Consider if you will, a man with the shop of his dreams, dreams that formed at the knee of his father working together at the bench well over a half century ago. This shop is in Shangri-la, a place and a refuge from the maelstrom from the surrounding civilization swirling down the drain.
Unfortunately our subject is not the most orderly fellow in the world, and over the years his shop and all its contents have slowly drifted into disorder. The time has come for him to impose order on the space and all its contents, tools and supplies requisite for almost any sort of project imaginable.
If this fellow were you in a one-car garage workshop, how long would it take you to clean and organize every cubic foot of it? Now imagine that instead of a one-car garage your workshop is equivalent to a 36-car garage and you get the sense of the task before him
Welcome, my friends, to the Rearranger Zone.
So that’s what I have been up to almost 100% of my shop time since last Thanksgiving, with hopes the undertaking will be complete this coming Thanksgiving.
By far my favorite woodworking shop video of all time was James “Stumpy Nubs” Hamilton’s presentation of “Rearrangeritis,” a debilitating disease for most craftsmen.
I will write more about this soon, but the plain and simple facts are that, in addition to being more than a little bit whimsical in my shop arranging and housekeeping, two realities have emerged. First, I use the space and setups differently than I had originally imagined. Second, what I am doing in the space has evolved over the years so even if the original organization was correct, it is so no longer.
Whenever I take too long between posts I’ll get a gentle query or two as to my well-being. All is well, I’m just cleaning and reorganizing and wrestling with this current bout of Rearrangeritis.
In no particular order here are a few updates that may be of interest to you.
During one of their interminable Updates to “improve” their platform WordPress changed the protocols for both the Contact and Comment functions. Webmeister Tim tracked down those changes (they were not self-evident), and I know at least now the Contact function works. I am less certain about the Comments utility.
I’ve been told that the first shipment of the back ordered Woodfinishing DVD is being shipped this week. Cross your fingers. Oh, the travails of using fulfillment service providers in Florida, a/k/a Hurricane Alley. Whenever the DVDs arrive I will immediately package and ship them to those three dozen of you who have waited so patiently and graciously for your order.
I’m keeping an eye on a batch of Mel’s Wax I made and packaged several months ago and will open the jars next month. If they are okay it will probably be back in the Don’s Barn Store around Christmas. The formulation is purposefully designed for archival properties rather than shelf life, so it’s always a knife’s-edge proposition. I could add stabilizers and preservatives and such, but then it would not be Mel’s Wax.
Finally, Webmeister Tim and I are in the planning and implementation stages for a YooToob channel featuring less formal “at the bench” type short videos (3-5 minutes) about projects and techniques. Right now, we need to settle on a cheap (free?) meat-and-potatoes editing application that is simple and easy enough for me to use but can still integrate two video feeds with the sound feed. At one time I had a long menu of formal videos I wanted to make, but since I cannot even finish editing the Gragg Chair video I am exploring this new path.
Stay tuned. For at least another week the weather is expected to be beautiful in Shangri-la so the outside/homestead work will take precedence over the in-shop time. Today I hope to finish up removing the detritus from the shack up on the hill, a project that was so rudely interrupted several years ago when the wheelbarrow broke my hip.
It’s been a while so I thought I’d take a minute to catch up on the doings at donsbarn.com/shop, the product page of the undertaking (all of this — blog, writings, and store — are an amusement/ hobby).
I have enacted a slight increase on some of the pricing to reflect my increased costs for both the polissoirs but mostly for postage. Those changes are already now in place or will be very shortly. If these modest increases make my products un-sellable, that information feedback loop will be instructive to me to discontinue the enterprise. I hope that is not the case but the future will tell.
The product line itself will remain unchanged for the moment until I can get some new things finished (see below). NB: for those of you who care about and base your purchases on such things, my products are provided by hetero-normative cis-gendered folks of European ancestry and hillbilly inclinations; we use brown polyester or tan linen bindings on the polissoirs based on my original work with the Roubo translation project (I do not deal in the books themselves, you can get them directly from Lost Art Press), non-recycled paper and standard printer ink for the labels. I am resolutely idiosyncratic/redneckian in every aspect of my life, and if that disturbs you, well, I cannot fix that issue.
The beeswax is commercially obtained as raw wax (I’ve been told the slang term of art for what I buy is “slum gum”) which is then hand process purified. All the bees involved in the production are now dead; the bodies for a great many of them are part of the contaminant that must be removed. The shellac wax is obtained directly from a purifier in India. Mrs. Barn and I (42 years this summer!) do 100% of the wax product purifying, formulating and packaging. I have received several requests to create some paste waxes of differing formulations and I am doing some explorations of that.
I think I have solved the problem I was having with Mel’s Wax, the archival furniture care polish we invented at the Smithsonian (Mel was my friend and co-worker who is the patent holder), and that may be available for purchase in the immediate future. Stay tuned on that one. I still won’t ship it to California. At one time I thought it would be the cornerstone for my post-retirement activities, but it never caught on.
Until now the videos have been purchased wholesale from the folks who made them at Popular Woodworking, but they no longer produce physical DVDs. They are strictly a streaming platform from whom you can obtain the video directly. However, with their permission we will begin the production of the physical DVDs for sale and mailing. That endeavor is imminent, I just have to forward a couple of graphics files to Webmeister Tim who will be doing the actual DVD burning and packaging. Good thing on that as at the moment I am out of the Wood Finishing video.
Another video undertaking is to finally wrap up the editing of the “Make A Gragg Chair” video (I now know why there is an Academy Award for movie editing), and to finally get some videos up on a Youtube page. I have several, from presentations I have made over the years, and hope to begin shooting some less formal shop videos once I get a handle on the whole process with the help of videographer Chris, who is so busy I may have to execute the filming and production process without him. I am also working on a set of full-scale drawings of the chair for sale on the site.
If you come to Handworks please stop by to visit. The booth will have lots of stuff.
The end of winter here in the Shangri-la highlands is accompanied by a number of traditions, not the least of which is the status assessment and repair/maintenance of the power system. Sometimes this occurs as early as mid-March, but with travels back and forth to visit Li’l T and his parents and the deposition of several inches of snow as recently as last week, this year “spring” and its requisite duties is/are late in coming.
It is an undeniable truth that when you are “off grid,” a prominent blessing is that you are your own power company. It is also an undeniable truth that when you are “off grid,” a prominent bane is that you are, well, your own power company. Last week I split my time going over the mountains to get some service on my truck (I am old; I remember buying a complete set of new tires for my first car, a 1961 Ford Galaxy 500 with a trunk big enough to hold six feet of a 4×8 sheet of plywood, for $50 in 1970. Now, two tires for my F150 are $500! Sigh.) and working on the water line.
I walked the quarter-mile of water line last Sunday to gauge the level of repair needed. Even though the winter seemed fairly ordinary judging by memory and the consumption of firewood, the condition of the hydro system penstock suggested a different history.
In six places the penstock was breached and fractured with classic helical ruptures as evidence of water freezing in the line. This was surprising as I thought I had been pretty conscientious when mothballing (draining) the system in November, but the proof of the contrary is unavoidable. And, this was not even the full extent of the damage to the system (more about that later).
I spent the better part of three days walking up and down the creek to make the repairs to the line itself. I’m still sore. I wound up grafting in about 80′ of new line, requiring 14 new joints.
As occurs every spring I spent some time refining the path of the water line to streamline it and increase its efficiency. And still, every winter I must endure the damage that nature inflicts on it.
Is there a solution to this neverendingly onerous burden? Sure. All it would take is to find someone who could bury 1/4 mile of water line 48-inches deep in a mostly-solid rock substrate. Finding that someone would be a challenge, finding someone to sign the check for maybe $125k is an even bigger problem.
Thus, I learn to embrace the responsibility of putting the system back together every “spring.” There is a lesson there. Whenever I face a particular challenge or hardship, I try ask, “Okay YHWH, what are you teaching me with this one?”
This winter will be the one during which I begin to address the door issue in the barn.
For the past 13 years the entrance into my studio space has been delineated by a pair of doors comprised of nice wooden frames with double plastic sheets, shower curtains actually, that have performed surprisingly well. But, the time has come to install proper insulated doors. Given the odd size of the doorways, determined by unalterable features of the original post-and-beam structure, the two doors into my studio space will need to be custom made.
The standard entry door to the first floor/basement was framed in about two hours if I recall correctly, needing to fit a compression fit jamb using only the things I had on hand one Sunday afternoon before heading back to Mordor. What I had on hand was some scrap white pine joist stock and a tube of construction adhesive, along with a salvaged insulated door. Years later this haphazard installation has become decrepit to the point where a good blast of wind or even a curious bear could take it down.
The garage-door opening of the first floor/basement was filled with a pair of four-foot-wide doors I made from 2x, plywood and with insulated glass inserts. Within a year of their installation (the photo was taken at the completion of the original installation) a howling windstorm caused irreparable damage to them (we get serious hurricane-strength (!) windstorms every year or so out in the holler) and ever since they have just been screwed shut with plastic sheeting covering the entire section from the inside. One thing has been made clear as a result, namely that I simply did not need a garage door-style access to the inside space as a matter of regular activity. I’m thinking of building a pair of panels, one screwed in place as an insulated wall and the other openable as a door to allow me to wheel my smelting furnace cart in and out as my foundry work progresses.
One of the aspects of having a humungous Fortress of Solitude like the barn, four stories of 40′ x 36′ space, is that there are a multitude of nooks and crannies into which things can be tucked, stuffed, crammed, lost, and re-discovered. I call these instances my own “Clean Up Christmases,” when I come across treasures I had forgotten, or at least misremembered.
Such has been the case recently when prepping the classroom for this coming weekend workshop Historical Wood Finishing. As the first class there in over two years, the space had, shall we say, devolved. That pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics; they tried repealing it but it just didn’t take. It has taken me over two weeks to get it ready for the group on Saturday. The level of “rearrangeritis” (full credit to James “Stumpy Nubs” Hamilton for coining the phrase to describe an all-day travail when moving one thing in his crowded shop) has been monumental, and monumentally rewarding on several fronts. It has also given me time for contemplation about future projects, a topic I will address in numerous upcoming posts.
At the moment I am mostly reveling the rediscovery of two caches that were set aside for some future completion. The first is the two sets of brass Roubo-esque squares fabricated before and during that workshop more than two years ago; all it will take is a day or two with some files and Chris Vesper’s sublime reference square to get them up and running.
A second trove is the pile of French oak scraps from the multiple iterations of the FORP gatherings in southern Georgia. I brought them home in order to turn them into veneers, probably oyster shell style, to use on some as-yet-unknown project. That “unknown” identifier is becoming more “known” as the days go by. Then, much like my shop being the only one in the county with two c. 1680 parquetry flooring panels from the Palais Royale in Paris, my tool cabinet will be the only one with veneers from some c.1775 oak trees from the forests surrounding Versailles.
Who knows what other “Christmas” presents I might find during the never ending effort to impose order on my space? Stay tuned.
One of the aspects to living in a locale so isolated as Shangri-la is that it is populated by folks who are at the very least comfortable with isolation; for the “born here’s” it is simply the life they have always known, for many of the “come here’s” it is the life they actively sought. If you cannot tolerate isolation, you leave. I can speak truth to this, for about 99% of the time my only in-person contact is Mrs. Barn. Going to the Post Office or feed-and-seed-co-op hardware store a few minutes a week hardly describes a life of social interactions — “social distancing” describes every day ending in “Y” out here — and during this season of psychosis our only regular time of interaction beyond ourselves is at church. (I am increasingly convinced that functionally Covid-19, while deadly to a miniscule slice of the population pie, is more of a psychological experiment in repression than a public health crisis; I will believe it is a catastrophic pandemic when the elites act like it is one rather than jetting about for vacations in Cancun or group dinners at fancy restaurants and when politicians and gubmint employees rather than small businesses lose their incomes.)
One of the things in which I have been long interested is finding other woodworkers here for fellowship and collaboration. They are around but like me they mostly stick to themselves. I’ve had some success in finding and interacting with gunsmiths, blacksmiths, metalsmiths, this smith and that smith, but thus far the woodsmiths have kept to themselves. In recent months this has begun to thaw as one retired “come here” with whom I am on a local Board revealed he is a luthier, and lo and behold there is suddenly a critical mass of luthiery-ish practitioners in the county. One is a newly arrived pastor/amateur musicologist, another is an actual full-time guitar maker who moved here recently and has a small studio in town. (When your region’s largest metropolis has fewer than 200 people…) Together we are in the gestational phase of starting a woodworking club with just the four of us working in my studio, the only space any of us has that would be amenable to the enterprise — plenty of workbenches in a heated work space. I think the plan is for us to gather weekly to work on individual projects as our schedules allow.
Since I am in fact the only one of us four who has never built a guitar from scratch I will be the main hindrance to the overall performance level. Still my enthusiasm for the effort is high, and not too surprisingly I expect to bring my own peculiar approaches to building a dreadnaught six-string guitar. Eventually I will build a hammered dulcimer for Mrs. Barn, who has expressed a strong desire for one ever since listening to the pastor/musicologist play his at a local music program. She never reads this blog so I will be able to maintain the secret surprise until it is finished.
Last year when we were having the driveway rebuilt up to and slightly past the barn, I indicated a desire to have a small parking pad next to the barn for students and visitors. “No hurry”, I says, “just fit it in whenever you get a free day.” Then, after months of consideration a couple weeks ago I announced my contemplation to reduce or even eliminate workshops at the barn.
So of course yesterday was that “free day” for the contractor and they showed up with a truckload of gravel and the equipment to move it around. Whether I need it or not, now I have visitor parking at the barn.
Actually even if I do not have students it will make a splendid staging area for cutting and splitting firewood.
Recently while noodling with one of my ripple molding cutters in preparation for the September “Make A Ripple Molding Cutter” class, which like the upcoming “Make A Roubo Shoulder Knife” has been cancelled due to unanimous disinterest (I will soon write about the future of workshops at the barn, most of which have drawn nearly unanimous disinterest and will likely diminish for the most part), I decided that the underlying design concept for that particular machine was too flawed to rescue. So, I tossed in the towel on that particular journey.
At the same time I was doing some cleanup and organizing on the main floor of the barn — alas when you have thousands of square feet of space the tidying is nearly an endless proposition — I decided to address the “problem” of how my lathe has been set up for the past few years. At the time I thought I would really like having the lathe sitting on a mondo beam adjacent to two of the vertical timbers holding up the third and fourth floors. In practice I realized that I REALLY did not like that set-up. What to do?
Well, with the ripple molding cutter being moth-balled I suddenly had the perfect base available for use with the lathe. So now it sits thereon, and I like the new set-up much, much better. An additional benefit is that the new base is long enough to hold not only my wood lathe but also my micro machinist lathe.
Excellent.
And fear not about the fate of the mondo beam. It now serves as part of a bench outside being used in my ongoing tactical training and practice.
My video production collaborator Chris Swecker has created a web site to market his new-ish venture, Seed and Fruit Media. If you are in the Mid-Atlantic region and would like to explore video as an element for your work, Chris is an excellent option. He is especially great at seat-of-the-pants production, and I find him a delight to work with and the final product is exactly what I wanted; whimsical broadcast quality footage.
Chris definitely has the chops for first-class work. He spent a decade out in Realityville working on big-time projects, and fortunately for me he has come back home to the place where he was raised.
We will be resuming filming the Make A Gragg Chair video early next month once the weather warms a bit. This was a bitterly cold winter, so shooting in the unheated attic of the Barn was not an option.
BTW I hope to post the next episode of the Veneer Repair video on Saturday.
PS Imagine the possible communication confusion when two of your closest collaborators are both named “Chris S.”
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