I actually watch a lot of Japanese woodworking videos and welcome this new tutorial approach. As much as I like the videos in Japanese shops, they are usually in Japanese and mostly without translation. Since I neither read nor speak Japanese this English chyron approach is most welcome. Not that I do much better with English…
Not only was a substantial portion of the inventory worthless, it was all soaking wet. I had to change my shirt after loading my struck. I wound up standing it outside for five days to get it somewhat dry.
My name is Don, and I’m an old coot.
Last week Mrs. Barn and I took one of our occasional trips to the big city, in part for me to restock some routine building supplies. It had been a very long time since I bought much in the building materials realm as I had really stocked up while constructing the barn almost two decades ago. Slowly over time that inventory had dwindled down and it was time to do a little restocking. Plus, replacing some decking was on the autumn agenda.
The sticker shock almost put me into a wallet-coma. Some CDX plywood, nothing special to say the very least. Enough decking to refurbish an 8’x12′ deck with some left over (even disregarding the need to sort through the pile since about a third of it was useless). Checkout was well on its way to ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. To say that I was ranting all the way home like a curmudgeonly old coot vastly underemphasizes the pungence of my rhetoric. Not only do they not call material what it is, they tripled the prices since I last bought stuff. $60 for a 3/4″ sheet of CDX plywood? $14 for a 12-foot piece of PT/SYP decking? Insanity.
It would be easy enough to condemn the lumber stores and the lumber markets, but markets just do what markets do. Their moral duty is to maximize legal profits on behalf of their shareholders.
The real crisis is inflation, a crisis I do not believe we has a culture have the knowledge, wisdom, or courage to address.
It would be easy enough to blame the bankers, especially The Fed. But even though they are integral to the crisis, the central bankers are only doing what the legislative, executive, and judicial politicians are instructing them to do.
Even though they are misanthropes integral to the crisis, the spineless weasel elected politicians are only doing what the electorate is instructing them to do; spend money on us that we do not have. When legislators and executives spend money they do not have, in order to purchase votes they need as they need food, water, and air, there are only two “solutions.” 1) raise tax revenues to cover the expenditures, or 2) create/borrow phony baloney money to do the deed.
The limits to the first are well established as history has revealed an almost iron-clad truth: governments can only extract about 23% of the economy in taxes regardless of the taxation scheme. Hence the drive towards totalitarian collectivism, a/k/a abolition of an economy.
As for the creation of phony baloney money, also known as fiat currency, the only limit is political. The blame for inflation comes down to us, the electorate. In the aggregate we demand the gubmint give us stuff we cannot afford and cannot be paid for. So they do the “rational” thing, they create money out of ones and zeroes and fractional reserves, reducing the worth of the money in existence. Intrinsic prices are not rising, it’s the value of the money that is falling. That has always been and always will be the proximate cause.
Until we in the electorate tell them to stop spending money on us (yeah that’s gonna happen) the inflation locomotive will be picking up steam as it charges down the tracks, the engineers unaware that the bridge up ahead is collapsed (if it has not yet occurred, servicing the debt will soon be the largest component of the Federal budget). And collapse is the only possible end point. Get ready for it. I do not know the current score in the game nor do I know how much time is left on the clock. But I know the end result.
So Don, are you saying you are smarter than all the smart guys in Washington?
Yup.
But then I live in Cootville and the perspective is not in sync with the outside world. As CS Lewis said, “Reality is a ruthless instructor. It does not care whether you agree with it or not.”
I’m not spending 100% of my time fighting the Rearrangeritis War. I still try to spend a couple hours a day writing, although not as fast as I would like, and portions of almost every day with chores around the homestead. One such chore is maintaining the driveway.
If you recall, several years ago I had the driveway to the barn rebuilt with hard packed “Limestone dust,” a pea gravel sized aggregate in common use out here in the hinterlands. (Shangri-la is immediately adjacent to a gravel quarry). The material packs to become almost concretious and serves its purpose well.
Then came the monster ice storm of last winter and the torrential rains of last spring. The frost-heave and runoff from these events took its toll not only on my microhydropower waterline, soon to be replaced en toto, but now I must spend moments of many days reconstructing the crown and shoulders of the roadway. The material is so hard it broke my hoe so I must break it down with a derelict adz, the only tool I have with the heft and robustness to accomplish the task. It was one of several old adzes I bought at a tool auction many moons ago. Two of the adzes are kept razor sharp, but this one is just a beefy hoe that I use for all sorts of digging fun. I repaired the original hoe but now use it mostly as a rake. The adz has the additional advantage of being three times wider than my pickaxe, which would have been my other option.
During his recent impromptu visit my brother took a whimsical double-barn-portrait selfie. I was amused. Some folks think we resemble each other (our wives say we even walk exactly the same) but we don’t see it. ;-)
More than thirty years ago I made a built-in cabinet in the living room to hold all manner of contents you would expect for a living room wall unit. Included in the design and construction was a set of shoji sliding doors using Japanese mulberry bark paper for the screens. I learned right quick that having paper panels on cabinet doors is not optimal for a home occupied by little ones. I soon replaced the original papers with new ones and backed them with plexiglass to minimize the puncturing and tearing of the lovely paper.
Recently I took another look at the shoji and saw another dozen or so tears that had occurred of the intervening decades. One by one I took them down to the basement shop to repair them. Unfortunately all I had was scraps from the original construction and installation or I would have simply replaced complete sections of the paper en toto.
My first effort to follow that trail was to order some new mulberry bark paper that turned out to be beautiful but not a good match to the originals. So all I could do was use my scraps of the original paper and make the necessary repairs.
Here’s an example of one repair, a protocol I followed successfully on the nearly dozen tears.
This tear is adjacent to one of the shoji frame elements, The dark area near the upper center of the image is a previous repair, still wet from the repair. As the repair dries it will resume the color of the original paper and thus become invisible to the standard viewer.
Here’s the scrap of the original paper left over from the construction 30 years ago. One edge is straight to match the shoji frame, the other is torn, or “deckled” to provide a feathered edge allowing the perfect blending with the underlying sheet being repaired.
After mixing up the adhesive, in this case dilute wallpaper past methycellulose, the repair ws laid in place and the adhesive brushed onto the margin and wicked in, binding the repair.
Next time I return to Mordo I will try to remember to take a picture of the finished project. The repairs really do look nearly invisible, complying with the “Six-foo-six-inch rule” that governed our work in the museum. In other words, from a standard viewing distance of six feet the repair is invisible, but close-up (“six inch”) it is discernable.
Rex Krueger has posted a very nice video snapshot of Plane Wellness’ Handtool Haven 2026, where I was one of the speakers and exhibitors.
I didn’t need to make any more blocks of beeswax for the moment, so I concentrated on turning my purified beeswax into Blend 31.
The preparation is indeed exotic (/sarc). I weigh out several hundred grams of shellac wax, then three times as much of the purified beeswax. It all goes into the cooker to melt together at a slightly higher temperature than is necessary for the beeswax alone.
Once it was all melted uniformly I ladled it into the silicone molds I made a long time ago that have served me well all these years. Given the temperature of the room I can make a new pour every 30-45 minutes as the blocks cool and can be removed from the molds. They are still pretty warm at this point and need to be set aside to cool completely.
A good day’s production is almost 50 units. I make four at a time, and each extraction/pour takes about 5-7 minutes.
Now on to the wrapping and packaging of the wax to take it to Handworks 2026.
The latest installment of the forty-year-long conversation with my friend “retired” broadcaster Brian Wilson (who cannot shake the habit), was posted at his Brian Wilson Writes Substack. If you enjoy provocative strident discussions about forbidden topics, give it a listen. If you do not, don’t.
The Abraham boys and their posse are at it again and Handworks 2026 is barreling down the pike. It will be Friday and Saturday of Labor Day weekend, in the lovely village of Amana, Iowa. I’ll be there again close to dead center of the Festhalle, hawking my wares such as they are. Polissoirs, beeswax and shellac wax, videos, and original c. 1765 Roubo prints, etc.
The Festhalle from Handworks 2013
It’s the most amazing tool festival of hand woodworking you will even encounter with visitors and makers from around the globe if the tradition holds.
I’m already ramping up my truckload of stuff to take with me, at the moment creating a pile on and under a workbench I will be taking and making wax processing part of almost every day from now on.
This just might be my last long road trip other than family priorities. We just don’t have the oomph for drives like that anymore.
I love tales like this. I knew of an instance in some southern swamp where they discovered an ancient sunken cypress trunk that was so valuable the salvage company had around-the-clock guards protecting it until they could find just the right buyer who had just the right project. I vaguely recall it went to a developer who was going to use it in all the public spaces is a huge skyscraper somewhere. I think the dimensions of trunk were 48+” diameter at the top and 180-plus feet long. That’s a mighty big tree.
I’d heard the asking price was $7 million.
Many years ago back in Maryland we had a micro-burst that uprooted a number for mature tulip poplar trees, the largest of which measured 24″ in diameter at the first branch, which was at the 60-foot mark. I was unable to find a sawyer willing to deal with it, so given the cycle of life it has now gone back to the earth.
© 2024 Don Williams
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