Monday, May 17, 2010

Slabs are Resting for the Season Now

Got waylaid by a plumbing crisis this week, but still got a few odds 'n ends done.

Managed to get all my slabs stacked up into piles. A couple leftover pieces still leaning against the garage have found new homes, just need to be picked up. The cutting season is over at the log dump, so no more milling until September. No excuses now on that bookcase!




A couple graduates from the IP school came by on Saturday before the show at Kozai gallery and rooted through my woodpile for a few pieces. Daisuke and Jacques, what a couple of great guys, wonderful craftsmen, I am sure they will put the wood to good use. I will have to remember to keep my eye on their blogs! Great show at Kozai, super packed, it was nice to see all the pieces and all the students. It was amazing how much work some of them got done in the week since I was up at the school!


Notice that this pile has 4 pieces of magnolia on top of 3 pieces of catalpa. Under the catalpa used to be four pieces of Port Orford Cedar until Jacques and Daisuke visited!

Speaking of the bookcase, I have really struggled with what to do for the consoles. Make or buy, make or buy. I have really wanted to make them but using off the shelf ones from Lee Valley would be so much easier. I drilled the holes in the bookcase at 7 mm, so that the Lee Valley consoles would fit if I chose to go that route.

There are 25 of them plus some spares, so I want some kind of psuedo-jig to do most of the work if I make them. Also, I don't really want to carve the dowel on the back of each console, I'd rather buy dowel and use it. Apparently 7 mm dowel is rather impossible to find. However, I did find this awesome video on Youtube of all places that shows how to make dowels super quick. I tried it, and it works well to produce a consistent sized dowel, although it's pretty tough on the saw. Just make sure you don't start any fires - you know, rubbing two sticks together at high speed!

And the panel from my last post? Thanks to Nick for his excellent guessing. From the top left: Port Orford cedar, yellow cedar, maple, Monterey cypress, birch, oak, locust, box elder, yew, London plane, alder, cherry, red cedar, catalpa.

3 comments:

  1. Wow, what a nice stack of wood you have there( read jalous here)!!

    Can you tell me more about that wood dump??

    Thank you
    Cheers
    David

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  2. Hi David,

    Thanks, too bad I'll need to wait to the fall of '11 before I can use the wood in that stack! The stack on the side of the house has some pieces that I will be able to use starting this fall though.

    The area where I do the chainsaw milling is down on Spanish Banks. The city has set aside an area there where chainsawing is permitted and the city dumps logs there, from street/park trees that have come down. Mostly for people to cut up for firewood, but some bigger logs do show up that are suitable for milling.

    The dump runs basically from Labour day to Victoria day. It's a totally free, unsupervised BYOCS (bring your own chainsaw) place!

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  3. Thanks, that is great... for you! Maybe I'll bring my saw next time I'm in the area...
    Take care
    David

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