Button, button, who has a button?

If you have been reading this blog long enough you will know I am a devotee of the Bodger's forum in the UK. In a recent post, someone wanted suggestions for projects for a 4-year old daughter. Now, since the village kids descend on me en masse in the summer, this is a very interesting question to me. I threw out a few suggestions. The last one I threw out was making novelty buttons out of branchwood. So today I picked up a stick from the floor and said "can we make some buttons out of this?" The stick was birch. I took (for once) pictures of every step. Some of the pictures are a bit blurry because the autofocus did not auto. Focus.

There are some rules to this game. One is no power tools. I cheated once, but I did not want to go out to the shop (-15C) and unearth a hand drill. No matter, 4-year olds (4YO) can use a cordless drill. Second is to keep asking yourself if a 4YO can do this step. Here I use experience as a guide. Third is to remember that while 4YO are very enthusiastic, their patience is limited. So instant results are desirable. Almost indispensable.

First job is to put the stick in the workmate and shave it down. I used a spoke shave; it is too small for a drawknife.
When I got through the stick was about 9mm diameter. Good enough, I am not trying to fit some particular buttonhole. Next job, cut off a reasonable length of stick. Again eyeballed. What you want for all sawing operations in this project is a very fine-tooth, narrow-kerf saw. My japanese miniature dozuki is ideal.
Almost any fine-tooth saw will work, however. It wants to be fine-tooth because the buttons will look awful if the teeth are too coarse. So quite by accident I now have a 90mm by 9mm rough cylinder. At this point it pays to stop and think. You could, of course, cut off slices and then drill them. But it is much easier to reverse the process. Drill first and cut later. This will save a lot of time later (rule three). Furthermore the holes will be all at the same spacing. But before you drill, take a moment to find the center of the piece, figure out the hole spacing (in my case 5mm) and center-punch the holes. I used my carbide-tipped scriber as a center punch, because it was there.
Explain to your 4YO that this keeps the drill bit from wandering all over the landscape. Let her try it on a piece of scrap. Now you can drill. Select a very small drill bit. About 2-3mm is right. I always have a set of Black & Decker cheapos on hand, in RGU of course; the one I picked was the second-smallest, 5/64" whatever that may be; about 3mm. The exact size does not matter. But keeping the bit exactly parallel to the long axis of the cylinder sure does matter. Here is where parental help is needed. Have 4YO hold drill. Check angles while she does. Coach until drill really plumb. Some drills have bull's-eye levels built in. Fine, use them but remember the stick has to be plumbed first. Get out the old square. If you hog up this step you will have to start from zero. Drill away:
Now the eyes are in. It is now a matter of sawing off slices; each slice is a proto-button. But is nice, indeed desirable, that the buttons be the same width, or close to it. What I did is to use a marking gauge. In this case, my miniature Japanese-style marking gauge. I made it out of a bamboo chopstick and a piece of scrap wood with a blade made out of scrap steel. But commerical marking gauges are widely available.
I set the marking gauge to 3mm for the first button. I thought that was a bit thick, so I reduced it by one skosh (= 0.5mm). Now you do not have to use a marking gauge. There are many other ways -- ruler and pencil in the worst case. But the marking gauge is nice because it cuts a groove for the saw. Because what we do next is saw off buttons. It looks exactly like the second picture in this post. Run the dozuki. Every mark/cut gets you a button.
For your 4YO, the marking gauge leaves a razor-sharp outline she can follow with the saw. This minimizes the uneven cuts that will produce lopsy buttons. I made a half-dozen buttons this way. With a good dozuki it takes 30 sec to saw out the button.

Now, from a certain viewpoint, we are done. But if we want to do the job well, we must explain to 4YO that we need to chamfer the buttons. That is, we have to put an edge on them, so they will go through buttonholes easily. At first I thought, well, a knife. But 4YO might not be all that enthusiastic about knives. Might get cut. For that matter, parent might not be so hot about knives in 4YO hands, either. So after some experimentation I came up with the idea of filing the edges. I'll spare you the varous things I tried. But the bomb, as my younger friends say, is to make a holding jig (or fixture) for the buttons. So you have the stick you started with -- still in the workmate. With any luck the holes are still there. Push some stiff wire into the holes and cut wire off at button height.
Beacuse you drilled the holes first, these will fit any button you have just made. Put the button on the wires. Get a coarse file and file away. Sharpen them edges. Poor photo coming up.
The little wire prongs hold the button down, and you can file your way around the button. Very difficult for your 4YO to hurt herself with a file. Coarse file works fast. Rule three again. You could do all sorts of other things, like sanding. But at the end of the day we have some buttons.
Now one could do a lot of this stuff much more easily on a lathe. Make the buttons with a form tool. Part them off with a really thin parting tool. But my objective, in this excruciatingly detailed tutorial, is not really making buttons. It is suggesting to some parent how to teach his 4YO to make buttons; a completely different problem.

Turnin' the wood

I think the pole lathe (in my case the bungee lathe) is an ideal tool for young children. The effort required is just pulling down a bungee cord -- even a child can do that! So a few days ago Neoni and her friend came by, saying that they wanted to build something. Anything in particular? We're not sure. Far be it from me to refuse them, so I showed them the candlestick (this is what you could make -- the carrot) and then we put a piece of alder (soft, good for kids) into the lathe and off we went. Having shown them the carrot, of course, we have to introduce the stick. This is turning the piece down to a cylinder before shaping it.
Neoni's friend turned out to be astoundingly good at this. She has the touch. Turning on a pole lathe requires much more finesse than turning on powered lathes. In the latter, the motor powers you out of most of your errors. In the former, an error is a jammed tool. There are three variables (we engineers call it "degrees of freedom") viz. The amount the tool is advanced, the angle at which you attack the wood, and the twist of your wrist which affects the amount of wood you remove. The two girls took turns getting a cylinder.
The pole lathe is about as safe as you can get with a child and an edged tool. On a power lathe they could get the tool thrown into their face. Bad news. Besides, if they ever go to power, they will have learned how to hold tools for maximum effect.

In the end we made a very respectable candlestick for Neoni's friend. She will give it to her mother (or her father) as a present! Once we started turning for real, with a spindle gouge, I was too busy to take pictures. The girls tend to get fascinated by the cuts and go too deep. Oooh, look at the shavings coming off! Me: Keep that tool moving! I allowed sandpaper to smooth it out. They are young, after all! We were at it one hour, and Friend allowed as how she thought it was ten minutes. She loves the spindle gouge; it is just her size.

On the whole, a stellar afternoon.

Invasion!

It started Sunday a week or so ago. There I was, making a stick stool, when who should appear but Neoni and some friends.
The three girls in blue are not village kids; they are visiting from any of a (large number) of Russian communities in the Mat-Su valley and elsewhere. A parenthetical comment: most hospitals these days have emergency room signs -- you know, the ones that say what your "rights" are -- in English and Spanish. But not Mat-Su Regional. English and Russian is what we have. Says something about Mat-Su, I think.

What would you like to do, girls? We want to make something. Anything. Would a stool do the job? Sure. So off we went. So let's shave out the rungs. Neoni, as you can see, is an expert shaver. She needs a longer treadle, but her younger cousins need it the way it is. Compromises, compromises.

So we shaved a bunch of rungs, and got the sides of the stool assembled. Neoni's frends learned the golden shop rule the hard way: do not touch anything in my shop without my express permission. Everything here bites, scratches, or claws. One stumble across the dragon anvil got that lesson across very quickly.

A few days later, we had the original crew plus a bunch of boys. The boys wanted wooden knives. I try to keep a bunch of splits for just such an occasion; swords, axes, and knives are much in demand. The Chalupy Armament Subdivision swung into action:
As time went on, we had a larger crowd. Some were interested in the stool:
Others were knifesmiths:
That is my shaving horse, obviously adult-sized, so the kids are double-teamed on it. Note the mini drawknife. I bought it partly for me, but mostly for the kids; it is very useful. However, the experts use the adult tools:
Good grief! Neoni in a short skirt? O tempora, o mores! What is the village coming to? But also note the double teamed hold-down.

After a few hours, something like a dozen kids will wear me down. But only one band-aid was required. Neoni disregarded my instructions and grabbed the drawknife by the edge. I think it was a cheap lesson in safety, and a good time was had by all.

Brand New Turner

I had an invasion of village kids last Sunday. Among them, Adrian, who took on the pole (actually, bungee) lathe:
He is, as they say, a natural. He got the idea in one minute. He is making (of course) a potion bottle. (The witch consortium did not approve of my potion bottle, so he is redoing the project.) In the photo, he is turning some aspen into a cylinder, which is the first step in any turning. I am impressed.

New Construction in the Village

Walking down the road the other day, I saw a new construction project in the Village.
You can see that the kids have built a wickiup or teepee or survival shelter or...
and a very healthy activity, too. Totally unsupervised, and much better than sitting around watching television.

The Russian Village

Sometime ago -- perhaps around 1980 -- a number of families escaped from the Former Soviet Union and somehow wound up in bush Alaska. ("The bush," by the way, is how those of us who live at some distance from the urban centers refer to our environment.) These people, with names like Reutov, Polushkin, and others, are "the Russian Village," as the rest of the Willow inhabitants call it. They are very traditional and very polite. One of the houses appears in the picture, taken obviously in spring because you can see bare ground. Their kids come to me for woodworking instruction. They usually wear traditional Russian dress; I find it very appealing. As kids anywhere, they are obsessed with armaments. Observe, in the second picture, the formidable variety of weaponry. Neoni (in the required long skirts), looks innocent and oblivious of the boys fighting each other, but this is not so, as you can see in the next pic. No wonder Napoleon and Hitler retreated before Moscow. But sometimes I feel like an arms merchant, a "dog of war" as some would have it. However, slowly I fit into the village in spite of the fact that I don't speak Russian very well. Once I took a course in Scientific Russian (reading). So I can puzzle out the Cyrillic alphabet, at least. The kids are completely bilingual; they attend the local school, which has about 15 students. All of them are two years ahead of their contemporaries in the public jail, I mean public school, system. Strangely enough, Beryozova school is a public state school. Some days Alaska really shines. In Russian "beryozka" is birch; Beryozova would mean "of the birches" or possibly "in the birches," Russian is not big on prepositions. But it's a lovely place to live.