A couple of weeks ago Daniel the Stone Magician completed the fitted dry-stack wall leading to the root cellar and defining my usual parking space. Watching him shape and fit 500-plus pound rocks with the patience and skill of a surgeon was an awe inspiring moment.
I am not sure if 15 tons of rock can be considered “lovely,” but if so this would certainly qualify. It is a new focal point for the homestead, and when I get the arched bridge done across the two creeks that convene there it will be pretty spectacular.
Mrs. Barn has her eyes set on the soon-to-be-finished plateau above the wall for dwarf pear trees and wild flowers. Meanwhile I have to level the ground in front of the wall with a pick-axe and shovel.
Stay tuned.
My long-time friend (~35 years) Dr. Walter Williams was a recipient of The 2017 Bradley Prize for advocacy in the cause of liberty. Here is the
video of the award ceremony, with his section beginning around the 18-minute mark.
He is a national treasure.
One of the many times Walter came over for dinner.
The summer is actually winding down schedule-wise, and here’s what’s left of my calendar for The Barn.
August 11-13 Historic Finishing – My own long-time favorite, we will spend three days reflecting on, and enacting, my “Six Rules For Perfect Finishing” in the historic tradition of spirit and wax coatings. Each participant should bring a small finishing project with them, and will accompany that project with creating numerous sample boards to keep in your personal collections. Tuition $375.
This class has one opening remaining.
September 4-8 Build An Heirloom Workbench – I’m repeating the popular and successful week-long event from last year, wherein the participants will fashion a Roubo-style workbench from laminated southern yellow pine. Every participant will leave at the end with a completed bench, ready to be put to work as soon as you get home and find three friends to help you move it into the shop. Tuition and Materials $825 total.
This workshop has two openings remaining.
If any of these interest you drop me a line here.
For several years the item that kept trying to percolate to the top of the pile was the making and selling of Mel’s Wax, a nearly effortless-to-use archival high-performance furniture maintenance polish. This is something we created during my time at the Smithsonian, and was patented by my late friend and colleague Mel Wachowiak, Jr. For years we simply created our own finishing and maintenance products as we needed them for our own use. This formulation was the pinnacle of our success in this regard, and one wax polish manufacturer declared it to be the finest product they had ever encountered.
One of the hurdles to the further development of this undertaking was finding a steady, affordable source for shellac wax, one of the ingredients integral to the formulation. After many moons of searching and corresponding I found an excellent supplier, and had a sample arrive directly from India. It looked very good at first, an observation that was strengthened by melting it, examining it again in the molten state, and then one more time after it re-solidified.
If wax can be scrumptious, this was scrumptious.
I was ready to buy enough raw material to assure a substantial pipeline of material to allow for uninterrupted making and selling of Mel’s Wax. I was delighted to learn that an order was merely expensive, but not stratospheric. It caused a deep breath and a little tingling, but not cardiac arrest. (My first inquiry into purchasing shellac wax from another dealer resulted in a quote of $3000 plus shipping for a 50-lb container.) Fortunately this supplier is grounded in reality.
It was a bit unnerving and required a leap of faith, as they had no mechanism for purchase that I was familiar with. No Paypal, no credit card set-up. After coming to agreement on our terms I went to my bank and authorized a very sizable and irrevocable bank-to-bank transfer from a li’ol Virginny bank to a big British bank in India. I gulped and signed it over.
Two weeks later my order of 200 pounds arrived, delivered to my door by Rich the UPS driver. Since I was not at home he drove up to the barn and took it inside!
Coincidentally the next week he brought my order of this year’s supply of raw beeswax , which thanks to bee-hive colony collapse had doubled in price from last year. I now have in-hand the supplies to go into production later this summer. Mrs. Barn wants that to be her domain, and I am more than willing to have her conscientious laboratory scientist self doing it. I have several other wax formulations in the pipeline as well.
As a warm-up, and in preparation for Groopshop I made a batch of Mel’s Wax using the new shellac wax and beeswax. Magnificent. I will be giving this away at Groopshop, but it comes with strings attached. Everyone who takes it must use it up, not hoard it, and must write a review of it for my personal use in fine tuning the formulation or the product literature.
So, this might be a monumental year at The Barn, taking us to infinity and beyond. Or it could amount to nothing more than an amusing sideline, in which case we would concentrate on reveling in the upcoming nuptials of our second offspring unit.
Two years ago in the immediate aftermath of the Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench exhibit in Cedar Rapids IA, my brother and his son came for a week’s visit at the cabin. As is almost always the case we had a project outlined for our time together. That year the candidate was the dismantling and salvage of an old shack (1920s?) up on the hill about 100 yards from the cabin.
So we went at it. It turned out that all of the roof structure, including sheathing, was chestnut in remarkably good condition. I am not a huge chestnut wood aficionado, but it is a local favorite so into the barn it went. By contrast the wall structure and sheathing were white oak. Primo! The lap siding was also chestnut, and we saved that.
Then I decided to quarrel with a gravel-filled wheelbarrow, and you know the rest of that story.
Flash forward 18 months. Late in winter Mrs. Barn mentioned that she really liked chestnut, and that for her birthday she would REALLY like some custom made frames for the mylar-encased matted art photos we had sitting on the mantle for several years. I said, “Uh-huh,” and left it at that. She of course assumed I had forgotten the incident and request entirely.
What she did not know was that I had retrieved a 2×4 from the lower barn, milled it, and fabricated frames to fit the photos. Some fussy miter jig work on the table saw followed by a little polissoir and wax action and then shellac and steel wool and the deed was done. Then while she was at Bible Study and yoga one day I finished their framing and glazing and replaced them on the mantle. The next day she had not noticed them so I casually pointed them out.
She was pleased.
From derelict shack to place of prominence; not bad. I’ve still got big piles of chestnut and oak from the salvage project, so who knows what will be coming next. Well, she did give me a list…
As with its previous iterations, Handworks 2017 was a remarkable event and experience, and there is no way to adequately express my admiration and gratitude to Jameel and Father John Abraham for keeping the flame of hand craftsmanship alive. I know that my particular little corner of the event was crowded almost all of the time, and several of the visitors extended very warm thanks and remembrances for the Studley Tool Cabinet exhibit in 2015. Often this was accompanied by exclamations about the magnificence of Jim Moon’s recreation of it, and I was pleased to have played some small part in it being at Handworks.
As I said earlier, there was great interest in traditional finishing and I must have demonstrate wax and polissoir technique roughly 100-150 times. It was heartening to hear the reactions as folks saw and felt the results.
One surprising thing to me was the decided lack of interest in my Roubo First Edition prints from L’art du Menuisier. I would have thought this was the perfect audience for them, but I was no more correct in that presupposition than I was when I predicted John Glenn would be President. I sold only three of the prints during Handworks, and two more outside of the event. Oh well, they will not go bad in their archival sleeves.
I did manage to come home with a few things myself. First was a stash of barrette files Slav Jelisejevich had among his intoxicating selection of new old stock files. I have no idea what sort of old file underground he is part of but I cannot cross his path without leaving a goodly pile of money behind.
Next was a criss-cross leg vise from our hosts at Benchcrafted. I have not yet decided on which bench to install it. I’m almost afraid to, knowing that if it becomes integral to one bench it might have to be obtained for several others.
Finally is a simple box that that was a gift from Jim Moon. Jim is currently salvaging lumber from an ancient grain mill, and the lumber for my box came from the inside surface of one of the grain chutes. Billions of grain seeds over many decades wallowed out the early wood of this southern yellow pine, leaving an exquisite surface that Jim exploited to its fullest. It is now part of my treasure trove, and the only thing I have left to do is decide whether to make it an artwork on display or a traveling box full of polissoirs and wax.
And that wraps up Handworks 2017.
This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
For that multitude of heroes I have never met, who like my cousin wrote us a blank check and signed it with their blood, I offer my profound thanks and humble honor. — DCW
Make no mistake, Handworks is one of the most important evidences that hand craft is alive and well. Participating as an exhibitor or as an attending aficionado cannot but help to influence you.
As I walked into the barn at about 9AM both days I witnessed this scene of eager attendees already in line on a cold and rainy day.
By Friday morning everything was set in the venues, or at least in the Festhalle where I was (and I heard similar stories to mine throughout the village).
In the Festhalle there was time for some last minute fellowship among the exhibitors,
some last minute shopping at other exhibitors’ booths,
and finally, the entry of a crew of highly enthusiastic woodworkers.
And more woodworkers.
Until it became a mosh pit around us throughout the entire day. I know I was entirely surrounded on all sides until just before closing, standing and greeting and explaining and demonstrating polissoir-and-wax finishing at least 100 times.
Saturday was abuzz with anticipation of The Roy Himself as our featured presenter. The festivities began with Mike Siemsen’s stirring rendition of the National Anthem.
Then came Roy, and of course the crowd loved him.
Throngs to the front of me,
throngs to the back of me (I chatted with one family whose daughter had undergone an appendectomy less that a week before, but she insisted on coming to see Roy Underhill), and even afterwards the affable Mr. Underhill was unfailingly generous with his time and energy visiting with the collected posse throughout the remainder of the day.
At 5PM we broke down the exhibit, disassembled and packed the Roubo benches, and were on the road home by 5.30
Once I got done setting up my little station for demonstrating polissoirs and beeswax finishing, I headed out with my friend Ben to see the other venues for Handworks around Amana. The expansion of Handworks has been astounding, the first one four years ago was confined to the Festhalle, this year included jam packed exhibits and demonstrations at a large room adjacent to the furniture-making shop, the former blacksmith’s shop, the former millwright’s shop, and the open air space for green woodworking and similar.
Our first stop was at the furniture shop, host to carver Mary May, the SAPFM Ohio River Chapter, Mike Siemsen, Jim Moon and his amazing Studley tool cabinet replica, and at least a couple more folks. There wasn’t much going on there just yet. Besides, I forgot to take pictures of the set-up.
The blacksmith’s shop was starting to fill, with Bad Axe Tools, and Mortise and Tenon magazine. Not all of the exhibitors had arrived.
Moving on to the millwright’s shop found more activity as a variety of folks were already set up, and some, like me, were out strolling the village.
I’m not sure what the story was with this freestanding great wheel, but I would have definitely found a place for it in the barn.
The final stop was the open air space for timber framers, chair makers, and best of all the crew from Norway demonstrating the amazing skottbenk planing beam.
A year ago I did not even know what this was, now thanks to their blog I have to have one! They were the most cheerful group imaginable, happy to be at Handworks and especially to be away from Norway for a while. The snow back home was still nearly knee deep, so they were reveling in the comparitive tropical paradise.
They’d even found a vintage skottbenk at Amana and had it on display at their space.
This very showy windlass from a bow saw was from their tool set.
We wandered back to the Festhalle for a final look as things were coming together. This is one of my favorite images of the day, from left Rob Lee, Chris Vesper, and Ben Hobbs chatting.
It was our last breath of calm prior to departing for home on Saturday evening.
Thursday was the time or setting up at Handworks, and we were one of the first arrivals at the site. That let me get set up and explore the five venues for this bestest toolapalooza ever.
Slowly but surely the exhibitors began rolling in, beginning with my immediate neighbors Jeff Hamilton, maker of marking gauges whose spot was in between me and Lie-Nielson, and planemaker Gary Blum.
Directly adjacent to me across he aisle on one side were plane maker Matt Bickford and the Tools for Working Woods folks.
Across the other aisle was the temptation provided by vintage tool maven Patrick Leach. Much to my own astonishment I managed to avoid the siren song from this booth the entire weekend (admittedly at this point in life my tool needs are modest.)
Directly further up the Festhalle center row was printer and designer Wesley Tanner, the award winning collaborator for both Roubo books and the Studley book.
Along the barn side with Matt Bickford was a booth shared by Konrad Sauer and Raney Nelson, and immediately past them was Lost Art Press/Crucible Tools.
Then came our hosts, Benchcrafted vises and such.
Up in the far corner was designer and furniture maker Jeff Miller, who unfortunately occupied the coldest space in the building. I know, because it is where I was four years ago.
Working down the other outside wall we have Hock blades and precision maven Chris Vesper from Australia, followed by Blue Spruce Tools and David Barron.
The other end of the center row from me included plane maker Ron Brese, tuning up a tool for the masses tomorrow, jig maestro Tico Vogt, and Czeck Edge Tools.
At either end of the hall were the large footprints of Lee Valley Tools and Lie-Nielson Tools. These anchors to the tool-mall guaranteed a spectacular experience for the hordes on Friday and Saturday.
By the end of the day we were all set up, ready for the onslaught in the morning.
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