Illtyd Perkins Woodworking

The oak has to be returned. Exchanged. Brought back. 

Alone on the 7.50 ferry; it's not at all sunny, the wind is simply cold and unfriendly; I read yesterday's Driftwood in the cab. The windows stream inside with condensation; it's chill, damp and smells like a dog kennel – which is odd, because no dog has been here since Churchill died.

At Westwind I am slightly exonerated, since the rack I took the nice (red) oak planks from is labelled "White Oak". Lars tells me that this is a mistake - a new and ignorant young man didn't know the difference. I feel like an old and ignorant man, since I didn't either, apparently. I am kindly guided to an adjacent stack of white oak. I feel like an OAP being helped across the road, and am lent a tape measure. Lars kindly refrains from explaining how to use it.

However, there is bright spot. I see a piece of nicely gribbelled and rust-stained wood leaning against the wall. I buy it for $20.00, and take it home. (On the ferry, I take my penknife and cut out the sodden carpet on the driver's side. The sheet metal separating me from the wheel well has rusted through. No wonder there is a permanent small puddle on the floor, and that the truck windows stream with water, and there is a smell of old wet dog. This is a very satisfying moment.)

I had a friendly 'phone call yesterday asking if I'd be interested in contributing a piece (of what?) to a show and auction to raise funds for World Bicycle Relief . SRAM is a bike-parts manufacturer in Chicago, and last year they held their first pART PROJECT , which essentially gives the artist a box of assorted bike hardware and lets them get on with things. This is pretty much a catnip project for me, and hence it will have to be shoe-horned (un-mix that metaphor.Ed.) into the late winter and spring schedule. Frankly, there isn't a lot of space in this "schedule", since a trip to the UK and France and Picton, Ontario, is planned for March and April (six weeks??), and then there is the matter of boat bottom painting and general maintenance prior to a planned extended summer's sailing to the Broughton Archipelago, and then North to what is now called "The Great Bear Rain Forest" - otherwise more easily visualized as the bits and pieces on the East side of Hecate Strait, north of Queen Charlotte Sound. (She still rules the waves, but has been booted out of Haida Gwaii.)  I have no idea what parts will be in the box - that's rather the point, I suppose; but gears, surely? Chain? Crank? Hubs and bearings? The simpler components of the Orrery?

If my last post was on 2011-07-27, and today's post is dated 2011-10-08, then there must have been a three month period without an entry. Much less a journal than a quadriannual. Enough said.

After a busy couple of weeks earlier this month spent preparing for the biennial printers' fair (or Wayzgoose) in Vancouver, which really deserves an entry of its own, today is the first day of more-or-less directly remunerative work. Repairs can be a pleasant way to get back into things, so:

This looks a bit like taking Grandad's Waltham pocket watch apart to clean it. However, it's essentially it's a sort of psychological ploy to ensure that the work gets done properly (or gets done at all). Perhaps rock-climbers do this when faced with a tricky climb - put themselves deliberately in a position of no-return, when the only way down is up.

This bass has been in the wars, certainly. The inside is water stained - odd; the outside finish had been heavily abraded in parts, perhaps with a wire brush. The neck has acquired a fearsome bow (visible in photo), which caused the fingerboard to separate itself along most, but not all of it length. At some point the two were forcibly rent apart. A new neck and fingerboard were originally all that was required, but it very quickly became clear that far more work would be needed: many of the glue joints had failed, and the bouts were barely attached to the top and bottom.

The lying press is coming along; the tub (stand) is almost complete, and tomorrow I'll start work on the press, which I'm looking forward to.

Still to do: fit the 2 long threaded 3/8" rods through the side-pieces; make the four removable caps for the 1" holes (visible on the end uprights) for their associated nuts and washers; fit the bottom board for the tub. Final sand and finish.

The only tangible result of the recent postal strike was the delayed arrival of our various magazine subscriptions. Once rural mail delivery resumed, there was a sudden rush of Economists, for some inexplicable reason TWO copies of Harpers (disclaimer: I don't read it, but it has excellent Cryptic Crosswords, plus twenty years or more of  accessibly archived dittos. "Angels at play arrive monthly? (7)"), but no New Yorker, past or current. Not that this was  greatly disturbing, as magazines in any case arrive only fitfully and sometimes in clumps, like the old Number 27 bus. (Chiswick to Twickenham via Kew Bridge, Kew Gardens and Richmond.)
When a solitary New Yorker did finally crawl into the group mailbox on Mereside, it was worth the wait: an Alice Munro short story, a long account of thievery and malfeasance in the world of New York hedge funds, and, most welcome of all, an essay by Adam Gopnik on Learning to Draw.
(Here I have to take a break and head out for a friend's 64th. birthday. Must not forget the Tiramisu for the potluck which J. left in the fridge.)
Back again; anyway, the Gopnik essay did shed a little uneasy light on my mild depression which followed last week's delivery of the finished book-press. Partly of course it was just the usual let-down that follows a time of intense activity - post [whatever] all is sad - but it was more than that. It was also a sense of being uncool, (old?) somehow un-with-it. Gopnik, an art critic and remarkably intelligent essayist, describes his attempts to learn to draw in the classical style, and ruefully discovers that despite taking an intense series of lessons, he is, ultimately, incapable of drawing. The essence of the art is more than technique, although technique is necessary, and not at all mere.
Gopnik draws like I do - grip the pencil firmly, look at the object, draw a nice line around the "shape", and then decorate this shape with appropriate details. His teacher, on the other hand, hold his pencil loosely, brushes it suggestively over the paper, and denotes the essence of his subject with a few lines, which are not in any way "outlines." All Gopnik's efforts to imitate this inevitably fail. Proper drawing (cool) is natural, lifelike, curved, shaded, and (god spare us) organic. (Manley Hopkins knew a truth or two about dappled things). Uncool is straight, right-angled, level, square (now there's a word with another meaning), precise; a carefully outlined shape (rectangular box) with fiddly detailly stuff  filled in to make it "interesting". It could also be characterised as a sort of sterile formalism, technique substituted for natural forms, style over substance. 
When it comes down to it, I'm just not comfortable with natural things. I like wood to be straight, dry, free of error (shakes, checks, knots, bark, sap, stain, mould, rot, pitch &c.). predictable, even-grained, biddable. Which doesn't leave much natural woodiness over. How uncool is that?

That's it, then. I should have posted this photo on Saturday, but couldn't really face it, which makes not a lot of sense. Odd.

It's been a very busy week on the standing press. The base and drawers presented no problems - lots of bits of wood, which always take time, but nonetheless straightforward enough.  The top section was another matter. I still hadn't tried out the  "new"  2.5" wood-screw threading tap, which has been decorating a workshop shelf for over a year, but the time had come:

It likes a little raw linseed oil to ease its passage.

Quite a degree of force is needed as it cuts the full diameter thread:

If there had been time, I'd have had a sleeve welded to the top of the tap to take a heavy T bar. As it is, a section of channel bar and a large crescent wrench will do. I've had to use a half-inch socket extension to get through the deep hole for the thread.

Hard work, but simple enough. Then there's the question of the actual screw itself. This is very much a boot-strapping operation: first use the tap to make a section of female thread in a 2'' piece of wood. Then use this to make the die to cut the thread onto a 2.5" turned billet of suitable wood. The cutting tool is a 60 degree router bit extending into the cut female thread.

Things have become more busy than I'd prefer, but then, like cooking on an electric stove, it's always either too hot or too cold and hardly ever "just right".

Some months (is it so long?) ago I, and perhaps a dozen other local woodworkers, were invited to take part in a small show organized by our local Arts Council: "100 Mile Furniture". It seemed comfortably far off at the time — July 2011 (2011?? It didn't even exist. Thus do grasshoppers and butterflies distinguish themselves from toiling ants and contributors to pension plans.) Anyway, whatever we entered for the show had to be made from material (presumably wood) that came from within a hundred miles of Saltspring. (Yes, Canada is a wholly metric country, but "160 Kilometer Furniture Show" doesn't have the right ring to it. Anyway, we're not metric, not really.)

I spent several months trying to decide what to make, but couldn't come up with anything that excited me - and if it didn't interest me, it's hardly likely that it would interest anybody else. Then it was suddenly this year, and even more suddenly Spring, and then late Spring. Oh well, there was always a chair - I have a notion of making a set of ladderback ash dining chairs (with arms), rush seats, and short shallow rockers to allow one to lean comfortably back from table on two legs; but chairs come in sets, and chairs need tables, and it was all too much - and not all that exciting anyway. Plus I don't have any more rush until this summer's harvest. (Definitely a 100 Mile (160k) qualifier - it grows less than ten miles away.)

The Bed was first mentioned just over a year ago; my Moleskine Weekly Notebook records the following: "2010. Tuesday  April 6: 9 - 9.30 see S. & ?".On the facing page are notes from their visit to the shop: "Outside Table, teak, unfinished. 10' x 5'. Chunky.  Legs 5.5" square. Aggregate panels." Then: "Bed + tables. Mattress California. Oak? Space avlbl for 124" incl. 2 table. Mattress Ht - 26". End 50" high head, 30" high foot. Sides down to floor." (The teak table & benches were finished last summer. Some account of the making is elsewhere in this journal.)

Later S. made a scale sketch of the bed on a large sheet of quarter inch squared paper. It seemed all a bit plain - two great  rectangles of wood at head and foot, and two wide boards for the sides. No curves, no decorative elements or possibilities, although she had indicated various widths for the planks which were to make up the ends. There we left things until the table was finished, and then email discussions resumed. First to be decided was the wood. Oak, whether red, white, Garry, or Japanese, was immediately rejected, as were sapele (cheap looking, too red), cherry (don't remember why), walnut (not my choice either, for anything except possibly coffins). Perhaps it was me who brought up the possibility of teak - more as a diversionary tactic than a likely choice; after all, the choice of solid 3" teak for the head and foot, and 2" for the side rails would be absurdly extravagant, surely? The ground would then be prepared for a "sensible" alternative - white oak, perhaps, which I like more than anything.....?

Back in the middle of February we and some of our immediate family converged on the small island of Isla Mujeres off the coast of the Yucutan for a short winter break, primarily for a nostalgic visit to the Naval Hospital where our daughter N. was born in 1980. Things didn't go quite as planned (although we did visit the hospital) - J.'s mum died on day three of the trip, and J. immediately flew back to Victoria. I came back a week later, and woodworking activity is only now starting to resume a reasonable routine in the small world of the workshop.
There have been other changes too: J. retired from her job with the local School District (also in February), so the old morning pattern of hasty breakfasts, and increasingly reluctant and hurried departures for Ganges and the High School, is broken. Our mornings are now more leisurely: I head down to the workshop at around eight, light the fire, and come back up to the house for breakfast with J. (This is changing as the weather warms (finally), and the fire no longer needs to be lit.) Coffee breaks and lunches are shared, and oddly, it's often pleasantly easy to work late in the afternoon and early evening, knowing that the house is warm, the lamps lit, and, very possibly, dinner cooking....