part two, glue to part one.

Blow jobs, slappies and five sets, weed and tequila. Turning 18 was fucking rad!
When my family sat me down and told me of plans to visit new schoos for my senior year, and that the school I was attending had asked my parents to please not send me back I was actually impressed. I was stoked even to feel the fire and anger it brought into me, to know that whatever they could bind me to I could untie myself, that no matter what they attempt to inflict upon me I had proven that I could undo their best. I felt liberated to tell them to fuck off, and let me be. I wasn't hurting enyone, I wasn't violent or dangerous, i was an 18 year old behving like one on a skateboard with my friends. But the one they pulled next with a little help from an ADD expert was a doozy.
On August 4th or 5th, 1994, I was told about a flight to virginia I was going on with them to visit an art school, and that was it. no detailed pitch in glossy brochures, no test to take for placement or aptitude, just get on the flight. I was nursing a pair of bruised heels and a hangover when they told me so I just went back to sleep, woke up around 9 at night, ate a box of cheerios and walked out the door with my board and 10 bucks I stole from my mom the day before. The rest was fun, skate up hill, stop by friends places while skating, take a nap in the wee hours of the morning on the waterfront, hit mcdees for a juice on the way home in the morning.
Ten or so days later I am at the airport, didn't pack a bag, didn't give a damn. Halifax,N.S. to Dulles intl, to Richmond, VA. and it is fucking HOT! the sweat on the back of my neck ran straight to my heels when we stepped into the early evening air of the north of the south. Richmond blew me away, I wanted to run out of the car and just skate into the heart of it, find the shitty parking lots with yellow curbs, steal beer from kmart and get shot at, Hah! The south, the fucked up backwards and still too dumb to give a shit south. I loved it. I wanted to go wherever it was we were going.
That night my mom had a headache as usual and my dad and I went for drive into the city. He dug it too, I sensed it in him and he did too. We drove a rental car through the city, down once thriving 50's and 60's main drags, cement pillars supporting covered roofed blocks of storefronts, shaded by dead trees. Cars I had believed extinct parked at angle to the sidewalk in a way I thought forgotten and only recreated in hollywood. There was an evening shade, a color I'd never felt before. It was glowing and red, as the sun dripped molten plasma of orange and red atop the city scape on its way to below the horizon. My dad and I talked of what we saw, he talked of u.s. policies and history, of civil and american movements. I saw failed america again. I was used to seeing it wherever I was in the states. Boston, New England, New York. An east coast of references to what supposedly once was, but has never actually been.
Richmond looked tough, gruff and dirty. I saw spots to skate, I liked their asphalt, nobody would give a shit about a skateboarder here.
My dad drove us back to the motel on the highway behind the airport, screen doors that slammed shut, green carpet in air conditioned rooms with blue porcelain bathrooms. More diagonal parking below our second floor room. they had their own room attached to my broom closet of a bedroom. I took my twenty bucks u.s. and went outside once I knew the old man was asleep next door. Walking on the outside of each foot, always keeping one foot firmly planted while moving creates a focus and awareness about the noise you make as you move through a space. I left my room and shut the screen door silently, breath bated until sitting on the highway curb below.
We choose things and we don't choose other things. SOmetimes the choice we make is to not do something in front of us, something all signs are pointing towards fulfilling. And when we choose not to, instead of choose to, we are acting in warrior fashion. As I sat upon a crumbling concrete and gravel curb alongside Williamsburgh Rd. also called the 60. I just looked it up on Google maps and found myself standing there using the tools available now. Holy shit.
I smoked marlboros, about seven or eight over a few hours of deciding if I should get into a vehicle and split. Just split, leave them all wondering for years to come where I went, what became of me, gone.
I felt a pull in my chest towards that road, to stick out a thumb, to try and see what I was made of, what I could become from nothing but a lighter and some smokes in the south. I wanted to get into a semi and get as far as I could, go as far as I could on nothing. take the road to nowhere and let it go where? This was compelling, in the exorcist sense, I felt a pull to do this very strongly and had little to do but smoke cigarettes until my thumb went up into the air on its own.
I felt fear though too, I felt temptation and fear all at once, and in the middle of that is where I sat smoking. I drank cokes out of the vending machine, and thought about it for hours. How would I get home? Would I ever get home? Would I want to? I knew that the point of doing something like this, of taking off for good like this was a commitment. It was deciding to never go back, to never have family again, to let go of them all forever and be alone, something I actually was desperate for. Alone to be able to find out who the hell I was. I knew it then, I was ready to do it and do so without much remorse, but my thumb never went into the air. I just kept lighting smokes and sitting on the curb, waiting for something else to happen instead.
I din't have to wait long, as the morning came and I slept in the back of the car for hours as my parents and I drove west on the 60, to the 45 south towards Farmville, but not quite. Remember, we were on our way to visit an arts high school in the woods.
I fell asleep for a while and woke up to a pair of grocery bags being thrown in the back seat and a stern and angry looking pair of parents.
A tour was given to me, displaying their one room schoolhouse in which students were upgrading their schooling or studying to challenge the g.e.d There were no art classes. Of any kind.
Next I saw a campsite? large pine a-frame structures 25-30 feet tall, numbering around five or six of these surrounding a central tent witha concrete hearth and four large logs to sit on. Obviously a circle for something to happen within. Then the tour was over and we all went back to the car, where my parents handed me two bags of clothes and said good-bye. Stunned I sadi only thank you, and good bye. They left, I was in virginia.

I love Hanging Shelves

I love the way they change your field of view. I love addin new planes to your senses. I dig it how a kitchen is transformed or a shitter becomes a sitter. Shelves are for hanging out with, chillin on and teaching your kids to jump from. I find wood now that I can carry around, take it to work or shape it at home, throw some ideas into how to expand its abilities and affect upon a spaces functionality and nobility. The word Nobility is key to really getting stoned and thinking about what makes cool design and furniture and environment. Nobility suggests an intrinsic quality of purpose, and the character and strength to carry its function. So yeah, I like building shelves out of wood these days, then putting them in my house.

Glue is for Biscuits

The Biscuits are in the box, the glue is in the bottle, and they are both tasty.

They are called biscuits and how these little things ever started getting chewed upon beats me, they taste awful and really hurt coming back out. Biscuits are for joining, not eating.

Below you will find the story of four pieces of Fir that went through a whole lot of milling together, became good friends and are destined to spend the next hundred or so years hanging out together in the form of a round table.

So that little thing in the photo next to the square is called a pencil. I wear 'em in my hat. They are good for marking where to biscuit your pieces together with the square. marking the seams on all four pieces, remembering where your template will be when routering so as not to end up going through a biscuit and exposing it to the edge of your table,using the square gives you a straight set of lines. Simple step.

After marking the lines I set the depth of my biscuit joiner using the outside edge of the wood, which will be cut off when I use a template to make the table rounder than a square.

Adjusting the depth so that the joiner cuts exactly in the center of the width of my boards will help to prevent the table from warping or setting up unevenly.

If the boards are not biscuited in exactly the same spots it will affect the surface of the table badly. Running your hand over the table you would feel the rise and fall between the boards, and no amount of sanding this out will give you an even surface with a consistent thickness.

After all the biscuit holes are cut I sand the surfaces real lightly, to rid the joined edges of burrs and left overs. Next is glue and putting biscuits in the holes and setting up the clamps and bars.

Before the gluing happens I set up all my clamps, all my bars and all the big ass clamps I will need. Glue sets pretty quick and in order to be able to clean off the excess that pours out from the seams when clamped it is really important to have everything in arms reach and ready to go. When gluing the pieces together I make sure to line up all my marks exactly how they were drawn, thus making sure that the biscuits are sitting pretty in their little biscuit homes.

After putting glue over the holes and running the entire length of the boards I put in the biscuits and then slide all the pieces together. Using steel bars and clamping the top and bottom bars together across the pieces before putting the clamps across the table I make sure that the surface stays flat and even. Keeping all the boards seams perfectly flush with the steel bars works like a charm. The big ass clamps go on after all the bars go across.

All the clamps are on, so I clean all the glue coming out of the seams off with a wet cloth.

I then set the whole rig up on blocks and come back after 24 hours to take all the clamps off and begin the shaping and finishing process. stay tuned...

Planers and Joiners Eat Fingers for Breakfast

Here is the lowdown on what time in the shop actually entails.

The wood on the left is Fir. The wood on the right are Ski cores made of Aspen and Ash. This post is about what happened to the Fir.

My ol'Lady has had her eyes on a round side table from Ikea, and I can no longer support them when I can do it myself these days.

Using an existing 28" diameter template left over from a previous project, I have set out here to show you how I build and finish a round table. Built of Fir I found in Nelson BC in the winter of 2008, the wood has been hanging out in my wood pile awaiting a shape to be decided until now.

Dry, un-warped and with a very small crown on all of the 2x12's I found, I cut them down to 4 foot lengths giving me eight pieces to use, four of which I am using for this project.

Found wood is good wood. So aside from glue and biscuits, and the power to run the tools this project takes, and as I am doing this work in my spare time, the total cost of this table will be less than 20 bucks.

So the first step is to put a rough cut straight edge on the wood, just by running the best side of the wood against the fence of the table saw I cut the 12" down to 8". It is important to always give yourself a larger cut by a fair margine when you are going to be using the joiner and planner. Saving material to be cut off 1/16" of an inch at a time will allow you more flexibility when it comes to compensating for the woods inherent imperfections. It is easier to take more wood off than it is to put wood back on, as the price of a quality board stretcher is far to much these days.

Moving from the saw to the planer I need to put a roughly flat and square surface on the face of my boards. This surface will be used to put a square side on my board that I will be able to use on the saw to get a clean and square cut to width. Resting the board on the infeed table of the planer and holding the wood from the end, one gently pushes the board through the planer, allowing the feed rollers inside to pull the wood through and chisel away something like 132 cuts per inch as the board runs through. The planer can be adjusted for depth of cut into your wood, though I never take off more than 1/16th of an inch at a time. Taking off any more than that will bite you in the ass down the road as the wood tends to tear rather than be cut, exposing large divots in the grain that you will need to sand out or fill later(if possible) leading to an uneven and imperfect table surface.

After passing the wood through the planer once to get a roughly clean face I move to the joiner.

Check the photo of the fir on the left, in the photo at the top of the page, and compare it to after going through the planer above. See the difference?

I am using the joiner to put a totally straight side on the wood. The joiner spins a whole shitload of super sharp and scary chisel tips frighteningly fast, ripping the underside of your board a flat and square surface as you pass the board over the bit. This machine is fed electricity and fingers twice a month, and when taken care of properly will do an excellent job of helping you create perfectly square sides with which you can create flush joinery.

To use the joiner you hold the freshly planed face of the board against the fence, totally flush with the vertical steel wall, this is the key to getting a straight and square edge. The first pass you see above is step one on the joiner. This puts a square edge I will then use against the fence back on the table saw, giving me a perfectly straight board after cutting.

From the joiner I go back to the saw, cutting all the board lengths, resting the freshly joined side against the fence and cutting the boards to their final width of 7 and 3/4" wide. All the boards are now straight and feature totally square edges which is good when it comes time to biscuit them all together. Having the boards be straight and feature truly square edges means that I will have very tight seams between each piece after biscuiting and clamping it all together.

This gives a much better surface for rolling dice upon and prevents your table from rotting when drinks spill and are unable to seep into the cracks of your table. Very important.

Now the edges are done and it is back to the planer to get the wood down to its final thickness. This is also done to get the surface of the wood down to a grain pattern that I like. I planed these pieces down to 1 and 1/4" thick from the 1 and 5/8" they were at the start. Planing the wood a 1/16th" at a time and doing all the pieces consecutively, then lowering the planer depth another 1/16th" at a time insures that all your pieces are the same thickness when finished.

Both sides are planed, and thickness is checked periodically during the process using a thickness caliper,(available at Lee Valley Tools) which is pretty accurate and gives you a solid reading of where you are at in the process and how much further you need to go.

There are a number of problems I often run into when planing that are worth mentioning here. It is imperative that you are running very sharp blades, free of divots or chips. Any imperfection in the chisel blades of the planer will be reflected in the surface of the wood. Long raised lines, no wider than a fraction of a 16th of an inch will show up on the surface of the wood after coming out of the planer. They can be sanded out during the sanding process, and I often have to do so, but spending the time and money on running a sharp and debris free machine pay off in time lost down the road. For home projects however I don't mind a bit of sanding, as it gives off a wonderful aroma that does a great job of masking my terrible stink. Ask anyone who has worked with me, they will tell you.

That is it for milling the wood. the next set of steps involves biscuiting, gluing and clamping, if you are interested in seeing these steps check out the post titled "Glue is for Biscuits".

Wood is Good.

miters and the dreaded crown ...

In the days before power tools and back when carpenters wore tweed suits and leather aprons cutting miters was done with jigs and hand saws, chisels and planes to fit with perfection.

These days we use heavy compound miter saws, dewalts. setting angles and compounding them is a cinch, so why is cutting crown so damn hard? SHouldn't it be an easy straightforward task?

I watched my boss spend an hour the other day running down the ladder back and forth to the saw to get pieces to fit properly. He is a master craftsman. I am not. We both agreed that there was some sort of secret to doing this a better way, but were at a loss for what it was.

It got me thinking about what life as a carpenter was like in ages past. How much thought went into tasks we use machines to do for us now, and how we have lost an entire set of skills over the past 50 years by depending upon machines and electricity to do the thinking for us.

What kind of Carpenter was jesus anyway? Was he any good, or was he just another fly by night pot head/alcoholic framer doing jobs for cash as fast as he could. Did he get along with ihs fellow carpenters? Were framing Carpenters all red necks back then too?

What about the middle ages when castles were being slowly built and stone masons depended upon carpenters for there scaffolding and cranes? Did the people building the jigs and support material for the masons get choked on how slow stone took to work with? Were carpenters getting screwed by other tradesmens scheduling problems as so often is the case today?

I wonder often about these things, while cutting on a table saw, or planing hardwood on an electric planer. Before routers existed how long did it take to quarter round and edge? Did carpenters receive respect for their work? or was it much like today where building with your hands is considered blue collar, and the boys in the cubicles and desks are getting the respect of the world.

I am whole heartedly in love with my work, it is never the same, inconsistent and challenging and above all constantly rewarding. What took a full day to do the first time can often take minutes the next time. I can think of little else in the world as easy to love as this kind of work.

The Road to Virginia (part 1)

Drinking and getting high like so many other 17 year old boys in 1993, I felt as though I fit in, belonged to a culture of skateboarders and rabble-rousers, dudes looking for a good time finding trouble and getting away with it. I had spent the past year in high school in southern vermont, snowboarding, smoking pot, visiting Boston to skate on the weekends and getting into all the regular teenage boy bullshit. I spent most of my free time from class, ( a relative term as class was an elective schedule in my mind) learning how to steal car radios, how to grow pot in the woods, how to steal 40's and packs of Camel smokes, and trying anything to get girls to like me.

At 4'11" I was the smallest guy in school, which I made up for by being the loudest and the wildest most of the time. My friends were my roommates of the previous year, Jack and Corbin. Jack hailed from Marin county, and Corbin came from Brooklyn and Montana, a native american whose family was steeped in history and a fair bit of legend as well. Jack and I hit it off immediately, he skated and shredded as I did, and we were both on the small side, while Corbin was a mellower character, who provided both Jack and I with insight into the ways of being a cool cat with the ladies.

Jack and I treated the school as a park for most of the beginning of the school-year, hauling benches out of classrooms and cafeterias to skate, building snowboard parks with the schools snow cat, and generally doing whatever the fuck we could get away with along with the genius assistance of a fellow by the name of Phil, who built anything out of everything and was as clandestine and reclusive as you could get at that age without being accused of resembling a Unabomber.

Phil once built a portable bong out of a Carmex container, radio antenna, bottle cap and screen from his dorm room window. It worked well, and Phil built it in all of 10 minutes.

One fall day in 1993 Phil, Jack and I, along with a hilarious ESL student from Tokyo named Seshi Yokoyama set out into the 500 wooded acres of school grounds in search of a spot to build the fort to end all forts. Phil had scoped a ravine deep in the back woods that had a perfect vantage point over the cross country ski trail that ran in the gorge below.

Putney School was built on 400 year old french sheepherders land, attached to a dairy farm that also served to feed the school. The wooded acres that surrounded the property had been used for cross country ski trails and students getting high in for the past 50 years. There were various forts all over the place. The "brush fort" was made of twisted bracken and shrubbery woven together to form a camouflaged igloo of sorts, there were a few tree forts scattered through out the forest as well, and Phil had made a point of searching out and evaluating them all earlier in the fall. He had decided at some point that they all were to exposed, there locations known to those teachers who made a point of seeking out kids getting high to bust them. So Phil had found this spot.

Untouched, forgotten and hidden from all below it, the location for this fort had a sheep herders stone wall running right up to the edge of the cliff, which plunged vertically down to the ski trail 60 feet below.

The four of us hiked out to the gorge with 180 feet of navy rope, 60 feet of 10' wide rubberized chain-link fence stolen from the schools basketball court fence rebuild project, and all the dope, cigarettes and beer we could find. Phil had designed a giant Hammock that we suspended above the gorge. Tying off the rope to two huge oak trees on the fort side of the gorge and threading the rope through the fence we then tied off the ends of the rope to oaks on the other side of the gorge, creating a 10' wide 90' long hammock that hung secretly above the gorge, invisible to those below due to the fence being coated in green rubber which blended perfectly into the tree canopy above. We would lay in the hammock smoking joints and drinking beers silently watching teachers on cross country ski's pass beneath us in search of students doing exactly what we were. Phil was a genius. And we were stoked.

The fort was an ever growing project, first designed as a simple rock wall form we changed the plans by adding five columns of 6'' thick pine in front with a beam across the top to support the rafters made of saplings that ran 12 feet back to the rear wall and down 3 feet, giving the roof a mellow pitch strong enough to support the canvas lined roof covering which we then hid under boughs of pine and spruce. The sheep herders wall supplied us with the stones we needed to build, and by the end of the first week of building at night we had a safe, camouflaged well hidden fort in which to get as fucked up as we wanted. But it was cold. And it lacked lights and beer coolers.

Phil and Jack and I spent a Sunday building a slate hearth in the fort with a well drafted chimney in which we could have fires that would send a plume of smoke through the chimney out into the dense Oak pine and spruce tree canopy above. The fireplace warmed the fort well, and we proceeded to bury three coolers in the ground around the fort, covering the lids with tree boughs to hide them, we now had hidden fridges for beer. And as for lights, well we just strung stolen mag lites up inside and ran through batteries a lot.

Seshi rolled up one day in late november, while Jack, Phil and I were chilling on the hammock, with a few of his fellow Japanese students and pulled out a 1 ounce bag of pot, which he had decided he wanted to smoke all at once. So he and Phil rolled a joint , which when finished was the the length and thickness of a paper towel tube. The news of Seshis intention had been spread earlier the previous evening, and that afternoon people beagn to find their way to the fort. Around 15 pot heads, guys and girls alike, sat in and around the fort getting really really high with us. The joint burned for over half an hour, filling the entire area with the scent of Seshis bud. No teachers showed up, no one got busted, everyone was fucked up, and it was way out of control. Phil expressed legitamate concern about too many people knowing about the fort, and he was proven right.

In the weeks that followed more and more kids frequented the fort, until eventually teachers, like Dave Arnstein, a physics professor notorious for following students in to the woods to catch them getting high, followed students and kids got busted and the fort was found. End of story for all the hard work and genius that we had put into it.

The lesson though, of DIY, and being clever enough to outsmart authority had not been lost on us all, and Phil had been the teacher. I returned to Nova Scotia at the end of that school year filled with a newfound ability to do shit on my own, not needing permission or acceptance from others in order to move an idea into action. This was a revolutionary thing for me.

Skateboarding and getting fucked up all summer was my intention, and I saw it through for much of that summer, until the time of my 18th birthday I had been carefree and getting away with all kinds of bullshit. I had made out with a few girls, almost got a blow-job behind a church, stolen lots of booze, run from cops and not gotten caught, smoked huge piles of weed and hash, and just gotten into all the shit I wanted to. I was pretty happy for an angry teenager.

My folks were not.