Knock on Wood by Ed

WHICH CAME FIRST, CHICKEN OR THE EGG? At our house this morning, it was the egg. I fried up some eggs for our breakfast, and Chicken arrived later in the morning, along with Madeline, who works hard in her piano studio in the basement. Oh, FYI, Chicken is the grand-pup that belongs to our other daughter, Johanna. And speaking practically, Chicken’s actually our part-time dog, being here several days a week, delighting us with her gentle black furry presence every time she ...comes. The chicken/egg figure of speech brings to mind one of the dilemmas, or rather, challenges, in these projects of mine. The thing that churns the brain, and one hopes, fends off ever increasing odds for retirement pre-mature brain scramble, is the exercise of sorting out the sequence of which doodad needs to be installed when, and what depends on what else, always before you can move ahead with the thingamajig you’re grappling with momentarily. The necessary pondering becomes increasingly ponderous. And of course, when you’re dealing with the on-purpose crooked branches on this current lamp, your options are decidedly narrower. After much on-the-other-hand-ing this or what-about-ing that, it eventually became obvious that the sequence of installations of components needed to begin with the LAST piece of mechanical movement instead of the first, because the positioning of everything else depended on that. That momentous decision prompted a relative flurry of action: the dismantling of the prototype plywood model that’s shown in the video below, and got the whole process started of decisions decisions decisions about subsequent moves. Which, I’m happy to announce, were ponderously begun. We began these paragraphs with an old saying about chickens and eggs. Let’s finish with a fitting aphorism from Millie’s dad. It rhymed in German, and it still rhymes in English: Once the project is begun, it’s already half done. But I’ll go slow. We don’t want to finish too soon. See more

"OLD THINGS" CONTINUED . . . . . And for the pièce de résistance, may I offer the stuff of dreams: a barn find! The old chicken shed hides a black Deuce and a Quarter as it was known, a 1960 Buick Electra ‘225’, pop culture icon and symbol of success and excess (anathema to everything Dad stood for). It was branded after its length: 225 magnificent inches of Detroit-style splendiferous envy-inspiring heavy metal glory. Granted, generations of pigeons have made sure that this Buick is in dire need of a wash, and there’s no claim made on the integrity of its wiring now that the mice have had their say, but the car certainly generates a palpably felt nameless awesomeness as it silently, glacially settles into the shed floor. Grace? Hmmm. Maybe it’s a slow race against time. But I think time is winning.

OLD THINGS Any visit to the farm invites a rumination on the past, on old things, things with a patina of aging grace. They emit an aura about them, an abstract feelingfulness, a vague mist of memories, some real, some imagined, the objects beautiful in their lonely condition of disuse and neglect. Exhibit 1: Lying in the parts boneyard beyond the granary are two John Deere tractor carcasses, cannibalized for parts when Dad restored back to pristine life 4 different R mode...ls, all within the last decade of his life. Can one look upon these sacrificial rusted hulks dispassionately? I cannot. Just down along the hedge is the old ’63 Dodge, receding into the undergrowth, being subsumed by the caragana. Do you remember the outrage in 1962 when the folks at Dodge became alarmingly creative with headlight and front-end design? We know-it-all teenagers who bought CarCraft and HotRod mags were positively apoplectic. Then, a year later, the redesign for this ‘63 Dodge thankfully showed a little more restraint, but as is obvious, even Lucy the cat knows my car photo needed to be improved with her presence. And now, retribution? Years after its decade of faithful service, nature is reclaiming it. TO BE CONTINUED . . . .

THE CROOKED STRAIGHT Isaiah foretold that the coming Messiah would make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. Should you need to do that for yourself, on the table saw, that is, if you find the need to have a perfectly straight line or cut in a crooked piece of branch, a workable method is to temporarily screw the branch that wants a straight cut line on it onto a scrap piece of lumber (already straight) and run it through the blade so that the scrap lumber re...mains tightly in contact against the fence. The resulting straight cut will be perfectly parallel to the saw fence. Then, remove the screws, and one can cut the piece to the thickness one needs. Or whatever else one needs the branch to do. And now we have the benefit of a perfectly straight cut on a crooked branch. This process was used today in the creation of the track that the rack of a ‘rack and pinion’ mechanism will slide along in. Let’s review: Last week, we made straight cuts to make straight things round, but today we made crooked and round things straight. As the old song’s monkey told the buzzard, ‘Straighten up and fly right! Good advice for this project. See more

FREE STUFF! One of the drawers in the workbench is full of clamps. Another drawer holds strips of rubber, cut from discarded bicycle tubes, rescued from puzzled proprietors of local bike shops. Both of these have proved themselves over and again, countless times, in gluing items together. Clamps I’m sure you know. But rubber strips?? Imagine this scenario: All the chair rungs on a kitchen chair have come loose. So, you glue them all and stick them back together, but ho...w do you hold them tightly in place? Rubber strips! Wind a piece just once around one leg and because it’s rubber, it will stay there anchored against itself, and then circle the other legs round and round, applying as much tension as you dare. The tension accumulates with each round of the rubber strip. Tie it off as you run out of length. Madeline came in the other day, thrilled as one can be, having found a treasure on her street. It was a discarded free-standing tilt mirror, perfect for her sewing enterprises. Broken in several places, it cried out for a glue and rubber strip rescue. Which it promptly got. Gosh it looks nice! And one more thing: the rubber strips will also become the drive belts for the lamp-in-progress. Let’s hear it for free stuff!

TWO KINDS OF PIE! This is not an article featuring the acknowledged pie queen in our midst. It is not about Millie’s apple, strawberry rhubarb, chocolate, chicken pot, etc. legendary pies. I’ll explain. One evening, wanting to move to the next phase of our lamp machine venture, I tried to access the familiar woodgears.ca site to print up a pattern for the wood gear that would engage with the spiral that was created in the last post. But there was a rather alarming WARNING!... shouting at me all across the screen. It seemed the site had been pirated or parasited or somehow compromised in ways that could be detrimental to the computer health of anyone who innocently ventured thereinto. Computerly hesitant and cautious to the core, I decided then and there to come up with my own template. Sleepless hours (minutes?) overnight gleaned a possible solution: This gear needs to engage with the grooves of the spiral, which are 25 mm apart, so the distance from tooth to tooth is a given, 25 mm. The circle needs to be divided into evenly spaced pie slices, say 12 of them, easily drawn by this amateur drafstman. Those will be the teeth. And the diameter of this circle? Well there’s my second kind of pie; remember pi? In about grade 9 we learned: Circumference = Pi x Diameter. In our case it’s 25 mm x 12 teeth = 3.1416 x D. (And then the kids ask, WHEN am I EVER gonna need this STUPID math?? Well, kid, when you’re all grown up and you need to design a lamp . . . ) Solving, D = 95.5 mm. So, the diameter of the circle from which to cut the teeth will be 95.5 mm. Two kinds of pie. Life is good. See more

Challenge: To use a tool that makes straight cuts only, for making round things. We’ve already talked about making a dowel on the table saw out of a branch. Not being able to find a suitable piece of lilac for this next dowel, I decided on a piece of apple instead. I had cut it down, dead and decidedly not producing apples, a couple of years prior. Now it was in the doweling jig on the saw. Lilac has its lovely flowery smell; we all know about cedar; when I cut into oa...k my nose always takes me back to Mr. Krueger’s UMEI woodshop under the stage in the old aud every glorious Friday afternoon in Grade 9 and 10. But apple? Sorry. It stinks. At least it’s not very pleasant. But it cuts well, and is straight and close grained, and it made a nice dowel. The next step is to make a spiral or worm gear. The photo shows that one can effect this with a temporary diagonal fence across the blade, and turning the dowel which in turn feeds the blade in a spiral around the dowel. A nail placed in the fence to follow the groove maintains the regularity of the resulting thread widths. Then move the fence, nail, and dowel over to the left by one blade width, do it again, and then do it again, and again. When the width of the remaining wood of the spiral matches the width of the groove, stop. Some filing and sanding and smoothing some rough edges later, and you end up with a mostly perfect spiral (worm gear). How fun was that! More round things: Straight cuts, if you make enough of them, can create perfect circles. As you can see in the photos, simply use a loose screw to pin a square to some scrap plywood, start cutting and rotating for each cut, and when it’s a perfectly round pulley, you’re finished. Accomplishment for an afternoon: modest Working with wood in the spring sunshine: priceless

Back to design considerations for the new lamp . . . . The previous four-legged floor lamp design used four straightish uprights all slanting together to form the derrick style of tower for the main frame of the lamp structure. It’s pictured below. The jumble of wood mechanical gears, a visual cacophony really, seemed to marry well with the functionally natural straight pieces of ash that formed the frame. But for the second iteration of that idea, let’s experiment with ...a higgeldy-piggeldy crooked frame (much more fun), superimposed this time over a more geometrically ordered mechanism, the components of which would be mutually farther apart, creating a less compressed visual texture. (In Plautdietsch, we’d call that wietleftijch.) For this look, let’s use belts and pulleys in the drive. As you can see, so far, the frame has organized itself with four legs, managing in spite of their best crooked efforts, to balance their way up to where they need to be to become the regulation height for a floor lamp. And while nature is being depended upon to provide the visual interest through a seemingly random linear chaos, I did abandon my commitment to not interfere: The improvised jig on the table saw had been wanting a test run, and so, I decided these legs would be the guinea pigs. By rotating the legs while lowering them repeatedly over the spinning blade, we managed the handsome blade-shaped constrictions above the tapered feet. AND, each one is sort of identical. Or similar. At least at the bottom.

In the pictures below are four guitar hangers arrayed in parts, wearing their first coat of semigloss urethane, temporarily disrupting normal procedures in the laundry room. The lighter toned wood is lilac, the darker is ash. I have high hopes for the purple streaks in the lilac to survive the varnishing, but I'll acknowledge my disappointment that in former projects, the red streaks in Manitoba maple soon turned brown. Oh well, as Miriam Toews' father says in Complicated Kindness, I'm "quietly living with my disappointments." As first world problems go, I guess I can handle it.

Waves of nostalgia accompany any visit to the farm. Driving up the long driveway invites memories of warning our kids to behave, of remembering how the sentinel Manitoba maples looked prior to their best-before date, remembering that Dad lived here for 80 years, recalling the just-baked bun smell of the crowded little farm house now emptily not so tiny any more. Detailed stories are never far away: who most recently purchased which section of land, who owned it before, and... for how long, which was the wettest year, the driest, the up-and-down prices of cattle of any particular year, what we had for supper when, which of the neighbours went to the one-room school house and which years, the dates when the Canada geese returned for any of the past 40 years, intimate knowledge of which numbered cow bore which calf and sired by which bull. And world history: nephews grabbing a few moments before supper absorbed in some subject in the 1970s World Book encyclopedia (remember those?), old books from school auctions everywhere, Danny’s penchant for remembering complete poems from his rarified library of books representative of the deplorable gaps in my own education. And importantly, the memorable practice of visiting with Uncle John, a single walkable km down the road. Millie would pop into the house to see Aunt Anne; I would drop into the shop. Tools everywhere, all in their place, drawers and compartments for all imaginable bits and bobs, projects underway, and patterns and jigs for easy retrieval hanging on the wall. The booker stove crackled warmth and Gemütlichkeit, and Uncle John would be mid-project in some kid’s toy, birdhouse, or another spoon rack for Aunt Anne. So, Uncle John, I hear you both went to Hawaii. How was it? Uncle John: See these little hinges? FIFTY CENTS!! Imagine, FIFTY CENTS for this little pair of hinges!! Undoubtedly, a visit to the local hardware store in Honolulu was his highlight of the tour. He’s been gone 25 years, and time continues to take its toll. No one has curated the shop since the day it ceased its function. Animals, visitors (vandals) and weather have left their mark. The evolution of decay is, for all its costs, still a thing with its own stark aesthetics. The stunning detail in the seeming chaos of the inside of the shop, the slowly decomposing Eatons house (like Ikea, it was delivered to be assembled), the John Deere combine gradually being reclaimed by maple trees and general prairie. Today’s reality, mundane or profound, is tomorrow’s history. And that’s just one more evocative aspect of visiting the farm.

We thought we would ‘take the day off’ last Friday, make a long weekend out of it and visit the farm at Oak Lake at long last. ‘The farm’ includes the house that Millie grew up in. It’s perhaps the equivalent of ‘the cottage’ that the extended family goes to, albeit in shifts, the family being large. The next postings will continue this theme, but for now, we’ll consider the joys of REALLY old oak. The two single brothers continuing to farm there tell me that these fence ...posts were in the ground when Opa Sawatsky bought the farm in the 30s. The pile of posts in the picture below represents the last of the original crop of posts. Now they’ve all been replaced with new and straight and perfect poles. Cattle being the oafish beasts they are, fencing needs constant upkeep in a cattle operation. I had brought a half dozen old posts home last summer, not really having a project in mind for them at the time. But it did not take very long before a café style of table resulted for our deck. And then in the fall, Millie had ideas for Christmas gifts for her brothers: a lamp for David, and a picture frame for Dan, to frame a fall supper poster he’d drawn while still a kid. So this weekend I grabbed another short pile to take home. I need to let them speak to me for a while before they let me know what project needs to eventualize. Oh, that handsome dude in the pics is our nephew Nathanael, David’s son.

Didn’t we just enjoy some perfect weather for making sawdust today! The postal delivery person came by the driveway this morning and exclaimed that it always smelled so nice around here. People certainly do like the smell of wood and sawdust. I picked up a piece of just-cut lilac. She continued, It always smells so good! Like cooking or something. Well, yes, Millie was cooking and the exhaust fan, true to form, was tantalizing the entire neighbourhood with roast beef,... onion, and whatnot aromas.**. I made her smell the lilac anyway. Mmm. Smells like lilac. Well OK then. Below are pics of the guitar hangers. The two on the left are lilac; the ones on the right are ash. All the parts have just been sanded; varnishing comes later. They are leaning on the sanding machines: a hand-held belt sander mounted upside down is on the left and that’s a spindle sander on the right. **I had a guitar student once whose mom always accompanied her, scheduled just before suppertime. One time, when Millie was as usual up to her superior culinary skills in the kitchen, the mom, with genuine awe and theatrical inflection: Ed!! You eat REALLY well!! I had to agree.

Wood: TO DOWEL OR NOT TO DOWEL, THAT IS THE QUESTION No, in case you just skimmed the title and misread it, I’m not referencing John Dowland’s So to the Wood Went I, although that is exactly what I did. (Musician’s in-joke?) Nor are we dealing with Hamlet’s famous question and Birnam Wood. Or was that Macbeth? I’m talking about the decision whether to create a dowel, or to retain the natural curves and textures of a branch, the way the vagaries of nature decided for me.... I had been gifted with a bunch of lilac sticks, really big ones!, by brother-in-law Al. Matured for years, they had dried into interesting twisty contortions that were rather far too big around for the purposes of making guitar hangers. So, if it was going to be lilac, then it would have to be turned into a dowel, or slimmed down. We’ll leave the natural curves for the outside edges of the backplate (called live-edge). Lilac is twisty and splitty enough to be rather sneered at by serious furniture makers, but who said we’re serious around here, and besides, among its ‘advantages’, lilac has these really beautiful purple streaks in the grain, and it SMELLS really exquisite when you cut it. Who knew? Maddy says it smells like lilacs! Cool. I invented (likely, along with hundreds of other woodworkers around the world) the jig in the pic below for making dowels of any diameter. All it takes is dozens of passes through the table saw blade, turning the branch a bit after each pass, creating copious tons of sawdust and filling the air with the perfume of lilac wood. Move the fence in increments closer to the blade and keep sawing until a dowel of the requisite diameter is achieved. Don’t forget to empty the sawdust drawer! Notice the gorgeous purple rings in the end grain of the lilac branches. And when you cut the twisty branch straight, you are effectively cutting the growth rings on their diagonal, and THAT is what creates the lovely grain pattern on the flattened pieces. That’s how you get a nice grain pattern in any species of wood. So, the straighter the branch, the less interesting the grain. That’s almost like people, ain’t it? Stay tuned for further developments as they break (figuratively only).