I started with taking a couple of 2×4’s and cutting half dovetails in them. They were left over from the platform I built so that I could build my assembly table. Now that I have the table, the jointed 2×4’s can become lathe ways, a more noble purpose, perhaps. This is a couple of the half-dovetails sawn with my crispy IT saws, not purtied up:

I then put a considerable amount of energy into the flywheel. It all started at Lowes… I didn’t have the stock on hand. Brought it home, threw it across the jointer, and glued it up. A couple of hours later I found a center, drove a finish nail through it, and started routing using a shop-made router circle cutting jig. It went pretty well until the finish nail pulled through. Disaster. I then had an oblong wheel, and I don’t even care for the elliptical machines at the gym! A 4d common nail, a new hole in the router jig, and viola! It has been healed, slightly smaller in diameter but round nonetheless.

It will be a few days before I can enter the sanctuary again, so I’ll post more when I get more. Thanks for following this!

Well, I went ahead and ordered the pin-handle-sawblade kit from Gramercy. I put the order in on Wednesday, the stuff was in my mailbox on Friday, and it came through via priority mail because I’m too cheap to have it overnighted. Now, I don’t care who you are, that’s fast. I didn’t need the overnight service.

The pins are a nicely turned brass, and I epoxied them into the handles today. Until I have my lathe built, I’m going to call that one good. I would say that for where I’m at right now, that was money well spent.

I ran into a problem, however; the blade was about 1-1/2” shorter than what I had planned on. I had been roughly following plans that called for a longer blade, so I wound up keeping my original walnut cross-beam and making a second one out of cherry that will match the length, if not the aesthetics. Truth be told, cherry is my favorite wood anyway, so it’s all good, and I’ll have the ability to use a longer blade in the future. In the mean time, I’ll be up and running whenever I get to town and find some braided fishing line. I’ll post pictures when I get that far.

Time to go eat some humble pie now.

In keeping with the bottom-feeder tradition, I’m trying to build the whole thing out of big box store dimensional lumber. I haven’t researched the bearings yet, but in the renderings I have the flayrod made out of 1\2” rod stock with a bearing welded on. I can see where it would be perfectly serviceable if I had a 1×3 with a bearing on the crank end and a bearing over a lag screw on the treadle end. I hope to begin construction this weekend—Momma wants me to get a project or two finished before I start, however. Sounds like “honey-do’s” to me…

This is sort of a front perspective of what I’ve come up with:

The same thing, slightly more to the side:

And a detail of the tail stock, using a tusk tenon and wedge:

I’ve concluded that no matter what I do to these jpg’s, Lj’s is going to crop the right side of them. I tried to trick it, but I can’t fool it. I apologize for the partial pictures.

Tell me what you think so far!

Every since I saw Roy Underhill (herewith referred to as “St. Roy,”) using his treadle lathe, I have been, well, smitten. I don’t have an electric lathe, I don’t have any lathe, and I need a lathe. I don’t have $600 either, and I need that, but that brings me full circle to the treadle lathe. Furthermore, the Moby Plank project is going to finish up another month or so out, longer if I can’t come up with a big band saw to use, and the bow saw will get knocked out this weekend when the parts arrive.

So, when my wife banished me to the shop tonight and said “Go cut some wood,” (I was strenuously protesting, too, but she shoved me right out the door) I found some dimensional lumber just laying around in the loft. Gee. I took a 2×4 over to the miter saw and laid it up on the bed, and whish wound up with a board exactly 42” long. Gee. Need a second. “whish”. Those look remarkably like something—wait, it’s coming to me—yes! The ways to a treadle lathe! And we’re off…

I don’t have any clue how I’m going to handle the metal parts of this puppy, not being much up on the likes of bearing varieties, flayrods and pittman arms. I guess I will be soon…

I’ll get pictures as work progresses.

The next task was to chop the mortises to accept the tenons on either end of the cross beam. I had cleverly taken the time to taper the arms, which really means I succumbed to the siren call of my No.-4. Note: if you decide to build one of these, chop the mortise first and then taper the arms. Much easier. This is the mortise layout, a little hard to see:

I decided to “go Galoot,” no power tools, so I got out my Millers Falls brace and Irwin bits. a 1/4” mortise was required, and I’m a sneak-up-on-it kind of guy, but my smallest bit was 1/4”. That will carry implications you will see later. Note the high-tech depth gauge:

Here’s another thing I thought of after the fact. If you are going to bore the mortise like I did, it might be a good idea to score the centerline with a utility knife in order to get a substantial groove. My bits wandered, and that meant that my mortises were not precisely 1/4” wide. The shoulders of the tenons will cover them and let no one be the wiser, but they weren’t clean like I like them to be. This is the bored tenon (which you might be too, by now…)

Grabbing my crispy Sorby chisel, and a couple of no-so-bad Marples, the mortises cleaned up to a usable level.

The next step was to cut the tenons on the crosspiece. I’ve tried fitting mortises to tenons and tenons to mortises. I’m definitely a “fit the tenon to the mortises” kind of guy. Trial by error. After laying out the tenons using a marking gauge, I made the decision to cut the shoulders of the tenon first. I did this because it seems to promote more consistency from one side of the stock to the other. For me, taking up my awesome Independence Tool carcass saw is better therapy than the best psychiatrist. After cutting the shoulders, cutting the faces of the tenon was very easy using my Independence Tool (yes, I’m gloating) tenon saw. The tenons came out remarkably straight and true, and needed only minor paring (I was sneaking up again) before they indexed snugly into the mortises. Here is a finished tenon:

The fruits of the afternoon’s labor (I can’t figure out how to make the whole picture fit, Sorry!!):

The next step is to plane, scrape, and sand my way to smoothness, bore holes in the arms for handles, prepare the “Spanish Windlass” and get a saw blade. Any suggestions on the last would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for looking!

One of the glorious things about being a woodworker today is our ability to be served by the Internet. Through this amazing channel of funneled electrons, we can blog and Twitter and post websites full of our projects and join together with others in songs of praise over the latest Veritas or Lie-Nielsen acquisition, or remind one another to be wary of the dangers of spinning carbide tips.

Recently I read a blog posted by Christopher Schwarz on the Woodworking Magazine reviewing a brand new Veritas plane coming onto the scene, which led me to a link by the Village Carpenter, a person after my own heart, pondering the “certain something” that draws those of us that are hand tool enthusiasts to prefer (to be polite) human powered woodworking over our electric counterparts.

Just so that there is no confusion: My alternative (older) online persona is Texasgaloot, a term derived from the combination of my obvious proximity along with my decade-old membership on the OldTools listserv. I joined that listerv not too long after a number of luminaries on “The Porch” found themselves refugees from the even older Rec.Woodworking. Rather than accept humiliation and defeat at being branded “Galoots” and “Neanderthals,” they accepted the terms as badges of honor, picked up their crispy Stanley No.-7’s, dovetail saws and marking gauges and formed their own group, still going strong (see www.galootcentral.com.)

As I was permitted to lurk on The Porch and learn from folks who started out as teachers and truly came to be valued friends, I began to realize how close-knit the hand tool community really is. One old tool vendor patiently carried my debt as my first marriage collapsed leaving me destitute, despite the fact that I had his tools in my possession. I kept them carefully wrapped and separated out from my users to preserve them in case I needed to return them, but the vendor insisted that I pay him when I could, which after three or four years, I was finally able to do. Try that at your local big box store!

There is a certain peaceful, spiritual connection that exists among those of us that are members of the Neander-community. Although many of us succumb to the stresses of time commitments and wind up using our table saws and drill presses to help us along (too often, myself included,) we reserve the hallowed finishing process of our hard work for our handwork. As soon as I finally get some decent photos made of my shaker night stand, I will be posting them; it is a project I did the initial milling using electricity, but hand-fitting and hand finishing from there on. The piece is now one of those things in my house I can just look at on a bad day, and it takes the knots out of my rope.

As I move closer and closer to my goal of full-time woodworking, I have done quite a bit of research on the advantages of being in business for oneself. I’ve noticed that advocates for entrepreneur-ship communicate a certain undertone, itself with a spiritual component that links me to the Galoot lifestyle as well. Entrepreneurs talk about two things in the same breath: freedom and control, and it boils down to the ability to have the freedom to control one’s life, rather than to abdicate control to someone else. While working for someone, one doesn’t have the ability to stay connected to Twitter, for example, and may only be permitted to check on one’s friends during “breaks.” In contrast to that is the person in business for him or herself, who has the freedom to go broke or be independently wealthy, the freedom to read blogs without concern over getting fired. Such is the sense of control I seek, and I think our woodworking forefathers knew the peace that it yielded.

The parallels are obvious: With hand tools, we have the freedom to hog huge slices of wood off that $50 cherry board, or to smooth it to a polish that shows your smile. We can chop narrow dovetails or take our time finessing a mortise-and-tenon fit rather than adjusting our trunions to micrometer precision. We have the ability to tell the in-laws, “I did that,” and not mean a whirring, spinning, screaming machine manufactured to leave that too-perfect pattern in the wood.

When I was young, my grandparents kept a cottage amidst the breathtaking Finger Lakes in Center New York State. At least a few times each summer my grandfather’s brothers and sisters would all gather, each bringing beans and radishes and fresh corn from their farms. We would have a great country feast, topped off with my grandmother’s fresh-baked apple and cherry pies. I would eat until my stomach hurt, and then the men would gather in the rockers on the front porch, smoke their pipes and tell lies about one another that were so funny my stomach would hurt all over again. The fragrances of the lake air combined with the lingering smells of supper and pipe tobacco in one of my favorite places in the world formed a synergistic aroma the memory of which I would never part with for any price. That was a time when everything was just right in my world.

As a micron-thin wisp of pine shaving curls from my smoothing plane, a shaving that if tossed in the air would have measurable “hang time,” I sense the connection to other woodworkers, past and present. I come as close as I ever will again to that spiritual experience of tasting a slice of Gram’s apple pie.

That was my mid-afternoon weather observation offering to my patient, devoted wife, as I stood dripping in our kitchen. I’m not like other woodworkers; I have the benefit of an air conditioned shop. I’m bragging, I realize, but after all that’s something worth bragging about. I’m just very glad to have a shop at all, let alone one that is so well air conditioned, and air conditioning that uses no electricity as a bonus!

Okay, by now you are beginning to catch on. My shop is set up in a barn that was erected in the 1920’s (that’s unimaginably old by Texas standards) using lumber that was obviously milled there on the ranch. The belt-driven circular saw that hooks up to the old McCormick H-model’s PTO still spins freely! The barn was built in order to house feed and hay for cattle and goats, and therefore it had no particular need to be, shall we say, pristine. Since it was built, a shed roof was added to the south side of the barn, and then the sides under the shed roof enclosed as well, creating what Texans call a lean-to. This was to house cattle and goats during feeding time. The upper 1/3 of the south wall of the barn was then removed in order to facilitate this feeding. Not a bad plan, if you are either a rancher, cow, or goat.

Now that it is 2008, we are faced with the reality that the lumber used to sheath this barn, long since unpainted (if it ever was) has become, well, autonomous. Nary a board touches another board. Some boards sport gaps of 1-1\2” between them, leaving the unwary woodworker inside subject to a fascinating pattern of striped sunburn should he not be wary. I’ve always wanted a unique shop.

This particular arrangement offers a number of advantages. First and foremost, I never need to worry about whether there is enough insulation to make heating and cooling efficient. At this point, that realm is entirely God’s. Another advantage is that I can keep my fan population at a minimum, as there is always a breeze through the building, like it or not. And where I live in Texas, there is always a nice, warm summer breeze… through my shop. Weather reports are easy—look up, and you can see what it’s doing outside. Noise? Who cares? The cows, horses, or deer? Are you a wildlife admirer? Great! Some will be passing through shortly…

Yesterday I spent all but a few hours in my shop, most of the time following the Way of the Galoot (I’m working toward my Galoot merit badge…) Chopping dovetails and planing boards can be strenuous work. At 97 degrees, I tend to be rather wet and rank from perspiration, and since I earned that yesterday, I was making no apologies for it. As we got ready for bed last night, my wife told me my feet were dragging (I thought that I was lucky, because it felt like there were other parts of my anatomy that would qualify.) This morning, my hands won’t work the keyboard and mouse properly. My feet are killing me from being on them so much, my lower back aches from being hunched over my workbench, and various and sundry other parts would much rather have stayed in bed this morning, rather than come to work. As I was inventorying my aches and pains, however, I came to a firm, but probably not startling conclusion.

I would do it all again today.

The other end has what I’ve affectionately come to call the “Lobster claw.” This is one side of it:

And the other side:

This is a photobucket-enhanced view of the whole thing. You can almost hear it doing a sort of inverted gasp for air…

The patterns critters made under the bark are going to make a fascinating edge to the bar:

As of this weekend, we have managed to move Moby out of the way so that we can finish up the rest of the shop, euphamistically speaking. Realizing that in my unique shop there are no to siding boards that meet, and consequently level floors are things other woodworkers have, we have begun to build our verson of the Spagnuolo torsion-box Assembly Table. That way, and assuming my hunt for usable mesquite goes better this week than last, we’ll be able to make the legs and frame for this, and actually have the legs sit level.

Stay tuned for future cliffhanger photos!

I’ve gotten my first commissioned piece, which when finished should resemble an outdoor bar made of pecan and mesquite. The slab of pecan has been in the client’s garage for a decade, since it was harvested because their new bedroom was going to occupy the same space. It is presently 12’ long, 4” thick and 19” wide. Not bad, considering I already had the diesel pickup to haul it with.

My country-girl wife and I stuck one end on a convertible dolly (turns out, it had to be the light end…) and then schlepped this whale up into the barn/workshop, caught our breath, and began the assessment process. I think we’re going to need an assembly table a la Marc Spagnuolo, an electric hand plane, a new Forrest table saw blade, and maybe three or four of those sexy Lie-Nielsen planes I’ve been lusting after (DON’T tell the country-girl wife I said that, please!!)

My task will be to turn it into a 6’ long, “L” shaped bar, semi-rustic, with mesquite legs, stretchers, and shelf. Not a bad thing for a galoot looking to get back into shape. As soon as I figure out how you all embed photos in your blogs, I’ll do the same thing, or at least mirror it on my other blog. Suggestions welcome.

As we begin to attack this monster, I’ll keep posting pictures. I’m going to even try and post the 3-D renderings I used to sell the folks.