When I returned back home from the microhydro-electric workshop at SEI I had a fairly clear idea about the logistical and technical requirements for my system. There were several integrated elements.
1. A body of running water. Check. While the flow was variable, the creek on our property had never gone dry in recent memory, so I figured all was well. The hydrology is so unusual around here with all the porous limestone and aquifers you can hardly throw a rock without hitting some kind of running water. This county has between 400-600 creeks, some of which are seasonal.
2. A way to get that water contained and downhill. As a practical matter this meant using a PVC pipeline to capture all the water I could as high as possible to exploit the inherent energy contained in running water. Given our hydrology and topography I figured I could get somewhere between 30-50 gallons per minute from an elevation about 100’ higher than the power plant.
3. A mechanical device at the bottom of the pipe to generate power from the force of the water jet coming out of the pipe. The evident answer based on the technical literature was a “Pelton wheel” turbine, which is basically a tiny(!) Ferris wheel which is turned by the water jet. The whole “machine” fits on top of a 5-gallon bucket! My turbine is 4” in diameter and the 48-volt heavy-duty truck alternator attached to it can produce more than a kilowatt of power if the water flow is enough. Mostly I get somewhere between 200-500 watts continuous output.
4. A method to store the power being created by the turbine. Giant truck batteries were the answer to the problem. I started out with four big deep-cycle batteries, the kind used for diesel truck engines.
5. A sophisticated system of electronic devices to control the electrical output from the turbine, to feed it into the batteries and dump the excess when they got full.
6. A high-power inverter system to transform the DC current from the turbine, and then feed the power to wherever I wanted it to go. The tail end of this system was standard wiring throughout The Barn. The “business end” was a matched pair of 48v input-to-110v output inverters in parallel, so I could have 220v in The Barn if I need it. In between was a 330’line of 6/3 cable fed through a shielded flex conduit.
At this point let me invoke the Schwarz Disclaimer — all of the products I cite in this series of articles are devices which I paid for in full, and get no benefit or consideration from their manufacturers nor distributors.
Up next — Building the System
In my opening entry to this blog I promised to present accounts of things other than historic woodworking or artifact preservation, with the emphasis on our evolving homesteading lifestyle. This is the first of those posts, as it begins a periodic recounting of the independent electric system we use for The Barn, and eventually for the cabin as well.
Being “off grid” is fundamental to the identity for The Barn on White Run. In part a lifestyle/political statement (I am fine with power companies but do not trust their political masters as far as I could throw a piano — virtually every gripe I have with public utilities stems from the regulatory bureaucracies governing them), in part a technological challenge (What? Just plug it into the wall? There has got to be a more complicated way to do this!), and part utilitarian practicality (out in the hinterboonies the power is interrupted a lot), the ability to work independently of the increasingly fragile power grid is a balm to the psyche. That has been especially true during periods of extended power outage, for example during the 2012 derecho storm when the power was out for more than a week. I continued work in the barn as though nothing had happened.
I am about to embark on several upgrades to my power system over the coming weeks and months, but I thought I would give you a glimpse of where I have been so you can better appreciate where I am trying to go.
Building the barn was accomplished with only a generator and power tools. My little Coleman with a Subaru Robin engine is apparently indestructible. After more than 1500 hours it still starts on the first pull and runs until I turn it off. (I could usually get about five or six hours per gallon of gas) A lot of time the generator was simply charging the 18v battery packs for the power tools, so rather than wasting an 8hp motor for that I got a teeny 1000 watt unit similar to this, that often gets about eight or ten hours per gallon of 2-cyle fuel.
I could have remained “generator only” for an indeterminate time, but making the barn fully wired required a more robust system.
Almost eight years ago I began to design our current system, its subsequent installation being the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. When originally searching for property in the late 90s, independent energy production potential was prominent on the “Wish List” menu. In the climes of the rural Alleghenies this meant hydroelectric power.
After we bought our place the wheels began to spin in hyper speed.
First, me being me, I read everything and bought every pertinent book I could find on the subject of micro-hydroelectric power. You want literature on producing your own power at home? Look on my shelf. It’s probably there.
Second, I searched far and wide for a practical workshop on microhydroelectric technology. Eventually I flew out to Colorado to attend a micro-hydropower workshop at the Solar Energy International. The course had a definite “Che was here” feel to it as most of the students appeared to be self-indulgent professional sandalista misfits pretending to follow their revolutionary catechism, while two or three of us were interested in actually building residential power systems rather than overthrowing political kleptocracies in the third world. The course was good as far as it went, but the holes in the content were large and did not become apparent to me until I built my own system.
Up next – the elements of my initial independent electrical system
I just finished a few days of production of glazed doors for the library bookcases. It gives me all the more respect for those artisans to make acres of kitchen and bathroom cabinetry. I am not really set up for large scale joinery production, but great progress was made nevertheless.
In following Occam’s Razor, the philosophical construct that suggests simplicity as the best answer to a convoluted question, I decided to make exceedingly simple glazed doors using the pile of southern yellow pine I had left over from the barn flooring along with a dozen or so sheets of plexiglass from a house project that never materialized (it actually evolved into a much better one). Of course I overlooked the inverse of Occam’s Razor, namely that the simpler the structure, the greater the need for skillful design and execution.
My plan was to build open faced mortise and tenon corners (bridle joints) using my table saw to cut all the joints. In principle the idea was fine, but in practice, let’s just say that a $25 saw from Craigslist is probably not the one you want for such a process (especially when the fence is such a piece of garbage it almost isn’t even worth the effort to throw it out the door). But, it was what I had on hand. My Unisaw was back in Maryland, along with my home-built but perfectly useable tenoning jig.
The first thing I needed to do was make a simple tenoning jig, which I did. Then, I cut all the open mortise shoulders on the rails, which were purposefully 1/2″ wider than the stiles. This went smoothly. I was left with several score of identical wooden tiles, which I gathered to save for the myriad times I need a small shim or spacer.
Cutting the open tenons was not so easy as the tenon length, corresponding to the wider rail, was deeper than the saw blade could cut when fully exposed by almost a half an inch. Grrr.
Quickly I set up the band saw to make the necessary shoulder cuts and it went fairly smoothly. Near the end things began to bog down a bit, and you can see why here. Even though well dried (almost three years for 5/4 stock) the rosin in the southern yellow pine was so gooey it clogged the 3/4″ 4 tpi blade. The only reason it worked as long as it did was the friction kept the rosin soft, so the saw blade could still do its work. Once I stopped the pitch cooled and hardened into a rock. I will either need to clean the blade completely or throw it away. Fortunately it is not my only blade.
Since the glazing was 1/8″ plexi, and I like fully housed glazing, I ripped an off-center groove on the inside edges of all the door elements into which I would insert the glazing. In retrospect I should have been more careful to line up the groove with the outer edge of the tenon. It would have made the fitting of the corners a lot cleaner, but then so would a well-performing table saw.
I moved to the work bench, my first Roubo model, and trimmed the shoulders of the tenons and cut the blanks from the open mortises with a coping saw. It literally took only ten or fifteen seconds per mortise. Most of the corners fit together without further attention, a few needed a handful of strokes with the rabbet plane for them to slip together.
I then glued the frames together with the plexi sheet inserted, and when dry they were ready for trimming and installation.
As a sop to motivational psychology, I temporarily installed two pairs of the doors and filled the cases with books. This fatuous gesture was very encouraging. When I return probably at the end of the month I will assemble the remaining doors, and finish the detailing of all the doors before I install them and load the units with boatloads of books.
With the exception of my Victorinox Spirit multi-tool, I’ve always had the impression, and mostly the experience, that devices designed for a multitude of functions end up not performing any of them well. To that end I generally avoid “combination machines” for woodworking, even though I have long owned a Mini-Max over-under jointer/planer. Truth be told it was way too big for my current workspace in the basement and has mostly served as a lumber rack for the past 15 years, but I look forward to rehabilitating it in the machine room in the first floor basement of the barn. The Mini-Max’s mortising attachment has never been attached to the best of my knowledge, and I will rectify that shortcoming shortly.
One combination tool that did make some sense to me is the jointer/planer offered by Hitachi, Makita, and others in which the cutterheads for both functions reside side-by-side on the same drive shaft. For much the same reason as the Mini-Max – I simply never had the space for one of the 8” x 12” units – I never looked into them closely. Then came the day some years ago when I went to a garage sale promising “Tools, tools, tools!”
As I approached the garage I saw this petite little version of this machine, a model I have never seen and frankly was unaware existed, and at $100 it was almost my moral duty to purchase it. The capacity is for jointing and planing 4” wide stock and it can plane about 3 ½” thick, which limits the usefulness to very small projects. Or so I thought. It sat around mostly gathering dust out in my shed until I moved it out the The Barn a couple years ago, where it gathered more dust.
Flash forward to the present, when I need to crank out a couple dozen doors for The Barn Biblioteca. I had just returned from the Roubo bench fest in Georgia the night before, and I had this stack of rough-prepped stock to get over the finish line. The mondo oak slab for the bench top is smack dab in the center of the Great Hall of The Barn (I have to work on it in the only place where I had an overhead hoist), making maneuvering with my Ryobi or Dewalt planers problematic. I guess I could have planed everything by hand, but the clock for relocating is ticking really fast. Hmmm, what about the little Makita combination machine? It was dramatically smaller and more nimble, at least when it comes to moving it and the workpieces. I pulled it out and gave it a test run. It passed with flying colors.
After a quick look-see and cleaning and lubricating I fired it up. No flying shrapnel, always a good sign. A quick edge jointing: perfecto. A quick face jointing – since this was door frame stock nothing was wider that about three inches – and it was still performing just fine. Setting the planer height and immediately planing the other face of the stock and I knew I had a winner. Literally I could prep three sides of each piece in under a minute. I spent more time moving the stock than working the stock.
In considerably less than two hours I was able to edge and face joint and thickness plane each stick followed by a finish ripping on the table saw.
It is such a delight when you encounter any tool, hand powered or pigtailed, that performs its function perfectly. This tiny machine is a perfect tool for the task of preparing small, long stock. I expect to give it a real workout in the coming months and years.
If you ever find one, you might think about picking it up.
As we approach the long-awaited debut of To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo on Marquetry, (my first documents for this project are over six years old!) it is worth reflecting for a minute on the unsung heroes for our completion, the tools that were integral to the whole project. Those tools were Michele Pagan’s lovingly assembled collection of French dictionaries going back more that 200 years. Notwithstanding the fact that French was one of the first Western languages to be standardized, the usage of words and expressions has changed over the decades and centuries. One phenomenon that Michele noticed was the change in dictionaries over time. In some early editions, the definition of a word would rank the likely usages in a particular order, but in the ensuing editions over 250 years, new usage emphases emerged while others receded and some disappeared altogether.
Once our remaining Roubo projects are finished in four or five years, it is unlikely that these precious word repositories will be retired. Michele now has a taste for the hunt for words, and she will keep on translating old time words on behalf of collaborators passionate about old time ways.
One of the grand new pleasures for me has been my fairly recent intersection with the hand-tool-makers world occupied by many new friends and acquaintances, as reflected in the recent gather of toolaholics at the Handworks event in Amana, Iowa. Perhaps most heartening of all was the reality that the riches contained in the Amana Festhalle were by no means the complete community as many other tool makers and aficionados were unable to attend for a variety of reasons.
One of these non-attendees was planemaker Tod Herrli. I first become aware of Tod through my long time friend Bess Naylor, who often hosted Tod as an instructor at Olde Mill Cabinet Shop in York PA. Then I ordered Tod’s brilliant instructional video on making a hollow-and-round pair. Thanks in part to my previous job duties I have seen dozens if not hundreds of instructional videos on a wide variety of topics, and I cannot recall ever seeing one better. Ever. To watch him construct a matched pair of hollow-and-round planes in near-real time is an awesome thing.
Last spring I had the opportunity to meet and visit Tod on my way to teach at the National Institute of Woodfinishing in Minnesota, spending a delightful afternoon immersed in tool chat. On my departure I indicated my desire for a small sash plane, and asked Tod if he could make one for me. Last month a package arrived with a sample of the output of such a plane, along with the question of whether or not I still wanted the plane I had requested.
The answer was an unqualified “Yes!”
On my way home from Amana I stopped by Tod’s house again for another wonderful afternoon of fellowship, culminating with taking delivery of my new plane. Now I have no excuse for not building small cabinets with glazed doors. A matching coping plan is in the works, and I will wait patiently until my turn for that comes up in Tod’s hectic schedule.
It is my hope and desire that Tod can come to The Barn On White Run for a week of planemaking 
teaching next summer, and perhaps many more summers after that. My plan is for Tod to teach an introductory class on simple planemaking on a Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday dedicated to a second class on making a more complex tool.
Stay tuned, and thanks Tod for making this new heirloom tool for me.
My name is Don, and I’m a shellacaholic. The topic of shellac and its uses and performance has been a near-constant focus of mine for the past four decades. One result of this interest has been my compilation of hundreds of documents with thousands of pages dealing with those very same topics, ranging from manufacturer’s brochures to articles in the popular press to arcane monographs so esoteric that their audience has been nearly invisible over the decades.
One great advantage (?) to electronic self-publishing like blogging is that there is no governor on the enterprise beyond one’s own energies. That capacity allows me or anyone else to go anywhere their ideas take them. Which of course brings me to the topic of this blog – my shellac literature archive. In recent years I have been scanning and digitizing these files, and I am not close to being finished yet!
With Jason’s help I have established a special section within the Writings section to house this archive. Over the coming few dozen months I will be uploading my shellac archive, one document per week or so. Some weeks it will be a stand-alone document, some weeks it will be a consecutive series of chapters from shellac treatises. This will be the shellac world’s analog to the old-time serialized novels. All tolled I think I have about 200 things to post (if stacked up it would be about a four-foot-tall pile), but the final number will depend on how I chop them up.
The first entry is, appropriately in this centennial year, the 1913 trade brochure, “The Story of Shellac.”
Chris Schwarz just posted my newest contribution to the Lost Art Press Blog. You can see it here. My ongoing exploration of these vises and my efforts to replicate them will mostly occur ay my blog, so stay tuned.
Welcome to the blog for donsbarn.com, the website for the Barn on White Run. While I have contributed to other blogs, most notably over at Lost Art Press recounting progress of the books I am writing for them, or other sites unrelated to the activities of the Barn on White Run (social, political, and economic commentary, etc.), this one is pretty much all about the activities at the Barn.
The nature of these posts will be, shall we say, eclectic, ranging from working on the barn itself, its hybrid “off grid” power system and the related homesteading lifestyle (and yes, it is a political statement as well as a practical exercise), teaching and lecturing, furniture making and conserving, updates on my multitude of writing efforts, expansions to the line of products I will be selling through the website, and sometimes just some neat things I am tinkering with in the studio or have experienced – such as visits to fellow artisans, museum exhibits, etc. There will even be reports on updates and expansions of the website itself.
The vision for what this site will become is still fluctuating and evolving, but that is the glory of electronic publishing. Certainly the archive of literature will be augmented as I add new texts and rediscover things I wrote in the past. One exciting utility for blogs is the inclusion of demonstration or commentary videos, and I will work diligently to expand that. Last summer while sitting with my pal Mike at Martin Donnelly’s tool junkie gathering, we sketched out a menu of almost a thousand possible five-to-ten minute demonstration videos. In short, there is no shortage of stuff for me to create and upload.
My goal at the beginning is to upload at least one blog post per week, easing my way up to thrice weekly. Some weeks will be easy, such as this upcoming week of research and photography related to the Henry O. Studley tool chest and bench, when I could probably post three blogs a day. Others days and weeks will be slower as you can imagine, as I might be up to my elbows in hot hide glue while building something or spattered with wax blends while formulating new polishes.
Finally, I am led to offer very enthusiastic and public thanks to Jason Weaver of OGREcreative for working with me closely and with great passion for this enterprise. It is a true labor of love for Jason, and the creative energy he has brought to the project is heartfelt and heartening.
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