This has to be the most amazing woodworking documentary I have ever seen. At every step, he does something I would never have thought of.

This documentary shows how a canoe is built the old way. César Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek of the Manawan Reserve north of Montreal, uses only birchbark, cedar splints, spruce roots and gum. Building a canoe solely from the materials that the forest provides may become a lost art, even among the Native peoples whose traditional craft it is. The film is without commentary but text frames appear on the screen in Cree, French and English.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/Cesars_Bark_Canoe

It is 57 min long but you will not be bored for a second watching this craftsman!

This is a film from 1971 and apparently his son Jean-Louis (pictured above in a recent photo and presumably one of the boys also shown in the video) now carries on the tradition of making these in Manawan, Quebec.

Note that while Cesar cuts down the birch tree which he strips of its bark, I have read that the bark can be removed from a living tree and it will not kill it – and the bark will regrow – how’s that for amazing resilience and sustainability?! I suppose without a ladder or other means of getting up high into the trunk of the tree, cutting it down was the only method. On the other hand, many of the other parts of the canoe are built from the birch. ( He carves two paddles from the birch as well)

This is entirely the method shown by Roy Underhill but with color pictures and timbers which he has probably never worked with.

What is a glut?

A glut is a wooden wedge used to split timbers green from the woods.
Made from wood, to split wood! Made entirely with a handsaw and an axe.

Start with about a 2’ section of log 4-5” in diameter. This is my SUV carrying it back from the woods.
Here I am use Australian Blackwood. I have about 50 of these dead standing ones which died in a cold snap about 15-20 years ago when they were less protected than they are now ( Pine trees have grown up around them). Most are still standing, this one fell over but still hard as a rock after all those years – a beautiful grain and color too! This particular piece may not have been the best, but I had nothing to lose to try.

Chop a wedge on both sides of the log using a hatchet or small broadaxe:

Couldn’t resist to plane it a bit to see the color of the grain

Sharpen the other end as well. Keep the length so that it is easier to handle

Cut it into two pieces down the middle

And then trim the other end down to the heartwood and to keep the glut from splitting and done.

Btw, you can’t start the split with these wedges, you still some sort of iron, an iron glut or a splitting wedge but they can be used to continue to split once started. Probably having more than two would be even handier and I might make more later.

As some have suggested, these can be made onsite with a chainsaw too, it’s just that I don’t usually get out my chainsaw for such small pieces of wood.

I don’t mean to take away from the human tragedy that this is and will continue to be for a long time and I hope I am not being insensitive by making a few observations about what buildings were damaged and which ones weren’t.

My own town of Murchison was the epicentre of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 1929 and lessons were learned then. In my town, all brick chimneys collapsed and were responsible for many injuries and since then, all buildings are all wood frame and all have wood siding with a very small minority with brick veneer ( which is, in my opinion, irresponsible ). This may strike people when they first arrive in town. To those who read too much “3 little pigs”, one might be forgiven for thinking that we live in a ‘poor’ town where there are no brick buildings.

However, I wanted to show a few photos from the recent quake in Christchurch which provides evidence that wood is a significantly important material in earthquake zones.

First a concrete and steel building which could not take the sideways impact of the 6.3 magnitude quake. Unfortunately there were casualties in this building.

Now look at another building whose brick facade crumbled but the frame stayed intact:

And another to show how a wooden framed window survived a fall from several stories to the street:

I am following Mike's ( stefang) master class on a medieval bucket>

If you recall, the plane is being created in order to plane the inside of the staves to the curvature of the bucket. As well we need a ‘binding lever’ which will be used to install the willow band around the bucket once completed.

Ive chose to pass on the lagging knife. There appear to be other methods available. i might regret this but for now, I don’t have a knife I could use anyway.

The bottom has been glued up, the side of the sole was squared up to the side of the plane and then the curve of the stave marked out and ready for shaping.

I shaped starting with a block plane to get the edges

And finished up with a spokeshave to get it to the final shape

It’s harder than it looks. The walnut seemed hard to shape without some tearout and some chatter but I think it should be ok

And now for some final shaping. I just freehanded some curves to a Krenovesque shape, being careful not to take too much from the thickness since I started with a 2” block. A decidedly un-medieval method using the bandsaw was used.

After the bandsaw:

and some sanding

some linseed oil and she’s all done! Ain’t she a beauty?

But does it work? Well, I can produce shavings. the opening of the throat seems ok – nothing getting caught up in there

And eventually I did manage to get the correct curve on a test piece. Though I think it still needs a bit of fine tuning since the curvature of the blade and the curvature of the sole does not exactly match. I think I need to tighten the curve of the blade to prevent digging in on one of the edges. I will have to take the blade back to the grindstone.

Then to the binding lever.This took almost no time at all.

Cut a blank on the bandsaw – using NZ Red Beech again.

Use Mads’ pdf template. I just traced over the template with a ball point pen and impressed the design onto the blank and then darkened the lines

and cut on the bandsaw. note: the circular part was drilled out first.

And some work with the spokeshave, sanding and some linseed oil finish. I may still need to shape the bearing surfaces but I left it for now until I know more about how it will be used.

I used Mike’s (stefang) technique for measuring, marking and chopping out the opening in the sole to fit the curved blade.

I don’t know if Mike was kidding when he said he chopped out the 45 degree ramp in the sole in 40 seconds. It took me about 40 minutes. I think each subsequent step in a complicated project takes me longer and longer as there is more at stake if I make a mistake. I didn’t want to do a do-over – though, who knows, I might find out later that I have to anyway.

So, today, I marked the opening for the blade in the sole. I decided to chop it out entirely using chisels only. Slow going but a surer way of ensuring an accurate opening, given the other options I had.

Then set up for chopping out the 45 degree extension of the plane ramp through the sole. I used the cutout from the plane throat as a guide. Mine looks like swiss cheese now as I use it for testing out hole sizes for pegs and dowels.

Fast forward and we’re done…

Ready for final glue-up on the plane

And add some glue and lots of clamps and that’s it for this weekend while the glue dries

I am following stefang's master class on making a bucket using traditional methods

I left off here last time

Next to make was the crosspin. I chose to make a wooden pin. I don’t have any plug cutters so I did this on my
rusty lathe ( forced to sit outside but under cover for space reasons). I sized the middle part to fit inside the plane less 1/16” so it wouldn’t bind when the sides were glued up), then marked centers on the ends, punched the center to ensure good seating on the lathe centers and then turned two pegs on the ends to 10mm to fit my drill bit.

Here’s the crosspin having come off of the lathe and being checked for size – seems ok

and a bit of clean up, rounding the 2 edges of the crosspin which go towards the throat of the plane to ensure that shavings don’t get caught up in there and a bit of linseed oil to finish before gluing up the sides.

Then carefully marking out the position of the pin, drilling the holes ( first one side, then using the hole as a guide to drill out the other side which I didn’t show here)

Lined up against my measurements. Flat side towards plane, spaced 3/16” away from the where the blade will be.

And now finally ready for gluing the other half with the obligatory subliminal messages now customary to this master class

and the glue up – go drink a tea…and start thinking about a wedge

I found this piece of wood which looks unlikely to be anything but it is a piece of NZ red beech which is extremely weather resistant, hard and close grained. It’s been weathering outside for several years but will clean up very nicely.

I didn’t take any pictures of the planing and forming of the wedge ( and I might still make another one later). I just formed a simple flat wedge about 5” long and slightly less than 2” wide. I might go back and cut a curved top wedge later. I can see the obvious advantages of the top of the wedge being slightly away from the blade when it comes to removing or tightening the wedge now that I’ve had a go with this one.

While it still does not have a base and the wedge needs some fine tuning to sit completely flat against the blade when wedged, I couldn’t resist a few test strokes. So it works like a scrub plane right now and sure enough it made some shavings!

The first steps are to make the tools required to make the bucket.

The most important tool is a plane to curve the inside of the staves of the the bucket and in true medieval fashion, this is being done with largely hand tools ( ok, and a bandsaw from well into the future).

This blog series is to show my progress of the master class.

Anyone can follow along and jump in any time to his class. His blog is excellently written and photographed and others following along ( particularly mafe and his progress blog provide excellent additional resources)

So far I’ve chosen some recycled Rimu for my plane body, planed, squared and sized the body to my stanley #5 blade ( 2”).

The sole will be a piece of wood I had lying around which seemed straight grained, clear and hard. I thnk it is a piece of walnut but not actually sure.

I skipped a lot of steps and just show them here together:

Then I skipped ahead a bit and decided to mark and grind my plane blade.
I decided I wanted a slightly bigger bucket than Mike ( stefang) is building ( his is about 8”) and I wanted mine closer to 10” ( actually 25cm) so my radius is set to 125mm

I don’t actually have a compass, so I cobbled one together from a set of calipers. It’s equipped with a felt tip marker for marking the radius on the plane blade

Marked out the radius on the blade and ground to shape using a hand powered grinder

And then the results after about an hour or so! This is before honing

And that’s all I got so far but I have everything ready to start assembling the plane now…

I built the ‘Alexander saw steel tapered reamer’ based on the information found on Jennie Alexander’s green woodworking website. SawSteelTaperedReamerPlans

I’m having some trouble understanding the instruction on how to sharpen the back edge of the saw blade, which works as a scraper to form the tapered hole.

Here’s what mine looks like now – As you may be able to make it out, it’s just a square edge right now.

Alexander says this about sharpening and this is the picture provided ( very small and can’t be enlarged ).

”View the blade from the heel, and chamfer so that the blade will ream when rotated clockwise. Drawfile the burr edge (or edges) to a 45° chamfer. It is helpful to chamfer the outside board clamping the blade in the vise. While the 45° arris can be cleaned up with a stone, that is not really necessary. Remember that your blade will be scraping end grain—not a pretty task. Thus the presence of saw teeth and a less than exquisite scraping burr do not adversely affect the reamed mortise. Put a drop of oil on the arris and lay it over by progressively burnishing until the burnisher is 10° below horizontal (1). Test the burr.”

It’s not clear to me which way the 45 chamfer should be. Can anyone help clarify?

Our seasons have ticked over, daylight savings time has kicked in, it’s warmish and it’s daylight until 8pm and I’m in the shop more than in front of the computer. I’ve still missed out quite a number of changes I’d like to make and have had requested. I will get to them.

For anyone who has already downloaded and installed 4.1.0.6pre, there are no additional functional changes.

For all others, upgrade from the 4.0.x series and download cutlist4.1 here

Do remember to completely delete the old copy of CutListAndMaterials.rb in your plugins directory as well as the Cutlistui folder.

CutList 4.1 has a completely new structure.The ruby script is now called cutlist.rb and the folder is called cutlist ( clever, huh?). The script has been broken into many smaller bits to make it easier for me to manage but otherwise of no consequence to you.

I’ve shut down the 4.0.6 share on box.net. It was getting old and there were still a few downloads of it. The newer versions will make you much happier. Unfortunately this makes all links to it now dead but hopefully a search will lead you here or to one of the current links.

Cutlist has now been downloaded close to 22,000 times. I sincerely hope it is out there saving some wood and helping you.

Cutlist has been and will always be free. If you have benefited from it and feel in some way that you wish to support the work on the plugin or my ongoing work planting trees, there is an opportunity to donate using paypal at my website

These salad spoons and a little bonus spoon were carved from recycled wood ( rimu – dacrydium cupressinum). Below is a bit of history of how they used to be made and in particular how I made this one, considering that it was from recycled wood and not from a tree.

Traditional spoon making

Historically spoons were rived from a log and rough carved with an axe. Riving, or splitting wood was usually done with a froe and a mallet. A hatchet was used to shape and smooth the general shape. The bowl was then carved with a spoon knife – a curved bladed knife.

The process has as much to do with the tools available as with the materials used.

Spoons, bowls and general eating utensils, termed ‘treen’ were fabricated as needed out of wood before metal and plastics were commonly available and where needed by generally skilled homesteaders. As the tools for fabricating it were probably part of the general tool kit of most households and the materials from which they were made were abundantly available, treen making was probably considered just another chore in a homestead much like growing crops, making soap, spinning yarn or drawing water from a well.
The method of splitting the wood from a log to form the blank for a spoon serves several purposes. It takes advantage of the natural tendency of wood to easily split along its grain which runs in the direction of the trunk. This eliminates the need to cut wood with a saw, a laborious process. Also, wood split this way takes advantage of the natural strength of the material. By splitting the wood along its grain, cross grain is eliminated, giving strength to the spoon and eliminating the tendency to warp.

As with anything utilitarian, fancier versions were also created by folks artists and today we regard treen making as a specialty woodworking craft.

My method, at least this time

While I would very much like to produce spoons in the traditional way, the material being used here dictates the process in this case. The wood being used is Rimu which is recycled from house renovations . As the wood was already milled for house construction, there is no need to rive the blank from a log and the grain direction is imposed by the recycled piece. Since the availability of Rimu is now limited, care also has to be taken to use the existing resources as carefully and as efficiently as possible. As a result, the blanks are cut from the wood using a bandsaw but even still, care is taken to use the straightest grain from the recycled pieces and to cut along the grain as much as possible.

Figure 1 – Rimu ‘Sarking’

Figure 2 – Cutting the spoon blank from recycled rimu sarking on the bandsaw

The desired pattern is largely drawn freehand and there is a lot of freedom at this step. This pretty much determines what kind of spoon or utensil you will be making from the wood. Since all wood is used, sometimes it is the shape of the piece remaining from a previous project which dictates what will be made.

Since we are then starting with a blank closer to the final shape, shaping with a hatchet would be overkill at this point and wasteful. The spoon is still shaped with handtools but because we already so close to a final shape a much finer handtool can be used. A spokeshave is the main means of shaping the handle round and the back of the spoon to a curved surface and to clean up any bandsaw marks.

Figure 3 – The spoon is clamped and the handle rounded with a spokeshave

The next step is to shape the back of the spoon and this too is done with the spokeshave. You can see the spoon beginning to take shape now. Spoon making is not unlike carving an elephant – remove all of the parts which do not look like an elephant!

Figure 4 – Back of the spoon being shaped

From here the next step is to carve the bowl. Since, in this case, we are not making a deep bowl such as that which might be used for a soup ladle, we don’t need to drill out the bowl or carve a steep angle into the bowl. Instead of a curved knife carving spoon, a shallow gouge chisel is used.

At this point the spoon shape is nearly final and what follows next is a lot (a lot and probably never enough!) of sanding with increasing grits of software from 100 grit to 400 grit. Any imperfections in the shape or tool marks are touched up at this stage though the absolute removal of hand tool marks is not pursued with fanaticism.
The spoon is finished with several applications of pure linseed oil ( ie: flaxseed oil), linseed oil of course being perfectly food safe.

Figure 5 – Sanding and sanding and sanding

Figure 6 – Spoon and grain detail

From the workshop of Steve Racz

Beautiful Murchison, New Zealand

All told, about 40 bd ft of pine. Not an extraordinary amount but it does represent the first self milled lumber from my own trees, so it is a milestone. With 50 acres of harvestable plantation pine, surely the tip of the iceberg of what is possible!

Then it was off for a leisurely hot brown beverage at the local River’s cafe before going back to my beech forest to at least visit this mythical log we dreamed of milling and a general tour of the pines(radiata pine), tasmanian blackwoods and the other kinds of beeches not yet spotted ( hard beech, black beech )

Finally, we met ‘the log’ – a red beech probably in excess of 300 years old. Moshe, keen on getting some kind of steel edge into this elusive log, tried to mill his log with his Silky japanese mini foldable saw. Defeated, we settled for a short section of spalted beech.

Then, off to visit the mama of all our beeches. this red beech specimen has a base 8 m ( 25 feet in circumference) and is estimated to be 600+ years old.Thus our final pose for the day and the end of our weekend.

The challenge to move this log using medieval winches and milling with the portable mill will have to remain for next time!

Thanks to a great bunch of guys for making this a great woodworking/milling weekend! I discovered that we all had completely different approaches and reasons for woodworking but were united in the love and respect for the material that we rely on for our craft.

Only 1 mishap when the poorly balanced ( and grossly undersized trailer of mine) bounced off of the hitch from an underperforming hitch lock ( solved temporarily with a oak wedge). Luckily the safety chain caught it and the worse damage was to have ripped the plastic off the bumper and dented the license plate ( no matter, it’s a 21 year old Toyota Hilux Surf).

Mill ready to go

The log as it stood before being sectioned and dragged and rolled into place.

The log being dragged into position.

Lunch ( LJ grimt, Mark, Dave, LJ Moshel)

Lunch ( partner Kristi who drove out to bring us lunch, LJ Craig Ambrose)

Milling ( LJ Moshel, Mark, Dave)

Dave

People: Fellow LJ Craig Ambrose from Motueka will also be joining us. Craig is a keen woodworker who has recently moved nearby to Mot to live in a new intentional community (Atamai).

We now have 4 ( out of 6 ) LJers attending making this an LJ event and Martin was kind enough to list on the LJ events calendar.

Forest track: I had contracted a local roadworks company to upgrade the forest track. Unfortunately like any good reliable builder (sarcasm) they haven’t showed yet,meaning that the track is in the same slippery, muddy state as ever. The contingency plan is that I’ve purchased (thanks Moshe) some heavy duty chains for the 4wd which might give it the extra kick we need to get up a particularly steep section.

Medieval equipment: Moshe has started a blog on our efforts to use 1000 year old technology to position the beech log to the mill. You can follow it here
Unfortunately I have had to abandon my winch version from roundwood timber ( for now) as it is taking too long to mark out and chop mortises and tenons in pine logs (at the risk of not having everything else in place).However the whole exercise of joining round logs is deeply satisfying and will prove to be very useful.

Weather: This may be the deal breaker. The forecast for the weekend is currently complete shite. Showers and rain on Sat, rain on Sunday. ( Rain forecast on Fri and Monday, so even if it shifts by a day, it may not be better). Keep in mind however, that there may be a necessary postponement.

Here’s my extended dolly for pulling the tracks through the forest.

My workplace has turned out to be a hotbed of longtime woodworkers and budding newcomers. Several of them have enrolled in the Beginning Cabinet Making Course at the Centre for Fine Woodworking in Nelson (founded by a former College of the Redwoods student).

As a result they have to pass through my hometown of Murchison ( 1 1/2hr south of Nelson) and so I have put together a milling weekend to kick off their two weeks immersion into woodworking.

If there is anyone in the area that I don’t already know about and haven’t already invited, feel free to contact me.

I am in the process of setting up a low impact forestry operation of a native NZ beech forest and an ‘exotic’ pine plantation and some of the things which we will be doing is to trial some systems to do this. The challenges are to get in to the forest, mill and extract without heavy machinery. We have some intersting iideas to try out and the milling weekend is all about getting out and enjoying the forest, experiencing a different aspect of woodworking as well as trying to revive some old and perhaps forgotten techniques for moving heavy things without machines.

The details are as follows:

Location: Murchison, New Zealand and Stainart Forest, 12km south of Murchison on the East Matakitaki Rd.

Saturday 28 August, 2010 – Haul the Peterson ATS mill to the pine forest skid site. Demonstrate the setup and mill operation on a windblown pine tree. The rest of the day will be spent getting the mill into the beech forest with limited tracking.

Sunday 29 August, 2010 – Experiments in moving heavy logs. We have to cut and move a previously fallen 9m x1m 3ton beech log from between a tree and a hill into a suitable position for milling. We will be using several different kinds of manual winches, pulleys, ropes, peaveys, jacks, rollers. If all goes well, we will mill this tree with both the Peterson ATS as well as cutting some slabs using an Alaskan chainsaw mill.

Meals and accommodation provided. Wild camping option in the NZ beech forest- listen to native birds such as the Kaka, a native parrot. (plenty of room but no amenities, bring a shovel)

I’ve uploaded cutlist4.1.0.6pre

You’re really going to want to delete the old version completely before installing this version because the structure of the plugin has changed completely. The ruby script is now called ‘cutlist.rb’ and it’s really just a stub with all of the main code now entirely contained in a folder called cutlist. The ruby script is now broken up into manageable and logical chunks. This is the first step I needed to do in order to facilitate co-development of the code, which some people have shown an interest in of late and also to manage the ever growing code!

Now for the good stuff. Yes, cutlist can finally display the sub-assemblies which a part belongs to.
The ‘tables’ options window selections have changed ( actually only the names have changed). Selecting Compact provides a listing by unique parts and the number of each required for the project. Selecting By Sub-Assembly Order shows the model broken down by Sub-Assembly and the parts contained in each. Sort by Size lists the part from largest volume ( bd ft for example) to least.

Resulting in a display such as this:

1. Complete restructure of the plugin files. Rename ruby script in the plugins folder to cutlist.rb and a folder cutlist contains everything else.
2. Renaming of the ‘tables’ selection, which is used to pick how you want your cutlist to be displayed. “Compact” provides a listing of each unique part required and the quantity of each ( regardlless of which sub-assembly it belongs to and in fact sub-assembly info is not shown). “By Sub-Assembly Order” – show all sub-assemblies and the parts which belong to it. “Sorted by Size” shows all parts sorted by largest amt of board feet (or cum) to least.
3. Sub-Assembly is shown in the “By Sub-Assembly Order” and in the “sorted by Size” listing and corresponding csv files ( but not compact table)
4. Sub-Assembly name is added to the CutListPlus csv file. The field was always there but simply contained the part name repeated, now it contains the actual sub-assembly name.
5. If compact table is selected for the CutListPlus output, then parts will be consolidated ( ie PartCount > 1) only if the parts have the same name, dimensions, material AND sub-assembly name.

I suspect having the sub-assembly appear in the tables will spur some new requests. One of the notably absent features is a way of cross referencing the part on the layout to the cutlist table and therefore to the sub-assembly. I’m working on a part numbering system which can be added to the layout which might help this ( well, it might just also confuse things).

The ultimate will be a new output format which consolidates all the relevant output for a project in a format which is consistent.

As always, feedback, criticism, feature requests, bug reports are always welcome!

What’s new?

• Tilde (twiddle) ie ’~’ character has been restored to the cutlist window display. SU most commonly displays ’~’ on some measurements if it cannot display it accurately in the units you have selected. This might alert you that your part was not drawn correctly
• Tilde ( ’~’) now has been removed from the csv output ( cutlist csv and CutListPlus csv). While I claimed it did this before, in fact I was wrong and it hadn’t been completed properly.
• Compact lists on the windows display as well for cutlist csv and CutListPlus csv will now consolidate parts which have the same name, dimensions and material name. Previously only the name had to match, thus squashing together like named parts which might otherwise have had different dimensions.
• CutListPlust export for inches has been fixed. Now, any unit selected in Sketchup can now be exported to CutListPlus ( inches, feet, cm, mm ). ( CutListPlus still doesn’t support import of metres but it’s unlikely anyone would be using those). Thanks to Todd Peterson at CutListPlus for clarifying the interface rules and allowing me to make this change which makes import into CLP effortless.

1. Additional characters which may end up in titles or material names which would otherwise give problems are now properly converted to display in html. These characters are the space(), single quote (‘), less than (<), greater than (>) and dash (-).
2. The twiddle (~) character which SU adds to measurements when they are not completely accurate is now removed from the window display ( it was already removed from csv and clp files but not on the display)
3. Part number ( ie components, sheet parts or hardware parts) are now ‘fixed width’. ie: whereas a part before might have been labeled for example as P-2-1, now it will be P-002-01. Part number are 3 digits and sub-part numbers are 2 digits. Also it’s set up now so this could become an option in the future if it’s not quite right for everyone. Why is this important? Some people sort their parts by different criteria for different purposes but if you go to put it back in the original order by sorting on part number, then it does not end up in numerical order again.
4. Enhanced help on some fields ( some descriptions were incomplete or inaccurate after changes)

Don’t despair if you don’t see your request here yet. Stay tuned.

This will lead to a new ‘stable’ version 4.1 which will be the next current version.

The first pre-release is now available from here cutlist4.1pre

Please not that this link will not be permanent and may be removed without notice. If that’s the case, be looking for a new link with a newer version.

Here’s what’s in this first cut of v4.1:

1. 5’x5’ sheets for layout
2. New interface to select kerf size and support for kerfs in the layout
3. Project titles on both cutlist and layout
4. Printable layout from layout window ( SVG still a better option, but print from window is easier). This was a huge pain to get working, so I hope this is really useful!
5. Layout generation is heaps faster
6. Layout bug limiting window display to small projects has been fixed!
7. Printable cutlist from window – new easier interface
8. Sheets sizes are now in true metric measurements ( not imperial converted to metric)
9. Compact list is now in alphabetical order ( special request to restore this functionality from previous versions ago)
10. Bug fix in display when using ‘&’ in part names.

I welcome anyone who is daring to try this new version (actually it’s really quite stable!).
Quite a bit of the infrastructure has changed so if you do want to install it and have a previous version, make sure to delete the following before installing:

1.In Plugins folder:
CutListAndMaterials.rb

2. In plugins folder:
The enture ‘cutlistui’ folder

Then, as before, unzip the contents of the download into the plugins folder.

Note that any previous settings you had should be retained but some new options will be set to default settings.

Any issues, questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment here.

It’s the culmination of many years of dreaming and scheming. Some 30 years ago I heard myself say that I wanted to buy and live on 200 acres of forest. I can’t remember where I got the idea from, or why it had to be 200 acres.

Several years ago, I did finally buy a forest, 250 acres in fact. Buying a forest which is situated 300km ( 180miles) from you is still not the same as living there. I could visit it, wonder at my trees, the expanse of 250 acres ( we still haven’t been to every corner) and then I just dreamed about the day I could live on it. Then a few years ago, we bought a house in the town closest to the forest, about 12km ( 8 miles) away. In fact it’s the closest town for 150km ( 90 miles). The plan was to sell the house in the city, pay off all the mortgages and then live in this house and then plan the new house and business we want to create in and from the forest.

Putting the house on the market, quitting our jobs, nothing seems to make the plan more real than moving day. The day you no longer own the previous house, you have no job to go to the next day ( though in fact I did manage to make a last minute arrangement to work remotely for a period of time) and the day when you have to pack up the shop and the lumber and get the heck out.

And then suddenly you are in the country and the city you left is now 4 hours drive away over the mountain pass and cows and sheep are your neighbors. Grocery shopping is 1 1/2 hours away and you have to take all of your trash to the dump yourself. The only form of heating is the log stove (it’s winter here) and your daily ritual changes from a commute through traffic to lighting fires in the morning and baking bread.

Even worse, you have to set up your shop again.

This is the old shop, the cleanest it’s ever been!

And the new shop still waiting to be arranged.

And where did I get all that wood from? So much I had to buy this 1981 Toyota Dyna(saur) to haul it all away.

But the scenery is beautiful and the dream is so much closer now.

This is a partial shot of our forest against the backdrop of the ‘Old man on the mountain’. That’s the forest shrouded in the mist.

And of course, before we left Christchurch, we had to leave a tree legacy and we planted a pinus radiata in the forest park next to our house.

Steve