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| Heading North! |
Yes, the weekend ritual, with small variations, is to get through the work week, discuss plans, throw a bunch of stuff in the truck, toss the dog in and point the Chevy toward the N. Pole.
We stop at the end of M-53, where this long road meets the Lake. Sometimes it feels like the N. Pole.
I must point out that every weekend, without fail, I toss my knitting bag into the vehicle we're driving. And every weekend, without fail, it makes the trip back untouched, unloved and undone.
But I have eternal optimism that the green yarn you see there will be made into the blanket/hat/whatevah. Ha!
Not when there is a metric ton of wood to be processed!
For most of February and now into March, we've been processing wood. Pine, Maple, Cherry and Walnut. It sounds good enough to eat!
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| Lots of Fiber! |
We had rough sawn wood.
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| That means pretty much right from the tree. |
I tried the best I could to capture the gorgeous natural beauty of the wood, but I failed. The wood is more awesome than my camera shows. But it all had to be processed; the wild ends where living pulp meets bark had to go.
The first step is to plane the wood. That means to shave off layers of the rough sawn jaggedness and leave a smooth, hopefully straight edge. The wood basically came from the tree!
The planer is a device that is:
1. Really loud
2. Really cool
When we first started planing, we stuck the whole plank through. That was hard. And kinda dumb. We learned… better to cut it to length first, then push it through.
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| What were you thinking, humans? |
You KNOW there's going to be gratuitous puppy shots now, right? Thomas has integrated deeply into our lives. I'm not sure how he'll do once we open the gallery- Mini Dachsunds are traditionally shy with strangers. But we'll see…
Meanwhile, there's the wood.
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| Gratuitous wood shots! |
Mike was at the feeding end of the planer, but I was at the fed-out end. I'm sure there's a better name for it, but I'll just call it the magical end. Because it was truly magic. Every time a plank went through the planer, more breathtaking views came out.
I don't have many pictures of this process because I was busy holding wood! It takes focus!
Here's one…
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| Pushin' it through! |
And this doesn't do it justice, but you can kind of see that bits are being revealed! (I might have gotten yelled at for taking pictures rather than focussing!)
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| Unveiling! |
And more…
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| In process… |
I also have pictures of the process of figuring out how to do this in the first place:
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| Ciphering dimensions. |
And pictures of using the jointer. Jointing is when you make the edges of the boards flat. But it also can plane the wide face of the board. It's fun!
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| Wee, this is fun! |
You will notice the ear protection. I'm teaching about sound waves in Physics during my week-day job, and I'm blathering on to my students about how delicate the ear mechanisms are. And then I prove how old I am by giving them a
frequency test. I only make it to 14 Kilohertz. The under-21's hear into the much higher frequencies. I remind them that they, too, will get old one day and that perhaps they shouldn't turn their ear pods up to full blast. They, of course, ignore my advice as only a 17 year old can!
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| Can you see the orange foam ear plugs? |
I took breaks to do some testing. Hey, I'm a scientist! How will the wood look with different stains. I needed to know. So I set up a lab and testing began!
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| Testing, testing! |
Turns out, we decided to go with clear coat. With this fine grained, dense, rich wood grain, clear seemed to be the way to let the beauty though.
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| Clear coats for you, me hearties! |
More next time!
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