The vortex that may or may not be appearing in national weather maps just could be the whirlwind emanating from the homestead over the past fortnight and into next week. It all revolves around the task of getting ready for the upcoming gathering of the Professional Refinishers web forum of which I have been a member for many years.
The set-up I normally have for working on and in the barn might be just fine when I am there alone, but it is definitely not fine when fifty people descend on us for a week in paradise. You have no idea how large a four story barn is until you have to get it clean, organized, and safe for such a crowd. That’s pretty much what I have been doing from breakfast until dark every day, and after that comes Mssrs. Roubo and Studley.
Today was especially busy as I first was wrapping up the cleaning/moving of a huge pile of planer shavings (more about that tomorrow) when I heard a horn honking down in the driveway. It was the delivery of the two portable facilities, an absolute necessity given that the burden of fifty people would far surpass the capacity of our infrastructure. The fellow who delivered them was an absolute gem, as common sense as could ever hope to find.
He should be President, but the people would never stand for it. It is clear to me that they prefer grifters and poseurs, or when all the cards are played rightly or wrongly, a grifter who is a poseur.
While the delivery man was up in the barn with me, the the pickup truck bearing the freshly repaired lawn tractor arrived, so now at least we do not have to push a mower around the place.
No sooner did that conclude than the two fellows from the phone cooperative arrived to install the wifi extender, to provide for wireless service up in the barn 350 feet from the cabin. They did, and it does. The transmitter unit itself is an unobtrusive box with an integral broadcast antenna, sitting just above the front porch and aimed up at the barn.
And to conclude the day, the mason dropped by to scope out the final session in restoring the root cellar for the granary, which he will commence tomorrow and finish Saturday, just in time for me to reinstall the vintage chestnut siding just before the arrival of the hordes.
Back to rasslin’ with the string trimmer, knocking down some man-sized weeds.
I am at a point in writing the manuscript for VIRTUOSO: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley where I am crafting a section on the woodworking lore and influence of Studley in popular (woodworking) culture, including folks who have interpreted the cabinet and its contents.
Some time ago I came across this superb effort by Jeff Scott of Alabama. We corresponded once about two years ago, but he seems to have fallen off the map since. I have tried several times to contact him recently to no avail. If you know Jeff, please ask him to contact me or send me the contact info for me to interview him, and perhaps even visit and photograph his tool set and cabinet.
I found these pictures on the web somewhere, so they are the best I can do for know.
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The web site for the upcoming May 2015 exhibit of Studley’s ensemble is here, with tickets available here This is the very first time the cabinet and tools will be on exhibit along with the amazing workbench.
Yesterday as Michele and I were completing the FINAL review of a section of the manuscript (the overwhelming majority of the manuscript is already in the Lost Art Press sausage grinder) we could not help but notice the big hole we had left in the volume To Make As Perfectly As Possible: Roubo On Furniture Making.
Beds.
You see, the whole point of starting the Roubo Project seven years ago was amusement.
Mine.
Not in the sense of what I found humorous, but rather the things I found interesting. If it was not interesting to me, it wasn’t going in the book. And I am not interested in bed making.
This is where the weight of history begins to rest heavily on the shoulders. Was I going to allow my own preference to mis-shape the record we were leaving for Anglophone posterity? And, when does preference represent principle, and when does it represent petulance? Even I could see that without the chapter on beds, Roubo would not be complete. So into the hopper it goes.
We have hit the ground sprinting, and by the time the LAP editorial process gets to this chapter, it should be in their hands so no special delays will encumber them in that regard. Still, the process for a book this massive is a hu-u-u-ge undertaking, and I can never show enough appreciation to Chris for taking a chance on us getting this project to fruition.
Now it is my job to persuade Chris to go along with our craziness.
So, those three of you who are passionate about French beds c.1770, and you know who you are, will get your cup overflowing.
It’s been two years since I installed the 8-foot long southern yellow pine 8″x10″ planing beam in the shop, and it has turned out to be my favorite work station.
Occasionally an itinerant minstrel stops by to admire it, and if they are reasonably pleasant I even let them give it a test drive.
For the most part it has stayed stable, but this week I noticed a bit of a crown on the top — of course, worst at the business end of the beam! — so I decided to address it forthrightly. The timber itself is eight years old — I bought a stack of green SYP timbers like it when I bought the barn thinking I might need them for repairs, but didn’t — so I expect it will still move a bit for another ten or twelve years.
Flattening the beam is truly a straightforward exercise that made me think of my high school math teacher Mr. Fisk, who was pleasantly rigorous in drilling us with Geometry Postulates and Theorems, and many a time one has popped into my head just when I needed it.
Well, one of the most important of the Postulates for woodworkers is the notion that any two intersecting lines establish a plane. What this means in practice is that if you address any surface with a hand plane, first at 45-degrees to the left, then 45-degrees to the right, when the two patterns meet and cover the entire face you have established a planar surface.
So I did that with a scrub plane, then finished off the surface with a toothing plane to give it a little texture while keeping it flat. At some point I will deal with the front surface, which is now almost certainly not perfectly square to the top. But not this week.
Up next will be getting some help in bringing the 14-foot southern yellow pine 10″x 10″ up from the basement to make a really spectacular planing beam. Maybe next month.
One of the many culture shocks in moving from the Stalinist Peoples’ Republic of Maryland to East Boondocks, Virginia, is the scale of commerce and gubmint. Prince Georges County, Maryland, is a corrupt and crowded place (a previous County Administrator’s wife was caught with her underwear stuffed to overflowing with cash during the sting that sent her and her husband to the Big House) with nearly a million inhabitants, and dealing with the gubmint offices there is a descent into Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. Any foray in person to the Motor Vehicle Administration there confirms that Kafka and Orwell were drug addled optimists. I have had instances of where a single simple auto title transfer took two days of vacation time.
Now we live in a county in the Virginia mountains that is so remote and sparsely populated that a full-service Department of Motor Vehicles office — necessary for the change of address and the acquisition of a drivers license — requires a drive of an hour-and-a-half to the facility in Covinington VA. That was the task I assigned to myself for the day.
But, guess what? And here I am uttering words I thought were metaphysically impossible: it was GREAT! The staff was polite and helpful, literally calling out to me as I was still in the entryway. 45 minutes later I departed with a new title for my truck AND the tags AND a new title for my trailer AND the tag AND a new drivers license AND a new voter registration. Just about any one of those would have been a day’s misadventure back in PGCMD.
Surely, the Age of Miracles is not over!
In preparing for the very busy upcoming summer, with the ginormous GroopShop gathering (more than 40 participants with additional guests, etc.) of the Professional Refinisher’s Group late this month, I dove into the last big construction project before turning my attentions and energies the the monumental task of bringing about order into the mountain of tools and wood throughout the space.
Much of GroopShop will take place up on the fourth floor, which my wife persuaded me to finish as an uninterrupted space last spring. It confirmed her smartitude as the tennis court sized room with an 18-foot ceiling is a grand place to gather.
But, to use such a space there needed to be multiple stairways to get the crowd up and down. I built a “barn stairs” two summers ago when it was just crude storage up there, but they are very steep and very narrow, unsuited for moving any more than a handful of people up and down.
I decided to annex part of the north balcony space for a new, less steep and wider stairway to the fourth floor, and finished it off yesterday morning. It’s an 8/12 pitch and 36″ wide, so it serves the needs well.
I embellished the main post — vintage (and hard as a rock!) southern yellow pine left over from the original barn configuration — with a pair of 19th French carvings, a gift from my earliest and greatest mentor, Fred Schindler. I think they are just the right touch for some rough barn stairs.
In the onslaught that was the ticket sales window for the H.O. Studley exhibit, Joseph Parker of the Bay area was the first person to make it through and order his ticket. Good job, Joseph! I will have to think up a suitable prize for your diligence.
In his own words, he’ll “be among the most western attendees, coming from the SF bay area. So, there’s no excuse for anyone else not to come.”
Yeah, what he said.
There are still tickets left for all sessions of the exhibit, so if you were rebuffed by the site when it got fried, try again and you will have success.
It is always great to see a lot of interest in something of which you are a part, and amazing to see over 3,500 unique visitors to the website in 18 hours — but the initial wall o’ interest that was more than 500 people hitting the ticket store in a matter of minutes was the virtual equivalent of Walmart opening its doors at 5:00am on Black Friday after waxing the floors with mutton tallow! [We normally get about 300 visitors a day here at donsbarn.com. — DCW]
As many of you experienced, the pages became slow and it caused a glitch wherein the inventory numbers for each session of a given day were showing a collective stock quantity.
This has all been fixed, and the sessions are now presented in a slightly different way to spread the love and provide easier access. When you go to the TICKETS page you will still see the three days of the event listed, but when you click on your preferred day you will now see eight individual products (one for each session). Simply click on the session time you want to attend, to see the current (read accurate) stock numbers, select the number of tickets you want, and add them to your cart. From there it will look the same as previously described.
If you have any questions about the current process or an order you’ve already placed, please feel free to email me directly.
Jason Weaver
I just got a call from a friend who told me the HO Studley Exhibit ticket sales store indicates almost everything has sold. I doubt this, and think instead that the level of interest has frozen or crashed the site. I know we had 500 unique visitors between 12.01 AM and 12.08 AM this morning, which had smoke coming off the keyboard.
Believe me, we are hard at work checking it out.
It is a strange time for me as the sorrow of losing a dear friend coincides with the excitement of a milestone in the H.O. Studley cosmos.
In little more than 48 hours the tickets will be available for the exhibit. We were test driving the site today and all was working fine.
Tomorrow night’s post will cover some more of the details of the exhibit and ticket arrangements. Stay tuned.
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