday morning.  My original plan was to wait until Friday to drive across the state line to the Woodcraft franchise in Lenexa, Kansas and pick one up in the store.  However, a free shipping offer from woodcraft.com meant I could save myself the sales tax.  That, and having a need for the new tool in one of my current projects was all it took for me to talk myself into it. 

Feeling less than heroic, I told myself I could play with it after mowing the yard and getting the kids to bed.  (Bedtime was a must anyway, but throwing in the mowing made it seem like I was accomplishing something.)

I unpacked the tool with a certain amount of ceremony, laying out each piece on my workbench.  It came in the fixed base, but immediately I switched to the plunge base and made sure I knew what the basic controls did.

My first impression was positive.  The controls were straight-forward and the plunge action was smooth–a concern since Fine Woodworking had faulted it for being slightly less smooth than the Bosch equivalent.

I thought it would be interesting to try a Krenov-style through-tenon.  Using a 1/4″ spiral upcut bit in the plunge router, I cut the mortise.  Here I began to have concerns.  The router did not come with an edge guide, so I had to do some creative workpiece holding to arrange for the flat side of the router base to ride against a reference edge to get an accurate joint.  Luckily, there’s a mail-in rebate that makes the accessory free with purchase of the router.

The other thing I noticed about the tool was the absolute need to use a vacuum to keep the dust clear as I ran the machine.  The plunge base includes a built-in vacuum port, which worked beautifully once I plugged in the vacuum. 

The tenon I cut on the table saw with a tenon jig.  I rounded the tenon sides with a Nicholson No. 50 Cabinetmaker’s Rasp and sandpaper.  I used a Stanley No. 93 shoulder plane to tweak the tenon cheeks for a friction fit.  I then cut saw kerfs in the tenon to accept the walnut wedges.  Next I cut out the wedges and drove them home.  I finished off the wedges to match the profile of the tenon.

After sanding the test piece to 220 grit, I applied a linseed oil and beeswax finish for deep, natural color.  The maple tenon really pops in the walnut, especially with the wedges establishing a rhythm.

I can imagine this as the apron and legs of a table or the base stand of a cabinet. 

Overall, I was pleased with the router and the results I was able to achieve on the first try.  This is a significant upgrade from my first router, but more on that later.

The oil and wax finish gave a great depth of color to the walnut, something I was looking for. I especially like the gradient effect of the sapwood as it blends into the heartwood. 

I’m not sure where I picked it up, probably thewoodwhisperer.com, but I used a piece of scrap maple from another project as my stir stick for the finish.  It really gave depth to the figured maple in the stir stick. 

These explorations are great uses for small scrap, and they also provide fodder for design choices later on.  Nights like these are less about moving my current projects forward, and more about charging my creative batteries.  View the pictures here.

Taking the long view

Dustin Wax posted this article on Lifehack.org, leading off with the perennial “where do you want to be in 5 years?” and moving into a discussion of personal development. 

There are many potential responses:  Why, as a creative, would I care? Why should I think about where I’ll be in five years, and how I’ll get there?  Because if I don’t, it’s a pretty safe bet I won’t get there.

Taking Dustin’s bait, I started drawing out a timeline… of the next twenty years.

With young kids, it pays to take the long view.  I began by mapping out milestone birthdays for myself and my kids. Then I mapped out when they would be getting braces and drivers licenses, then graduating from high school and college.

I’ll be 50 when my youngest graduates from college. He’ll start college during his sister’s senior year, so things might get interesting if their 529 accounts don’t perform well.

I dug out a plan from my someday maybe file that would let me pay off my mortgage 10 years early by paying $200 extra to principal each month. Realizing that my payoff date would still arrive after my daughter graduated, I upped my forecast payment to $250 per month, and my projected payoff date hit just as my son started college. Perfect.  Plus, if their 529 accounts cover their college expenses, we’ll be in a strong financial position, with low expenses at the height of our earning potential.

Now I just have to convince my wife that it’s the best use of that $250 each month.

Wondering when I might retire comes second right now.  Sure, I want to have the best retirement I can, and make good decisions along the way.  Meanwhile my plan is to have a full life, and to look for opportunities to take on fun and interesting projects.  Taking a realistic look at my life and knowing where I can fit in creative work will be more satisfying than ignoring the future and getting frustrated at a lack of opportunity.

Sing for Accelerate

I finally bought REM’s latest album, Accelerate, on iTunes - the version with the bonus non-album tracks.

I know, it’s been out for two weeks now. Why didn’t I buy it April 1 when it came out?  I thought about it when I first heard this podcast of REM at SXSW, but that was a few weeks before the release, when iTunes was selling the album in advance. It seemed silly to buy it in advance. It wasn’t like they’d run out. (That’s the great thing about the digital economy: you don’t get the same sense of scarcity as you would if, say, the record label had pressed only a few hundred thousand copies of a disc.)

No, my slowness in buying Accelerate had more to do with wanting to pay off my credit card.  So I put off the purchase.

This interview with the band brought it all back, though, and the album gnawed at the edge of my subconscious ever since.  So I bought it Tuesday, and I’m glad I did. 

Steeped in themes of disillusionment, anger, and defiance, each song on Accelerate is a solid effort, filled with political indictment, personal invective, and REM’s signature inventive lyrics. 

The band offers a guided tour through a post-apocalyptic atmosphere with “Houston” and “Sing For the Submarine.”  The laughter toward the end of “Sing” lends a maniacal texture to the almost disturbing lyrics.

One of the most entertaining songs on the extended offering from iTunes is the non-album track “Redhead Walking”.  Listen toward the end for Michael Stipe’s primal scream, which is followed by something like “Ow! That hurt!”  That kind of verbalization suggests an artist who’s comfortable in his talent, and reminds me of the playful banter found on Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.

Most interestingly from the interview is Michael Stipe’s explanation toward the end of “Sing for the Submarine”, in which he talks about the persistent dream world he’s dreamt since he was a boy: “part Children of Men, part Blade Runner, but a little bit happier”.

There’s rich material in that world.