When Life Hand Your Neighbor Several Tons of Lemons…

… of course, you get ready to make 100 Gragg chairs!

Departing home the other morning for a manly breakfast with my woodworking friend TomS I encountered the roar of a chain saw and the necessary surrounding activities at my neighbor Bob’s house.  As a dead-tree sorta guy, I was compelled to stop and check it out.  It seems that Bob was removing some mature trees that had become a risk to his home.  As someone who just last month replaced a chunk of roof as the result of tree damage, I am entirely sympathetic to the sentiment.

As I got close I saw the last vestiges of a red oak, standing stark against the sky.  All I could think was, “There’s at least 100 Gragg chairs on the hoof!”  I asked Bob if I could have it, and when he said, “Yes,” I asked the tree-trimmer to leave it in 5’ long logs for me on the ground.

When I returned from breakfast, there the 6′  logs were neatly on the ground awaiting my ministrations.  And how magnificent they were!  The bottom section was well over 36” diameter, and the successive ones an inch or so smaller.  The upper two did have some branch stumps, but it looked like there was plenty of meat left to salvage.

Thus began my unexpected nearly two-week adventure (thus far; fitting it in amongst a full slate of home improvement projects in preparation for moving was, shall we say, domestically challenging) in reclaiming some spectacular wood from a suburban neighborhood, using only sledge and wedge.  Fortunately TomS has tutored me well and the harvesting proceeded well.  Not easily, but well.

With Bob’s grandchildren watching along with him and another neighbor, I began by identifying the natural fault lines of the log, and drove in the first wedge.  Then another.  And another.  Within a couple minutes the cr-a-a-a-a-ck of sundered wood filled the air. BTW, Bob’s granddaughter C graciously agreed to take some pictures.  I had hoped she could portray me as young, slender, handsome, rich, and suave.  She mostly failed at that, although my loss of 85 pounds over the last 12 years is evident.

The kids and adults alike watched in wonder as over the next half hour or so I split a nearly 3,000 pound log in half.

I had the pleasure of stopping periodically to explain what was happening to Bob and his grandkids. They thought what I was doing was almost magic.

Following the “Rule of Halves” that TomS taught me – always split a piece of wood in half to keep it balanced and splitting evenly – I then split the half into quarters, then the quarters into eighths, all on the radial plane.

In an hour or so I had those four sections free and ready for further work, all while using the lower half of the log as my “work platform.”  I don’t do this sort of work regularly so I am pretty slow.

Moving the “eighths” to the ground I split them one more time into “sixteenths.”

They were still exceedingly heavy, too heavy to load into my truck (which was the ultimate goal for the exercise – they needed to be moved out of the way ASAP.)

So, each “sixteenth” was split but on the tangential plane, and each of those two 32nds were slated for a second tangential split.

The firewood pile of pith was sizable and grew quickly.

The inner section was easily split with the pith being discarded into the firewood pile, but the sapwood was simply too squishy to split.  I will return to them for that step perhaps in a month or so once it has dried a bit and will split more easily.

Sharp eyes will note that the splits have a bit of wind to them, perhaps 10 degrees give or take.  While that might bring on the vapors to someone building 17^th century board furniture, for me that is no problem.  Virtually all of the elements I employ in constructing Gragg chairs have been reduced to approximately 5/8” x 1-1/4” cross sections, and once these are steamed they pretty much submit to my demands for them to conform to their bending forms.

This was the harvest from the first QUARTER of the first of three logs! After I get done with this, it might be decades before I need to do it again.

It took me two pretty full days to harvest just the first (bottom) log.  My arms hurt all the way to my knees, or perhaps it was my knees that hurt all the way to my shoulders.  The yield, even with the inner quarter missing when I split off the pith, was probably close to 2,200 pounds.  All I know was that my little truck was groaning as I loaded the pile and moved it to my place two houses down.  Since wet oak is about 45% water that weight will diminish naturally over the coming months, and will be helped by a fairly rapid loss of about 1/3 as I split off the sap wood.

A complete full-arm/continuous-leg Gragg Chair requires about as much steam bent oak of the size of a standard 8-foot 2×4.  At this point I think my inventory of raw materials is approaching 150 chairs.  I only have two chairs commissioned thus far, but when I get more orders and have streamlined my process enough to host a workshop on building them, I’ll be ready.

But for now, I’m only 2/3 of the way towards getting these beauties out of Bob’s yard, to be followed by a lot more work getting ready for use and even more in making the chairs.

Stay tuned.

Dealing With Book Acquisition Disorder – 4, a/k/a The Revenge of Occam’s Razor

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.