In the run up to summer activities at The Barn — the Professional Refinisher’s Group gathering in June, the Parquetry workshop in July, Planemaking with Tod Herrli in August, hollows-and-rounds and advanced planemaking, and the Boulle Marquetry workshop in October (there are still spaces for all workshops) — there were many high priority housekeeping issues. High on the list was the fact that there were still sections of the siding that provided no impedance to the encroachment of nature.
Last month my pal Tom and I cut probably a thousand linear feet of battens to close up the gaps between the siding boards, and that project continues as a filler between every other of the 12, 691 top priorities in my life. Combined with a generous application of spray foam insulation/sealant in the multitude of cracks I have noticed a dramatic drop in livestock already.
I was also really nervous when I saw tons of wasps buzzing about last month, but since I have robbed them of many nesting places, they seem to have moved on. Three summers ago they built a paper nest literally the size of a bushel basket. Not something you want visitors to be concerned about.
And finally, since the Barn has been a non-stop construction site for almost seven years there is a mountain of construction debris that just won’t go away no matter how many trips I make to the dump. Well, I recently spent several evenings with a roaring bonfire, so even that nuisance is receding.
The results were most gratifying.
This was not the coldest winter all-time in the Virginia Highlands. Nor was it the snowiest. But in both categories it was near the top, and the combination made it a brutal winter.
Many folks are bewildered by my descriptions of weather here in VIRGINIA, being part of the South and all, but my friend MikeM and I compare weather notes frequently between The Barn and where he lives in upstate New York. The weather in those two places is remarkably similar, it’s just two days off-set depending on which way the weather fronts are moving. It has to do with our location and elevation of 3000’+.
We had some pretty sobering damage from this past winter. Most notable were the collapse of a basement foundation for a treasured little granary shed/root cellar due to a century of frost heave cycles and a water table that is at all-time highs (although that is a great portent for hydroelectric power for the coming months), the tale of which will be covered in an upcoming post (the reconstruction is progressing nicely), and the blowing up of the hydro pipeline.
Truly exasperating was the destruction of a thousand feet (!) of the 2″ Schedule 40 penstock for my hydroelectric system. I believe that water running vigorously in an enclosed pipe can continue to flow until the ambient temperature reaches -17 F. Guess what? Yes, it gets that cold in our little holler in the hills. Did I mention we were in VIRGINIA, which is part of THE SOUTH? Yep, we had sustained overnight temps in the -20 F range on at least two occasions. Pipe? KABOOM!
I have already taken one full truck load of shattered pipe to the dump, and will take another this week. I am mostly finished with the rerouting of the line (to achieve a smoother downward slope with no swales) and grafting in the new pipe to finish connecting the bottom and the top of the system. I currently just have the upper pipe end sitting adjacent to the mating pipe where it shattered, and still I am getting something around 8-10 kwH/day. Combined with the solar panels this is way more than enough for me to work in the barn. By this time week after next it will all be done.
Not so with the broken basement door, where ~80 mph winds smashed it pretty good. The Highlands are a windy place, and it is good to know that The Barn has been well-tested by extreme wind loads, and snow loads that would have buried a car if it was parked underneath the avalanche when it let loose.
Stay tuned.
On Friday I installed the 74th and final window in the barn, each one individually made there. This particular window went into a space where I originally thought I would install a shower, but the hydro-logistics were not conducive. So, for the past few years there has been just a piece of plywood over a hole in the barn siding.
Flash back several years to a memorable day that began in western Pennsylvania visiting our daughters at college. I had located a large inventory of salvaged thermal window panels in Ohio, which as you might know is the state right next door to western Pennsylvania. The plan was to have breakfast with the girls, drive to Ohio to get the glass (part of a window factory liquidation) then go to The Barn and drop them off.
It is only when you drive across the United States that you learn how really, really big it is (Note: this trip preceded my travels of the past 18 months, and two trips driving to Texas and back drove home that lesson!).
Well, Toledo, Ohio is essentially in eastern Illinois. And, my night vision isn’t the best so the final few hours of that trip involved my wife driving a van full of glass, in the dark (she is an early morning person and starts winding down immediately after supper, so she was not thrilled at the evening chore until midnight), in the rain, on unfamiliar winding mountain roads as we were coming from an unfamiliar direction. I am not the brightest bulb in the pack, but believe me when I say I will not replicate that adventure of driving 700 miles, the final 500 miles with a half ton of glass in the back of the van.
Over the next two years my friend CraigC and I fabricated and installed dozens of fixed windows, in addition to the dozen huge window plates I had previously installed by myself.
Other than some storm damage requiring some window panels to be replaced, I am now pretty much done with windows in The Barn. The end result is not displeasing.
I have a few panels left, so I can replace a few over the coming years. After they are consumed, I will have to begin the hunt again.
While touring the Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati last week we encountered, well I encountered, “machine lust.” The staff was constructing a new exhibit in one of the conservatory halls, and there was a young fellow using this machine. Given the tasks awaiting me at the homestead over the coming years of morphing fully into my emergent status as an Appalachian American, where the main crop is rocks, it seems a perfect fit. That, and a bush hog. Yep, I think one of these is nearly obligatory.
Now if I can persuade the CFO…
As far as I know these are my teaching/hosting commitments for this year.
March 8/9 and 15/16 – For the next two weekends I will be demonstrating at my pal David Blanchard’s shop on Main Street in Monterey VA during the Annual Maple Festival. If you are in the neighborhood stop in to say “Hi.”
March 21-23 I will be teaching a parquetry workshop at the Kansas City Woodworkers Guild.
May 30 – June 1 will be the Finisher’s Retreat, an annual event I host for the two chapters of the Society of American Furniture Makers in which I am active. This year it is the Virginia Chapter. For more information contact Bob Mustain at mustainrw@juno.com
June 24-26 The Eighth meeting of the Professional Refinisher’s Group, and the third time the event has been at The Barn. For more information, contact Ben Myre at bcmyre@hotmail.com.
July 18-20 will be a weekend parquetry workshop at The Barn.
August 11-17 will be a week with plane maker Tod Herrli at The Barn. the first three days will be a workshop on making a hollow-and-round pair, the next four days will be something a bit more advanced; topic not yet finalized.
September 12-14 Woodworking in America, Winston-Salem NC. I will be presenting two topics, the first being Traditional Finishing and the second being Gold Leaf.
October 3-5 will be a weekend workshop in Boullework Marquetry at The Barn.
October 21 I will give a presentation to my dear friends of the Washington Woodworker’s Guild. At the moment the topic is probably Inlaying Pewter.
When you combine this schedule with settling in out in the mountains, submitting the manuscript for To Make As
Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Furniture Making sometime in April-ish, and the manuscript for Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley some time around Thanksgiving, it seems like a pretty full year.
Boullework is the method of composing either pictorial or filigree marquetry employing metal sheet, usually brass, pewter or copper, with veneers of tortoiseshell. Tortoiseshell is now a proscribed material after the CITES Treaty of 1975. Instead we will make our own “tordonshell,” a convincing artificial material I invented for just this purpose, to make a pair of small marquetry panels, one the negative of the other. Some projects may instead use ivory planks for either the metal sheet or the tortoiseshell.
This three-day workshop will be limited to six participants, and will take place October 2-4, 2014, with a registration of $375.
Recent weeks have found me working feverishly to prepare a place in The Barn for the remaining shop accoutrements from the house in Maryland, primarily with the laying of a plywood-on-sleepers floor in the lowest-level north bay of The Barn, and most recently with the construction of an insulated wall between that bay and the remainder of the lowest level. This space, essentially a below-grade walk-out room, has the advantage of remaining above freezing all by itself except in the most extreme and extended cold snaps. While working out there earlier this month, with consistent outside temps in the teens and twenties the interior temperature back in the deepest corners remained in the upper thirties and lower 40s.
Last Saturday morning several of my woodworking/conservation friends, Anthony, John, Fred, Eric, Tom, Hugh, and Bill, converged on the house in Maryland to move and load several tons of machines onto the rental truck waiting in the driveway.
I could have probably handled the machines and foundry stuff out in the little barn in Maryland myself, but getting them out of the house — they were in the basement and needed to be muscled up the narrow stairs, down the ramp, and across the yard — was clearly beyond me. It is indeed frustrating how merely sitting in place for three decades had increased the weight of all this stuff.
Special thanks goes to JohnR for coming a day early and helping get everything set up.
The weather report all week had been foreboding for Saturday; snow, sleet, and freezing rain. Much to everyone’s delight dawn that morning revealed only a light overcast, which held until just moments after our work was completed several hours later when the freezing rain began.
With a double 2×10 ramp laid on the basement stairs up the the deck level, another ramp down from there to the ground level, and a 75-feet long runway of 1/2″ plywood on the ground, we had a “clean” shot to the truck. Everything was strapped to dollies, and thanks to the genius of FredG bringing his portable winch — I gotta get me one of them! — big heavy loads were creeping out of the basement in no time.
In about two hours we had everything to be removed from the basement and loaded on the truck, and another hour emptied those things we were getting from the little barn. We concluded with a festive meal of Mrs. Don’s home-made turkey soup.
Sunday morning we pulled into the driveway at The Barn, where the weather was considerably colder with several inches of snow on the ground. My pal Tony, a local contractor who keeps an eye on the place when we are not there and harvests venison when the time is right, had arranged for a snow plow to clear the path. Still, the 10%+ incline up the driveway to The Barn was a challenge we overcame with four wheelbarrow loads of gravel on top of the ice. In less than an hour Darren and Rick had everything out of the truck and into the formerly empty bay.
Meanwhile Tony was completing the installation of an amazing little wood stove he had salvaged from one of his renovation jobs. As we were finishing unloading the truck he was firing up the stove, and it is a simply superb addition to the facility infrastructure. It will heat the lower space and then radiate up to my shop above. The stovepipe runs through that space right next to my sharpening station, and between the grills in the floor and the stove pipe, the space warms quickly and remains that way, helped by the R43 polyisocyanate foam insulation panels surrounding the envelope.
Later that evening I was shuffling all the space’s contents to make sure I could move around, there is still much to do, and the stove kept the place t-shirt warm. Magnifique.
The one area of The Barn to receive the least attention thus far has been the ground floor, a shortcoming I have begun to address. In anticipation of the upcoming move of my machinery next month I needed to get room for them prepared, which I began with the recent clean-up of the space.
For the past couple of days I have been making great progress in getting the machine room ready not only for the machines but also the installation of a wood stove to heat the machine room and my main workshop which is immediately overhead.
Fully cleaned, or as fully cleaned as I could get it, the space looked like this at the beginning Wednesday night.
The best thing about being at The Barn is that it is not close to anywhere. The worst thing about The Barn is that it is not close to anywhere. When building materials are required for a project, if they are not delivered it means a three-hour round trip to the lumberyard. On Thursday afternoon I made the trek, returning with about 1400 pounds of supplies in my little half ton S10. If GM had not been vampirized into a confiscated soviet enterprise I would be the perfect spokesmodel for their little trucks, as I have used them hard with nary a whimper on their part. Remind me to tell you sometime about heading over the mountain, some of the winding-est roads anywhere, with two 400-pound smelting furnaces, a raft of machines, and weighty supplies in the back, my pal Mike riding shotgun. In the dark. In the rain. And me with poor night vision. I cannot state with certainty that when we arrived he leaned over to kiss the ground, but it would not surprise me.
The space for the machine room still had its packed gravel floor from the original construction seven years ago, wholely inadequate for machines (yes I know the dictionary spells wholely differently, but in my opinion dictionaries are wrong about this). In addition, the gravel floor was not really level. So, my plan was to flatten the gravel and lay floating 2×4 PTSYP “sleepers” on it, then screw ¾” CDX sheathing on top as the final floor.
The first several feet were fine, and the gravel level was just about right. The hardship came after these first few sleepers were laid.
Unfortunately the remaining gravel had been put down with a slight crown, about 3 inches worth. That would not have been a terrible problem, but I had to inset the sleepers with their tops to be about two inches below the current gravel level.
Let the digging begin.
For the majority of the project, I wound up loosening all (and removing most) of the gravel where it was, using a shipwright’s adze as my implement of destruction. The gravel was a local product known as “limestone dust” which packs tight, becoming almost cementitious over time and traffic. This consumed about 75% of my time and 90% of my energies, as the gravel had to be bludgeoned into a state of looseness, the shoveled and raked smooth at the right level.
Had you been there to keep me company yesterday and today — and where were you, by the way? — this is what you would have seen a thousand times.
My working routine for this was to sit on a concrete block and work in arcs swinging the adze to break up the gravel, working in ever widening arcs and moving the block stool as needed. Once a large enough area was so prepared I would remove about half of the gravel, one shovel full at a time.
By the end of the day I was practically immobile with exhaustion, and last night I was in bed by about 8.30, too tired and sore to even open the folder with Roubo 2 manuscripts being edited.
Just before a late supper tonight I finished with the main area of flooring I will get done this trip, but even this 300 square feet (with another 100 s.f. to get next trip) exceeds my current tiny basement workshop by 50% so things are looking good. But then, I have to make room for a wood stove and all the machines I have out in the barn at the other house…
Tomorrow I make the new garage doors for the machine room.
This is the “Week of the Bench” as I am joined at The Barn by old friend Dave Reeves and newer friend Jason Weaver, who is the webmeister of this site. When I asked Jason to design and construct the site, one thing he asked for was to spend time at The Barn “learning stuff.” This is the first installment. Three guys trying to finish two benches in five days. hmmm.
I’ve been assembling a nice inventory of large-ish hunks of lumber, and a stack of vintage (salvaged around 1950?) 12-foot long 5×12 Douglas Fir beams struck me as a nice starting point for a Roubo bench, and Jason agreed. The end result will be (we hope) a ~8-foot Roubo bench with a pair of Benchcrafted vises.
Dave had somewhat different bench needs, as a successful furniture restorer he did not need a massive behemoth like a Roubo, so he is making a lighter weight version of the same concept. He arrived with a pair of 3-1/2″ hackberry (!) slabs and a bunch of other timbers to make his bench. His only vise will be a leg vise with an Erie Toolworks screw.
I promised a fairly vigorous if not brutal pace of work as we all worked side-by -side, and thus far we have kept to that promise.
We began Monday evening by running all the slabs through my friend Tony’s giant planer, and Tuesday morning we set to getting them glued up.
My Ryobi 6-inch timber framer’s portable joiner was conscripted for the task, along with a scrub plane, and #5 set up as a fore plane, and a #8.
By noon we had them glued up and set aside, with leg stock prep on tap for the afternoon.
The afternoon was all about getting leg stock flat, square, and true. Both guys made progress, with the goal for today being the readiness of all the leg stock and a good start on flattening the glued up slabs. While our choreography was a bit off in the steps, we done good.
By the time we stopped for dinner both tops were flat, and legs were coming together nicely.
Again, the typical progression was from a coffin plane set up as a scrub plane, a #5 used as a fore plane, and a #8 jointer to finish things off.
This is pretty much what you want to see coming off the blade when trueing up.
As we finished last night the sky was ablaze with an azure and fluorescent pink composition with a crescent sliver of white highlight.
Today was all about keeping things moving forward, fast. To help with the cleanup problem we hauled the bench tops outside to keep the mess out there.
Both ends of the tool spectrum, with me using my power planer to hog off a lot of stock in a hurry, with Dave in the background using a horned wooden plane set up as a shallow-cut fore plane.
The slabs of Douglas Fir are going to make a spectacular bench. I will probably be using it at WIA next week.
While both guys were busy, I snatched some time to finally flatten my very first Roubo bench from several years ago. I will add a crozet and some dog holes on the left leg.
Dave trued his legs and cut the double tenons (and learned about – and learned to love – holdfasts in the process), and Jason should have his four legs ready tomorrow.
Again tonight there should be no insomnia in the ranks, as we are finding consciousness leaving the grounds fairly early, and arriving late. Aching joints and groaning muscles are the hallmark of the morning, but once we get going we seem to be almost ambulatory.
More later.
In 2006 I contacted Rich Buttner of Nooutage.com in Richmond to help me with the electrical engineering, which he did with experience, knowledge, skill, attentiveness, and excellent customer service. A retired power plant engineer who launched a business in the back-up energy world, Rich was excited about contributing to his first complete hydroelectric home-based system. I have been so pleased with Rich’s contribution that he remains my “go to” guy whenever I need advice or hardware about further improvements to my concept.
As he was spec-ing out the project and assembling the hardware, I went to work.
In late 2006 I got my hands dirty for the first time. I had already located the highest elevation on our property where the stream could be harnessed. About 100 feet from where the creek crossed the property line there was a narrowing to about 6-feet that was perfect for a small dam to serve as a capturing basin for the system.
Using sandbags filled with dry concrete I built a double coffer dam about 2 feet high and ten feet wide, about two feet thick. It did not have to be big, it just had to steer the water into the penstock (the pipe that carries the water down hill). I accomplished this task by embedding a 10” culvert into the dam, which in turn channeled the water into a capture basin, which itself was connected to the water line.
Somewhere around this time I ruptured a disc hauling piles of 16’ 1×12 siding up a ladder and nailing while I hooked a leg around the ladder, so I wound up delaying everything by almost two years for rest and physical therapy (with a healthy dose of “Don’t do that again!” scolding). Eventually I was back to full strength and ready to proceed with making a capturing/diversion basin and laying the pipeline.
Since I was still working a the Smithsonian at the time, for a capturing basin I used a museum-quality plastic tub underneath the outflow of the culvert pipe, which I fitted with a museum quality shower drain, which I then attached to a 2” PVC fitting. I topped it off with a home-made Coanda screen filter on the top to keep the debris out of the tub but allow for full capture of the water.
It was then that my friend DickP enhanced his account in the Bank of Don by coming up for the weekend and helping me haul, arrange, fit and connect over a quarter-mile of 2” Schedule 40 PVC pipe. Seriously, I am in his debt more than I can fully articulate. At the end of the weekend we had a continuous line of 2’ PVC from the dam to the powerhouse where the turbine was going at the bottom. I opened the valve at the top and water flowed out the bottom. That was a joyous day!
At this point I will comment on the shortcomings of the workshop I first attended. They really gave short shrift to the construction and more importantly the “lay” of the penstock. Over the years I have been helped by friends and siblings to modify, disassemble and reassemble, and reroute the penstock four times to get it right. Perhaps I am simply stupid, certainly I am stubborn, but more understandng before beginning this stage would have saved me a boatload of trouble. Finally this past spring my friend TomS and I got it right, and I do not foresee any changes at this point other than repairs from falling trees or rolling boulders during a flood or some such.
Up next – Hooking It All Up
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