Stick Chair , more alder fantasies

Having done two stools, I thought I was ready for a chair. So, here beginneth the episode of the alder chair. I selected some alder. Now alder, I have remarked, is remarkably strong. But is is never, never, straight. Well, I thought, there is worse than that masquerading as "sculpture" in the MOMA.
Here the back legs are held in an invaluable "Alexander jig," a birdsmouth thing tensioned by rope and toggle. It allows you to rotate the legs till you get the desired effet. I am getting ready to drill the holes to connect to the front ones. Doing that gives us...
The next step is to connect front and back legs with rungs. I had just pruned my lilac tree (too big to call a "bush") so why not use it for rungs? Above you see Mr Chair still in his jig, with lilac rungs, ready for the next step. To wit, now mark out and drill the holes for the cross-rungs, joining across the two sides. Then we tap (actually, pound) the whole thing together with a mallet. Now, if I've done my job right, I've shaved the rungs to a "white knuckle" fit in the hole. So they won't go in very far. Just as with the stool, we subject Chair to torture. We have ways...
After sufficient moral persuasion is applied (the turn of the screw, as it were) Chair allows as how he will fit. Love the scritch sound of mortise going into tenon. Hate the cracking sound that means it split. I had to remake one front leg, split at the top. You can see I have started to put in the back supports, also lilac. I took pictures as I remembered, not as I should for a real tutorial. (I have yet to figure out all the modes on my new camera. Nikon supplies the user's guide on CD. This may save Nikon money, but it means I have to go through a rigamarole to read the user's guide. )

And finally...
In retrospect, I should have looked at it more closely when it was in its jig. The back is crooked. Well, it's all crooked! Meant to be. Art is neither straight nor square. I'll let it dry out a while, then rack it some more. Torture solves some problems, all right. But it is the first stick chair I ever made; indeed the first chair period. So cut me some slack; remember the Guggenheim has some strange things indeed in it. And we learn more from mistakes than we do from successes.

New blog I follow -- a musical interlude

I've added a new blog to my "follow" list. This is the Owyhee Mountain Fiddle Shop blog; the author repairs and makes (and also plays) violins. I find musical instrument making a fascinating craft. Hard to get maple in Alaska; all we have is "Japanese maple," in fact I just pruned one of my Japanese maples. Hmm. Could I make a fiddle? Fascinating thought. It would be mostly birch; I suspect that alder and aspen are not violin woods. However...

I used to work with someone who made harpsichords as a hobby. When he started he went up to the Yale museum and measured, photographed, noted and recorded all that he could. He went to Italy to get the wood -- and discovered that nowadays the Italians use it for cargo pallets! (Don't remember the name of the wood.) So he bought essentially a lifetime supply of the stuff and had it shipped to the US. I am delighted to report that at last report, Rob was building harpsichords for a living, with more orders than he could fill. Bravo. A harpsichord is a great big guitar; instead of plucking it with your fingers, you press a key which operates a jack which plucks the string with a plectrum. Plectra (or is that plectri?) used to be made out of feathers; nowadays (high tech) Lexan is the choice. Otherwise it's mostly cargo pallets.

Anyway, the moral is that you make do with what you have. One person's pallet is another's harpsichord. Or violin.

Wees, weeds, but also turnips

We have had rain on top of rain. It is hard to do any gardening in the rain. But the other day there was a brief break and I rushed out to pull weeds. I got an enormous amount out. Rain, they say, is good for the garden. It is also good for the weeds. However, in the process of weeding, I noted that some turnips were ready to pull, and I did.
It makes a nice tableau. The Darthcartt, of course; many gallons of weeds, and the turnips. The payoff for all that weeding. The turnips are huge, perhaps I should have pulled them earlier. But then, it was raining. We also have radishes and some of the chard is ready. The cabbage has started to form heads. The broccoli and the cauliflower seem overwhelmed by rain; no sign of heads although they are very leafy. Well, gardening is a gamble. Win a few...

Stick Furniture, part I

OK, Blogger, I am seriously annoyed with you. Your unspeakable user interface deleted my entire last post. So I have to put it in all again from scratch. Your wonderful autosave feature autosaved the last word I typed in. And only the last word. Maybe you can split the blame with Firefox, but I wish you would stop fiddling with designer templates and get what you have working properly. I would trade every "improvement" you have made for the ability to insert an image where the cursor is! And don't tell me it's JavaScript's fault.

End of rant. Grrr. Anyway, stick furniture is furniture made out of branchwood, as opposed to stuff riven or sawed out of trees. I have loads and loads of alder that I accumulated when I cleared out the pasture. So, I thought, why not make a stick stool? Start simple, I thought. A stool. Four legs, eight rungs. How simple can you get? Now, you can find alder in any shape you can imagine, except straight. No such thing as straight alder. But that's OK, I thought. It will be artistic. Furniture as nature designed it. Guggenheim, here I come. Alder Fantasies. The next Alaskan dream!

So I hauled some alder from my brushpiles, cut four legs and eight rungs, onto the shaving horse, peel, and shave the ends of the rungs to a very tight fit on a hole drilled with a 15 bit. I think that's 15/16 inch in RGU, about 24mm. So assemble two legs and two rungs. Tap them in with a homemade mallet. You will find they only go in so far. So, as Darth Spader might say, "we have ways of making rebel rungs fit."
This is the torture rack. The Geneva convention says nothing about alder, so tough luck, Alder. Clamped to the trusty Workmate is a pipe clamp, acquired for a couple bucks at a yard sale (the pipe was a found item). I should make a fixture to hold the pipe in the workmate. Mañana perhaps. Anyway, you put the stool in the pipe clamp and turn the screw firmly. There is a wonderful scritch sound, and the rung slides about 5mm into the hole. Repeat with the other rung. Try to keep things square. I didn't. Bad on me. We learn, though.

To the right of the torture rack, we have the orange-topped story stick. This is a stick which records leg lengths, rung lengths, hole heights and diameters. Once you have built a stick, you need no other measuring instument. Big time-saver. Also to the right, two more legs awaiting torture.

Next episode in the tale is related in part in the post entitled "Invasion!" The kids wanted to help. So I had them peel and shave the remaining rungs. They were too loose a fit. I know, I should have checked. But with eight kids loose, just you try supervising anything! Anyway, the next step is to assemble (mallet) and rack the whole stool:You rack the thing until it is square. In stick furniture, there are no right angles and no straight lines, so it's all eyeball. The picture is of the second stool I made using the lessons learned from the first (and without kids to distract me).

Credit time. The racking procedure is covered in Mike Abbot's Living Wood book and Jennie Alexander's How to Make a Chair from a Tree DVD. Google them. Mr Alexander recently changed his name; formerly John Alexander; Google may not find anything under Jennie.

So what became of the first stool? Well, we put a top on it, and two little girls carried it off to their clubhouse!
It did not occur to me at the time, but an adult stool is perfectly adequate as a little girl's clubhouse table.

Lysander Rides Again

Lysander, my 1947 International Farmall H, had not started since about this time last year. Part of the problem is that he is a 6V tractor, and you can't buy his batteries at NAPA auto parts, at least not in Big Lake or Wasilla. On my last trip into Anchorage, I visited Alaska Battery and they found me one. So I charged it, and we had a couple of days where the sun was shining. Time to give the old hero a go.

Let's see -- install the battery, remembering that he is positive ground. Clean out the sediment bowl on the fuel line. Put in fuel, and turn it on. Observe, the bowl fills up. Check the oil. Swing up into the seat. Check neutral. Push in clutch. Switch on. Pull out choke. Pray. Hit the starter button. Lysander coughed. Push in choke halfway. Another hit on the starter button, and off he went! Wonderful rumbly sound. Not only that, but the ammeter registered a charge! I had spent some time last fall tracing out all the wiring, tightening connections, cleaning the commutator on the generator, and tightening the generator belt. It paid off. I still think there is a loose wire or fifteen in there, or possibly a partially broken one. But right now it's time for a workout. Drive up to the power line right-of-way, hitch a rope to one of the logs lying there.
There is Lysander pulling a log, off to the right (long rope, easier than driving Lysander down the right-of way). Notice the elegant paint job, mostly finished. I will order a decal kit and a new muffler any day now. Lysander was ready for more, but I was absolutely exhausted. Pulling logs is hard on the operator -- you have to lift the log so's you can get a rope or chain on it. So we drove Lysander to his summer dacha, and tucked him in.
I can't believe how reliable that tractor is. Modern cars work OK when brand new. When they get old, their computerized circuits fail, the safety features hamper starting, and a thousand ills beset them. Lysander is over 60 years old. Look at him go!

The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick maker

I don't do any butchering (except in wood), but I do bake. What about candlesticks?

I cannot resist the pole lathe. I suppose it should be called the bungee cord lathe, because the restoring mechanism is a bungee cord. So what should I turn next? Why, that old lathe standard, a candlestick. Should the recipient need to light a candle to St Jude (the Patron Saint of desperate causes) then she shall have the proper fixture for the purpose.
Blurry photo. Drat. I am in "scenic mode" and I need to wait for autofocus to work. Haste makes waste, in photography as elsewhere. Anyway, this is J. Random Birch. It turned out (no pun intended) to be spalted, or tiger-striped, a valued quality. The picture shows a very rough stage in candlestick; it will undergo major slimming as we go. Aided by my trusty diamond hones, I sharpened up all my gouges. Unbelievable difference. On a powered lathe, the motor overcomes dull tools. Not so an a foot-powered lathe. I have a spindle gouge designed for turning, but until I put the diamond hone on it, it wouldn't cut, it would just scrape.

And, I see, I am in major rant mode. Bear with me, or just stop reading here if sharpening tools is not your thing.

I have said it many times, and I will say it again: modern tools are just too **** hard. The manufacturers know all about hardening, but they assume (correctly) that the average user is a lazy ignorant snerd, who won't learn to sharpen his or her tools. So they harden their tools way beyond the reasonable point, in hope that Jim (or Jane) Snerd gets some use out of the tool before it has to be (uck) replaced. The manufacturer is well aware that he will make some Geld out of the replacement. Further incentive to harden 'er way up! Rc 80, here we come!

My favorite sharpening medium is the Japanese water-stone. But if you try to do, for example, a kitchen knife, a good quality one, say a Sabatier, on a Japanese stone, you will be wasting your time. On these stainless, chrome-vanadium, ultrahard tools it is either a belt sander or a diamond. The instructions with the knife say something like "once a year, have it professionaly sharpened. "

Bah, humbug! Your professional sharpener will put it on a belt sander, touch it up with a diamond, and voila! That will be $20.00, please. I can do much better with periodic touchups with a diamond. I am really glad I bought that $7.60 diamond hone at Lowe's (or maybe it was Home Depot),

Well, rant over. But what's the use of having a blog if you can't put in a good rant once in a while, I ask you?

Midsummer Garden's dream

It has been raining, and then it has rained some more. This morning, the rain gauge registered 51 mm total. May not be much for the tropics, but is is quagmire for Alaska. This is supposed to be very good for the garden (it is also very good for the weeds, alas) but the garden is indeed prospering.
I put down some lovely weed-control stuff between rows. Potato row left, then letttuce, onions and such, then brassica row, and root crop far right. I cloched a bunch of stuff with my nonpatent fruit juice container cloches, Made a huge difference. A tailored greenhouse, in fact. Off picture, the strawberries are producing. Here's dinner ingredients a few days back:
Lettuce and strawberries, yum. Beautiful strawberries, sweet. Berries of all sorts seem to do well in Alaska.

We are in the "cold and wet" cycle of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Since the period seems to be 30-odd years, perhaps it should be "Pacific Tridecadal Oscillation," or PTO. But that is also the acronym for "Power Take-Off" one one's tractor. How confusing! Acronyms are the curse of modern languages, but even I have to admit they are sometimes useful. By the way, the sun was shining when I took the garden picture. Do not be misled by taking it for the norm in these PDO, or is that PTO-challenged times.