Twisted

For the past week I’ve been undertaking a deep clean/archaeology of the barn required by the upcoming Historic Finishing workshop.  Given that I’ve only had one workshop in the classroom in the past four years, the disarray was considerable given that I do not possess the tidiness gene.  In part it has been like Christmas as I discovered a lot of things I knew I had but could not put my hands on, including the machete Mrs. Barn had requested for some of her heavier weeding.

Today the 1952 tune “Twisted” by Annie Ross, written for and first performed by Lambert, Henricks and Ross, was running through my mind.

The reason?  A piece of I tree that featured in the first Roubo book a dozen years ago.  To illustrate the sawing methods described in L’Art du Menuisier I made both a saw and saw bench in a similar configuration to those Roubo illustrated, then my friend Craig and I photographed ourselves sawing the trunk of a plum tree that had died in the back yard a few years previous, and the harvested trunk had been air drying under cover for several years ever since.

Well, I came across one of the half trunks today and was quite startled at the degree to which it had twisted in the years since.  It was almost three inches out-of-plane.  At the time we finished, the saw plane was straight, or at least as straight as we could make it.

Wood can be fickle.