2023 is shaping up as a pretty Graggtastic year in the shop. I am in the home stretch of the copious pinstriping for one chair to be delivered. A second client’s chair is fabricated but I have not yet begun the painting, and a third chair is about half built.
Then last week I was contacted by someone who has a Gragg chair with a broken arm, and based on the images they sent it just *might* be ONLY THE THIRD ORIGINAL, COMPLETE ELASTIC ARM CHAIR known to exist!
There is the completely overpainted chair at the SI that I kept in my conservation lab for almost two decades, trying unsuccessfully to persuade the curator to allow me to remove the overpaint.
Then there is the beauty at the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, and the heavily restored one in Baltimore. Unfortunately at the moment I cannot find my overall photos of the BMA chair but I have a large folder of detail shots. As I understand it the Baltimore chair was missing some elements that were newly fabricated and integrated to make a whole chair.
This newest chair has a tricky repair to be made to the arm, and the putative client inquired about me making a new chair to make a pair with the old one.
On top of all of this excitement there are several new Gragg-ish projects on the drawing board. Without revealing all the cards, consider that 1) we have a new grandson, and 2) the front porch of our Shangri-la cabin is rocking-chair-tastic.
Finally, I’m at long last seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for the “Build A Gragg Chair” video set. Whether that light is sunshine or an oncoming train I cannot yet be certain, but I remain hopeful. At the moment I am estimating the series to be more than a dozen half-hour-ish episodes, and Webmeister Tim and I are noodling the mechanism for the on-line offering. I’ve had one faithful donor sending me a small contribution every month (THANK YOU JimF!), but we need to come up with a system for processing the $1.99(?)/episode charge without viewers crawling up my back as the episodes are released. One approach I will almost certainly NOT take is a subscription model. I’ve spoken to some subscription-based content creators and they are unanimous in their regret. No matter how much content they create, their subscribers want more, and more often. I want no part of that.
Now the only thing left in the equation is the resolution to the question, “Why am I not as energetic and productive in my 68th year as I was in my 28th?”
‘Tis a mystery. Who knows, if I can solve that problem, I may even want to offer another Gragg chair workshop if there is interest.
Remaking the Japanese mortising saw into a premium veneer saw was straightforward, but, as in the case of any instance where you must first break apart a perfectly functonal quality tool to do so, gave me pause. I thought about it long and hard, even going to the extreme of ordering a duplicate tool. In the unlikely case where the “remaking” went south I would still have the original capability.
The mortising saw business end did a great job at the cutting, but the long neck made the saw somewhat floppy and unwieldy for repeated and routine veneer work like the hundreds of cuts I will be making for the tool cabinet parquetry. Somehow that floppy neck had to be dispensed with. Once I settled on a simple strategy it was, like I said, straightforward.
I began by removing the bindings and set screw from the handle, which I then split along the blade tang with a sharp rap on a Sloyd knife.
The handle, being paulownia, cleaved instantly and cleanly, releasing the entirety of the metal blade.
Re-housing the tang to “remove” most of the floppy neck was a piece of cake. Using the tang itself as the template I marked then excavated a pocket of the exact dimensions of it so the two halves of the handle could be reassembled to incorporate it. I cleaned the tang and abraded it lightly, then reassembled the unit in the new configuration with epoxy.
To hold things steady until the epoxy set I wrapped the handled with some elastic tape and left it for two days.
Removing the tape revealed a now-perfect parquetry cutting saw. Now all I need is a perfect set of sawing templates.
I’m not one to make New Years’ Resolutions. I figure I either have the interest, temperament, and commitment to do something on its own or I do not. (Mrs. Barn can absolutely confirm that I cannot be bullied, browbeaten, or guilted in to doing anything I do not want to do, no matter who gets offended.) Making a statement about some goal at some arbitrary date on the calendar strikes me as nonsensical. (It is sort of analogous to my apparent indifference to Christmas and Easter as religious commemorations despite being a devout Christian. If I am a Believer, then incorporating the essence of the Incarnation of The Word and Resurrection of The Redeemer are part of my permanent personal makeup or they are not.) Notwithstanding any “New Years’ Resolution,” in recent and future months, I have been/will continue to focus on a surmountable problem with the barn. Actually, it is two interrelated problems, intertwined with a personal foible.
The barn is too big.
There is too much stuff in it.
I am not by natural disposition an orderly person.
The fact that I have so much space at my disposal (roughly 7,000 s.f. plus a 600 s.f. lumber storage barn just down the hill) there is no real constraint on my inventory of things. Thus, the natural devolution of the barn’s contents is pretty much inevitable. I find myself spending too much time trying to manage all the stuff inside these walls and am undertaking a low-intensity review of all those contents to decide which are integral and which are superfluous to being productive at the work bench or writing chair.
Not sexy, hardly compelling blogging, but an ongoing undercurrent until I can get to the point where I spend a lot more time being productive – making furniture, historic craft exercises, writing books and short stories – than I do “straightening up.” Fortunately, I have some models for this undertaking. My dear friends MikeM and MartinO are living examples of how to do this, how to manage too much stuff in too little space. I will do my best to invoke their spatial genius as I pull this all together.
I did so little websurfing over the Christmas week that it took an email from Webmeister Tim notifying me that the donsbarn.com entire web site had been offline and that he was on the case. It turns out it was an administrative thang going back ten years to the foundations of donsbarn.com. There was some sort of certificate/hosting/renewal minutiae that named original Webmeister Jason as the payment source, or more precisely, Jason’s credit card. Since Jason has moved on to other projects and almost certainly does not have the same credit card numbers, and neither Webmeister Tim nor I were listed as the contacts/payers for some “i” dotting, “t” crossing exercise, the entity involved had no one to respond to their billing notice.
Anyhow, Tim texted me last night that the electron-work details had been resolved (is it really “paperwork” anymore?) and we will have a strategy chat tonight about the future of the site and its ancillaries. I congratulate him resoundingly for diligence in getting any interwebz/compewder service company to respond in any way on Christmas Day!
I’m still in the midst of a season of scheduling dynamism so don’t get too nervous about any occasional radio silence. Never fear, there is so very much going on and yet to begin on the homestead.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
And they said, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary?”
And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
I pray for you to have a blessed Christmas with loved ones and that you are celebrating the Incarnation, through whom we can be reconciled with The Creator.
After a hiatus Michele and I are back at the Roubo grindstone. We are now looking forward to two or three or four years of near-constant work. Notwithstanding any reservations, we are determined to bring our final three sections of this monumental project to conclusion. Admittedly, if the ongoing social and political exploration of the boundaries of decadence brings about the ultimate collapse of Western Civilization, and the interwebz with it, that could be a serious glitch. As long as we can communicate easily between locations in the Virginia mountains, northern Vermont, and southern France, we will charge ahead.
In the aggregate, these three final sections — interior carpentry (windows, doors, stairs and floors); garden carpentry (surprising amounts on discussion of carving and design principles); and carriages (perhaps the coolest content of the whole encyclopedia) — are roughly 20% larger than Roubo on Marquetry and Roubo on Furniturecombined. LAP has indicated they want the whole pile all at once, so we are about to go “radio silent” for this portion of our working lives. I expect to post approximately zero times over the next couple years on this project.
At the moment my task is to photograph the text pages from my Leonce Laget facsimile set, then to crop and reformat those pages before sending them along to Michele to work from. At that point our well-established process will play out.
text page images to Michele
rough first draft translation back to Don for heavy editing and workshop-friendly annotations and ancillary content
round-robin between Michele and Don until we are both satisfied with the completed draft
completed draft translation and text page images sent off to Philippe (note to self, contact Philippe; he is now living back in France)
send “final” draft to LAP, to begin the round robin with them.
Unless there is a compelling reason, there is no need for me to blog any more about this until we are much nearer the finish line.
The assemblage of the 60-120-60-120 parquetry for my proof-of-concept panel for the tool cabinet, confirmed two critical tool contributors requisite for the process. First is a set of fine kerf saws and the other is an ultra-precise trimming template for the individual units. The blog on the trimming template will be posted soon, but the next few are all about the saws.
In working the heavy sawn veneers, I found myself using several small Japanese saws exclusively — a readily available dovetail saw and a curved tooth veneer saw. I’ve blogged previously about the unavailability of Japanese veneer saws, at least in my experience, which motivated me to look for other alternatives.
One of the alternatives I have used in the past is the saw used for cutting into the center of flat areas, mostly for outlining mortises for carpentry-scale work. Such a saw works perfectly for trimming parquetry elements in part because it has a much larger handle than anything similar. Unfortunately it has a really long neck on the blade, making it “wobbly.” Blending the cutting capabilities with a stiffer handle and neck was a project I bit in to with vigor.
We are now firmly into the wood-stove-heating season, and it happens that this year we have a lot of black walnut to burn. Not anything furniture-worthy, I set all that aside for use in the shop later, but the branches and such. Since we felled several walnut trees two years ago there is a lot of that “clean up” to burn, and burn it we are. One thing is clear in my observation — walnut may be great for furniture making and bowl tuning, but as a firewood? Meh.
For the number of BTUs per unit volume of wood it really fails to deliver. Yes, of course it burns and provides heat as a result. But compared to everything else on the menu for wood burning it falls way short. Plus, it is really ashy, as bad as soft maple.
In fact, walnut comes in dead last in my hierarchy of firewood I can harvest from my own ~70 acres of forest.
The top of that list is occupied by locust, which seems to be almost as BTU-dense as the coal I burn in the shop stove. It can’t be, of course, but goodness I love the output of heat vs. volume and ash I get from locust. I’ve got a lot of it including two stupendous fallen trees up near the ridge property line near the cabin. Even one of those trees will suffice for a complete winter, so I am anxious to bush-hog enough to get my little 4WD truck right up to the windfall. In fact, the two remaining standing trunks are so big I need to hire my pal Bob to come and bring them down. I just do not possess the experience, skill, or saw to bring them to the ground.
Next comes oak, which we have a fair bit of but not as much as locust (firewood-wise). Given the amount of windfall of other species we have up the hill I do not cut much oak. But when I do, once seasoned it is a premium source of heat.
As is ash, of which I have very little. The characteristic of ash that makes it a good firewood is that it needs almost no seasoning to be ready for the woodstove.
Cherry and maple are also good source of heat, and we have a lot of both. The difference between them is that maple is a lot more ashy than cherry for the amount of heat provided. When we burn a lot of maple we have to clean out the stove about once a week. With cherry it would be every two weeks. For oak and locust it could be every three weeks. About equal to cherry is the surprise pick of black birch, which we get a tree or two every so often.
We do not have any tulip poplar so the last spot is occupied by black walnut. It’s just the way it is. We’ve got a very large walnut tree that is ailing and through which the power and phone lines travel. I hope the tree recovers, but if not there’s a huge pile of lousy firewood waiting to happen.
BTW I am almost done splitting and stacking the firewood for next winter and will likely wrap that up with a couple of good days after New Year’s and will weave more occasional firewood processing into my routine thereafter. A couple hours here, a couple hours there, and the mountain of cut wood will turn into a mountain of split and stacked wood.
…when I listen to this version of The Messiah at least once a day. It is so sublime that I will not desecrate it by trying to sing with it, and sometimes I cannot even bring myself to hum. It is that majestic.
There are many features of this performance that I find captivating. Of course the musicians and singers are simply superb. Alto Delphine Galou is my version of the old Benjamin Franklin quip, “Beer is the proof that God loves us.” (Admittedly some of the impact of this saying is lost on me as I do not possess the beer-drinking gene.) Mrs. Galou’s voice is one proof that God loves me.
I love the ensemble who performs the oratorio and the philosophy behind them. The Prague-based Collegium 1704 ensemble emphasizes period instruments, and it is simply amazing the sounds and configuration of those instruments. It’s no big deal to find c.1700 violins. Expensive, but not unusual. But c.1700 trumpets and other brass instruments? Wow.
The vocal ensemble is much smaller than typical for The Messiah, which tends to be a monumental production with a monumentally sized orchestra and choir. Aside from the four soloists there are twenty in the choir, with roughly the same number of instrumentalists. This allows for the massive inertia of most presentations to be overcome with this much more crisp and sprightly version.
Finally, the setting, again made possible by the smaller ensembles, provides a much livelier sound; the giant spaces necessary for huge performances muddy the music in my opinion.
I must not be the only one, the video has been watched almost 8 million time.
It always surprises me how many last-minute Christmas orders I get for the very limited range of products in the Donstore.
Be forewarned that Mrs. Barn and I will be coming and going A LOT over the next few weeks, so if you want me to send you something before Christmas make sure to get your order in by COB this coming Friday. After Friday, orders will be at least a week later, perhaps even two or three weeks.
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