October

Presenting Gragg at Winterthur

Every Spring, Winterthur Museum hosts a Furniture Symposium, and I have been invited (again).  I will present a demonstration on the making of Gragg’s Elastic Chairs during this year’s event, April 23&24, 2027.  (I say “again” because I was invited to present five years ago but was then disinvited when I declined to comply with their Fauci Flu protocols.)

I think my presentation/demonstration will be about 75-90(?) minutes, which should be quite the adventure.  You can follow the event developments at winterthur.org.  Just go to the “Calendar” page.

I hope to see you there.

Once I get my teaching and presentation schedule finalized for 2027 I will post it here.

Gerrymandering

One component of my activities organizing and streamlining barn/shop space and function this year has been taking a page from the American political handbook, wherein electoral district has been reconfigured to render a permanent advantage.   This process is known as Gerrymandering in honor of it first practitioner, early 19th Century Boston politician Eldrige Gerry.  Ostensibly this practice has been attributed to partisan advantage, but in practice it has mostly been used to protect incumbents.  (Actually, only one Party has this strategy figured out and the other is just spinning on its thumb.)

In my case the spatial reorganization has been centered on the question, “How often did I use this particular tool or supply?”  If the answer was, “Not in several years,” the item(s) got moved from a place of relatively easy access into deep(er) storage.

Given the termination of workshop activities here, thus no longer needing classroom or dormitory space, I have plenty of available space to use for storage and archiving.  Lots of stuff has been relocated to reflect more current usage.

One instance of that was removing the leather, mother-of-pearl, and veneer inventories in the giant map case in my main shop workspace.  I had already reconfigured the top of the cabinet quite a while ago to serve as the location for processing beeswax and shellac wax, and the occasional batch of Mel’s Wax.  The leather inventory consumed four drawers, the MOP four drawers, and the special veneers three drawers.

The mother -of-pearl went into two large storage bins now located on the shelves now ringing the former classroom.  The specialty veneers went underneath a rolling worktable that is moved to wherever it is needed (I have a giant stash of walnut and cherry veneers up in the former dorm space), and the leather went into two giant storage bins and a large plastic trash can now relocated on top of that veneer stash.

Seriously, what in the work was I doing with a complete buffalo hide and a zebra skin rug?  And a big pile of elephant hide?

Who knows.

The map case was about 90% empty, available for a large inventory of different tools that had previously occupied a nearby cabinet.

Gerrymandering, my friends.  Gerrymandering.

Latest Conversation

My most recent conversation with long-time friend, broadcaster Brian Wilson, is now posted on his Substack, Brian Wilson Writes.  If pungent conversation about the state of the culture it might not be for you.

Not Mussorgski

It was not the Pictures From An Exhibition but rather pictures from an exhibition of traditional wood finishing as last month I taught another iteration of my class at Joshua Farnsworth’s Wood and Shop classroom.  Oddly, three days is barely enough time to scratch the surface of the topic while still changing the students’ mindsets pretty profoundly.

So I present, Pictures From An Exhibition of Historic Wood Finishing, featuring performers (students) from all over North America.

Clothespin Nirvana

For many years I’ve been a fan of Herrick Kimball and his Planet Whizbang site.  He is one of the most inventive guys on the interwebz.

I’ve posted occasionally about my fixation with the utility of clothespins in the shop, employing them for a whole host of uses.  I’m always on the lookout for good clothespins and currently have a shoebox full of them on the clamp rack.  Since even better ones are cheap, I use and dispose them frequently.

Even Mrs. Barn appreciates a good clothespin as most of our laundry is hung on the line.  A while ago I bought her some of Herrick’s clothespins from his Classic American Clothespin website.

Holy cow!  They are so different in quality that they are different in kind.  I mean, who makes clothespins from kiln-dried ash, and oversized to boot (compare it to a pretty good quality clothespin from Ace hardware.)

Maybe my search for the perfect clothespin is over.

I’ll Be Watching With Great Interest

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…

Cootville

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.”

A Shovel Ready Project

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.

Double Barn Portrait Selfie

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. ;-)