Woodworking Blog

I was riding around with a contractor one time and we saw a sign advertising “Ten Famous Nails”.  I immediately wondered who would celebrate 8d, 10d, 10d brite finish, double head form nails and all the rest.  I could think of many more than ten nails and had a vision of bins full of nails like the candy bins in the M&M store we found in Las Vegas one time.

Course it really wasn’t those kinds of nails, but it reminds me of lists like that which I have always liked.  Try this carpentry list and see how many of these numbers you can identify without looking them up:
16″.  19.2”.  1.618.  73.  3.141593.  1.414.  16.97.

How did you do?  Ok, there’s one trick one in there, but all the rest are good ones.   Here you go:

a.  16 inches.  Easy one.  Standard spacing for wall studs in residential construction.  Noted by little red blocks on your carpentry tape.

b.  19.2 inches.  Still pretty easy but much more uncommon.  That is the little black diamond on your tape measure and is the spacing for floor trusses in particular.  Designed to save material when framing and is known as “five bays in eight feet”.  If you set floor trusses on 19.2” spacing then five times 19.2 equals 96 inches or eight feet.  Your sheets of flooring will fit.

c.  1.618.  A ratio, known as the golden mean and called phi.    Mathematically it is (a +b)/a = a/b.   In rectangles, it is the ratio of longer side to the shorter side and we   perceive that as beautiful.  Works on beautiful faces, buildings, drawers in desks, and in the  Fibonacci number series where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers.

d.  73.  From Sheldon on  “The Big Bang Theory”

Sheldon: What is the best number? By the way, there’s only one correct answer.

Raj: 5,318,008?

Sheldon: Wrong! The best number is 73. [Short silence] You’re probably wondering why.

Leonard & Howard: No no, we’re good.

Sheldon: 73, is the 21st prime number, its mirror 37 is the 12th and its mirror 21 is the product of multiplying, hang on to your hats, 7 and 3. Did I lie?

Leonard: We did it! 73 is the Chuck Norris of numbers!

Sheldon: Chuck Norris wishes! In binary, 73 is a palindrome, 1001001, which backwards is 1001001, exactly the same. All Chuck Norris gets you backwards is Sirron Kcuhc!

Sorry ‘bout that.

e.  Pi.  Redneck joke.  Pi are square?  Everybody knows pi are round.  Cornbread are square.

f.  1.414.  If you have an equilateral triangle then the hypotenuse is 1.414 times each leg.

g.  16.97.  When you lay out rafters on a house, you use a run of 12 inches and whatever pitch you have.  When you lay out the hip rafter, you use a run of 16.97 inches with the same pitch since the hip runs at 45 degrees from the corners of the building and the diagonal of a 12” square is 16.97 inches.

Guess that is not ten famous numbers, but hey it’s close.  If you insist, we can add c, e and i, but you will have to Google those (hey, that’s another one!).   And if you really want to get technical, remember the old Indian Chief SOH-CAH-TOA for your trig functions.  After all these years as an engineer, I still use him.

Got any more?

I went to Highland last weekend for a Saturday class on Spoon Making.  I have made a few spoons over the years, mostly by trial and error, watching Roy Underhill and some other videos on the internet.  It is always funny to me there is a mythos about many kinds of woodworking and Spoon Making has its share.   Generally speaking, you are pretty far down the handle if you use power tools.  The really good makers have a large beat-up stump in the middle of a brick floor, use a small axe to get the initial shape, and a curved knife made by American Indians on an island in Puget Sound. The rest of us use whatever we have in the shop and knives we buy from Highland.

Curved Knife and Fork and Spoon Blank

When I tried my first spoon, I took an old piece of dried wood and started hacking at it with my small axe and then with whatever knives and chisels I had in the shop.  It did not take me more than about two days of hacking to decide that the traditional methods were not for me.  My style degenerated into seriously considering using my chain saw to hollow out the bowl.  I figured if I could clamp the saw into my workbench vise with the chain facing my chest, then I could hollow the bowl by pressing the nose of the chain into the blank piece while holding it to my chest.  Of course, I would be wearing my leather apron just in case it slipped away.  (Do not try this at home, Ralph.  You do understand sarcasm when you see it, right?!!)  The point being that without the right tools and a little instruction, it is really easy to get tired and discouraged trying to make a spoon out of dry hardwood.

Instructor Jay Hallinan and Our Class

Our instructor, Jay Hallinan, met us at Highland early on Saturday and introduced our little  group to the art of Spoons.  Turns out there is more to spoons than you ever thought about.  The shape of the bowl, the shape of the handle, the shape of the end of the spoon to fit into a pot for stirring, all are more involved than you would think.  For instance, an eating spoon must be shaped so that when you put food in your mouth, you don’t have to scrape the bottom of the bowl with your teeth to use it.  Jay showed us some salad spoons, larger than eating spoons, which were too heavy on the handle end and tended to tilt out of the salad bowl flipping lettuce all over the table.  Who would have thought?

Rough Shaping

We went over tools and sharpening.  The best primary tool is the curved knife.  Used upside down so the blade comes out the bottom of the hand and with the thumb on the end of the handle for leverage, it is surprisingly effective in hollowing the bowl.  One of the best things I learned from the class is that the shape of the spoon does not have to be symmetrical.  You know me, Mr Engineer, I want things to be parallel and perpendicular, but who cares if the handle is curved.  The issue is how it feels in the hand and how it eats and how it stirs and your name on the back of the handle.

We used soft wood to do our spoons so no one would get discouraged with the difficulty of the carving and whittling.  Our first spoons were made from blanks Jay had prepared for us beforehand.  After that, we had plenty of scraps and fire wood we could choose from and begin to make another.  And the point is just that — you can use scraps, fire wood, found wood, fallen limbs and shrub trimmings to make a spoon.  Many people sit around and spread a cloth on the floor to keep the spouse happy and carve away while watching TV or listening to music.

Intensive Carving

All in all, it was an excellent class.  Coming to the Seminar Room at Highland is like coming home.  The workbench at the front of the class is signed by instructors who have taught there and you will recognize many of them.  The best thing about it is the camaraderie of like-minded people who come to learn a new old skill.  I am always pleased to have classmates ask about some other class I’ve taken or some blog I read that they have not yet discovered.  We all go to lunch together to one of the bars next door and the instructor generally goes along with us.  And on the way back from lunch you can shop in Highland Woodworking and buy a basic tool kit for making spoons.  You can even get the address of the guy in Puget Sound.

Basic Finishes

It occurs to me that everybody may not have the opportunities for wood that I am fortunate to have.  People know I love to turn and they are always bringing me wood and asking if I need some more.  I am reminded of the young fellow who came to the shop one day and looked around in amazement and said,  “So, you just get a tree from the woods and make something?”,  “Well, yeah.”

Stumps in the walkway. Saw for scale.

A few months ago a friend asked if I wanted some chunks of walnut.  I said does a bear brush his teeth in the woods?  Some people he knew took down some walnut trees and were cutting them up into firewood.  He got it and brought it to me.  Most of them were so big that we could not pick them up, and so instead we just backed his truck up to my gate and slid them off on the walkway.  I have been walking around them to get to the shop for about four months, so today I decided it was time to do something with them.

For all you people out there who think milk comes from the store, eggs come from the dairy case, and bowl blanks come from Highland, this is for you.

Break Time.
That’s a plastic wedge.

There are many ways to do this, but this is my method.  These pieces are too heavy for me to do anything but slide them and tumble them, so I pulled out the trusty chainsaw and went after them.  I like bowl blanks with the rim of the bowl set vertically at the pith of the tree and the bottom of the bowl near the outside bark edge.  The pith must be removed from the bowl because any crack which develops will run to the pith as the bowl dries.  One problem with these pieces near the stump of the tree is that several of them have up to three piths in them.  With that many piths, I try to cut so the piths come out near the edge of a blank.

I made a bowl blank from one of these chunks a while back and it is coming out so deep that I don’t like it.  So today I decided to limit the bowl depth to about five and a half inches.  That is a pretty good bowl — if you are going to use it for salad, you better have a big family.

Perfect Blank Slice

To begin, I sawed a piece in half and managed to get one piece on top of another chunk so I could get to it better.  I laid it down flat and then took a random board from the shop and marked a saw line with a yellow pencil at a depth of just under six inches.  I got a lovely slice with parallel sides that I could put on the bandsaw and make a round blank.  With the compass I made a circle on one side of the slice and then put it on my bandsaw with the Highland Woodturners Blade mounted on it.  This is a wonderful blade made for the purpose and it  zipped right through the circle.

Circle on the slice.

One side of the blank had some issues with the pith and the other seemed to be smooth, so I made the smooth side the outside of the bowl and most of that pith will be turned away.

Smooth Side will be the outside of the bowl.

The Pith Side

I mounted my face plate on the future inside of the bowl and stuck the blank on the lathe. My lathe is a Oneway 1640 from Highland, so it will handle a bowl up to 16 inches in diameter inboard and 24 inches outboard.  Since these stumps are only about 13 inches, it works beautifully.   I love that stripe up the wall behind the lathe by the way.  I turn green so that is moisture from the wet blanks.

Homemade Bowl Blank Ready to Go.

Also note my magnetic LED worklight from Highland.  I love that light!

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Terry Chapman is a Professional Engineer (Civil) and Land Surveyor who lives south of Atlanta.  He has done woodworking for many years and particularly enjoys bowl turning and making Windsor Chairs.  He currently works as Site Development Manager for a local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity and has one son who pastors a Church in Connecticut.   You can email him at cdeinc@mindspring.com.

Got a new toy in the shop and no, it’s not Festool.  Let me tell you about it.

Twenty five years or so ago, I designed sewage lift stations for land developers. One day a salesperson came by with a demonstration pump on a small trailer behind his truck.  All the trailer sides rolled up so we could walk around the pump and get a feel for size and installation issues.  I remember standing there with the distinct impression the pump was running, but there was no electrical connection or generator.  I could hear it running and feel the vibration through the floor of the trailer.  No sewage either, thank goodness.  (It may be sewage to you, but it’s bread and butter to me!)  I searched for a minute to see where the noise and vibration was coming from, and finally realized it was from a Bose radio down in the front of the  trailer playing a recording of a pump running.  I have wanted a Bose radio ever since.

Bose Shop Radio

Finally sprung for one for my birthday last week.  I ordered the attachment for Bluetooth to go with it.  What that means for you Luddites out there, is that I can play music off my phone and my iPad and it comes through the radio.  It is a radio of course, but it will also play CD’s.  The sound is nothing short of fantastic and will rattle the walls of the shop.  It will drown out almost any power tool in the shop and it may drive bugs out of the sawdust pile, depending on what kind of music I play and how loud I make it.

I spend many hours at the lathe and I can hear my new radio while I am working.  I also listen to podcasts, (look on iTunes — ask your grandchildren to help you! )  and there is one particular podcast I really like called “Stuff You Missed in History Class”.  Excellent discussions on some really arcane subjects (did you know that only five people actually died at the Boston Massacre?), but very well done.  Podcasts typically download automatically once you subscribe and there are thousands out there on hundreds of subjects including many on woodworking.

Get yourself set up with a good radio or a Bluetooth speaker and enjoy music and a whole bunch of other good stuff while you work in the shop.

While you are out there, by the way, go look up Bluetooth and the connection with Hedy Lamar, the famous actress.  What a remarkable woman.

Editor’s Note: Some great woodworking podcasts include: Wood Talk and The Modern Woodworkers Association.