Once all of the stenciling is done I do all of the pin-striping on the frame and begin assembly.
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So here is the Buch’s Pennsylvania 3 cornsheller completely restored to working order and looking good.

Another Fun Restoration Completed

After all of the tenons were cut and all of the mortises were drilled and chiseled I drilled all of the hardware mounting holes, and did all of the rabbeting on the router table using the original pieces of the frame as a reference.

Here are all of the pieces for the frame.

Dry fit frame

The sides of the cornsheller were made from poplar and are fit to the frame with rabbet joints cut on the router table.
I used the scroll saw to do the cut-outs for the bearings and for the large hole on the top section where the feeder chute goes.

All of the woodworking is now complete.
Waiting for the square headed nuts and bolts so on to the custom paint job.

By combining existing technology and American ingenuity the first high volume cornshellers were produced and distributed throughout the US made by different manufacturers among which were John Deere , International Harvester, Hocking Valley and Buch’s and Sons just to name a few. With the use of these type of shellers production would go from several bushels a day to hundreds of bushels a day.
So without further adieu I will take you through the steps to bring back a little piece of history in the form of this restoration.
Because of the fact that the original paint job on this cornsheller was non existent, I had to do some research to determine the manufacturer. One of the things that led me to figure out that it was a Buch’s cornsheller was the internal chaff screen used to separate the waste corn chaff from the kernels.
Chaff screen exclusive to a Buch’s sheller

Also the round edge flywheel was another giveaway that this was a Buch’s.

Round edge flywheel

The wood members were all in pretty good shape so getting accurate measurements was pretty easy. I dismantled the sheller and got my materials together for the restoration. White oak for the frame and poplar for the box section..
Buch’s Sheller with metal work removed.

Let’s do some woodworking

I finally got the Custom Intarsia tap handles and tower complete.
This was a challenging little project which tested my Intarsia skills(and patience) but was fun to do.The client is very pleased.The tower is made from mahogany and features a removable back to access the tap installation and hoses. Threaded inserts were installed to provide a way to attach it to the bar top. The curved sides were made by laminating thin pieces to form the curve.

Each of the tap handles consist of 40 pieces for the intarsia with 5 coats of spray-on poly for the finish. The woods used are:
Frame-antique mahogany
Background- lacewood
letters,nose, eye pupils -ebony
body-Peruvian walnut
chest ,muzzle and bottle label- cherry
foam and eyes-holly
lips-bloodwood
bottle- lignum vitae
wheat-yellowheart

The card holders are made from antique mahogany

Can’t wait to see it all set up.
On to the next project—Complete restoration of a “Buch’s Pennsylvania 3” cornsheller Circa 1897

Picture of logo

Don’t do much carving or etching I said but I do Intarsia which is a unique type of woodworking that might be something you’d like to see. Invited him to the shop to see some of my work. We discussed pricing, woods, sizes and I was given the go-ahead to get em done as an intarsia. Talk about a challenge!!! Like I said, I like working with small pieces but I gotta tell you , I might have bitten off more than I can chew with this project.
Just to give an idea of the size of these things, the total width of the logo is 4 1/4” so keeping the scale correct means that the inlay has to be contained in a 3 ” circle. So the letters are less than 1/4” tall. I’ve cut some pretty small pieces before but to cut and fit letters this small and inlay them into a background—well that’s just getting down to the nitty gritty part of this type of work.

That little black spec is the letter “E”

So after a little trial and error (LOTS) and learning a few new cutting and sanding techniques here is the first of 4 Rabid Otter logo’s. Still have to turn the handle and glue everything in but I do like a challenge.

In order to make the frame of the cornsheller look old, I begin by sanding all of the frame components to 100 grit to roughen it up a bit. I then mixed a water based acrylic paint with water to make a very thin wash and applied to the white oak frame with a foam brush. This will give the appearance of weathered wood which then is stained using an antique maple oil based stain and wiped off. The grain of the oak becomes prominent and the grey shows through just enough to make it look aged.

When I did the first cornsheller I hand cut the stencils which took lots of time and had I known then that I would be doing another Hocking Valley sheller I would have made the stencils out of real stencil board for re-use. I did have the original stencils and contacted several businesses that do custom stencils to see if it would be possible to have stencils made from my originals. WOW—I’m in the wrong business!!!

Average price was $75 per stencil for set up fee then $40 per stencil and that’s with me supplying the stencil board. NOT—- I need 3 stencils ,so time to gather my patience and do some drawing. I could still use the original stencils as a pattern which did save lots of time even though the new stencils needed to be a little larger. Plus I added one more stencil which I did not make for the first cornsheller.So after 4 hours of drawing and cutting with an exacto knife the stencil problem is solved.

I used enamel spray paint for the red parts of the sheller and did the pin striping with enamel craft paints and used the Dab method for the stenciling.

So here are a couple of photos of most of the painting . I still have one more side to stencil then the whole think gets finished with a couple coals of shellac.

On to the assembly of the Hocking Valley Cornsheller—stay tuned

After spending a little time piecing the wooden parts of the puzzle together, I made up my material list and headed off to buy the lumber for the project. I bought enough 8/4 white oak to do the frame sections and 5/4 white oak to do the box sections.
Here are a couple of photos of the original woodwork that I had to work with.

All of the joinery is mortice and tenon which I did with my handy-dandy bandsaw tenoning jig, forstner bits on the drill press and a little chisel work. I used the scroll saw to cut the holes out for the bearings and for the top in- feed section.

So after 3 days of woodworking and head scratching this is where I’m at with the restoration.I started by sizing all of the frame parts to 1 3/4×2 1/2 and planed all of the box pieces to 1” thick.

Dry- fit frame

All of the woodwork in place.

The guts in place

Time to do the paint job

Mike My daddy retired in 1996 and proceeded to purchase his dream retirement property in south Mississippi. The land he purchased had three old barns on it. The prior owner had cleaned out all the items that he wanted and told my daddy he could have anything left. As you can imagine, there was a lot of junk. In the cleaning out process, some old antique tools were found along with the cornsheller. Daddy quickly put it to good use. He grew corn and would have me and my small children come over to help him turn the crank and do the shelling. We would catch the corn in a 48 quart cooler and then take it to the grist mill for grinding. He was known to give out bags of fresh ground cornmeal for Christmas every year. Store bought cornmeal just doesn’t compare to the fresh ground taste of the grist mill cornmeal.

Thanks
Robert

So he loaded it up on a pallet and sent it to me .
Here are a couple of pics of My Newest Challenge

Looks like fun to me!!!

Simply a matter of tracing the slots onto the blanks. I used a piece of sticky back label paper on the walnut blanks but traced straight on the maple and cherry

In order to cut the slots on the scrollsaw a 1/16 ” pilot hole is drilled in each location.

After all of the holes are drilled for one full set, it’s over to the scroll saw to begin the fun. I used a # 5 skip tooth blade which works good on thicker stock. I soon found out that a sequence was needed for cutting. I could cut all of the slots for one block with one blade if I cut the maple first then the cherry and finally the walnut. Take your time and stay on the line.

It wasn’t worth trying to get more cuts from a blade in this 3/4” stock. Blades are cheap.

After 3 days and 25 blades I got all 350 slots done.Now THAT was fun stuff.

Next session will be more glue -ups—-stay tuned!!!

Just a matter of loading the side piece into the jig, clamping in place and drilling down to a pre-set depth on the drill press.

When I did the prototype I marked out a circle on the bloodwood , then cut it out on the scrollsaw, then sanded the edges until I got it to fit properly. Very time consuming process. I had to devise a jig to cut 50 inlays exactly the right size in less than a minute each. The jig that I made started out by using the 3” forstner bit to drill a hole through a piece of 1/8” plywood. Glued this to a scrap piece of 3/8” plywood that clamps to the scroll saw table. Cut 3” disc from 3/8 plywood and sand until it rotated smoothly in the 3” hole. Cut a 1/4 circle section from the disc, thin down to about 1/8” and superglue back in place. Add a piece of 60 grit sandpaper to help hold the inlay stock in place, dremal a couple of finger slots—ready to go.

It took a bit of trial and error to get the correct radius but once I got it dialed in, I could cut perfect inlays every time.

Next segment—-more sections to glue up—having fun now!!!

Perfect inlays in less than a minute each. Mission accomplished!!!.

A few passes past the drum sander is enough to straighten out the tip for a good tight fit.

Because each block consists of 2 bookmatched sides I made a jig for the glue-up that allowed gluing both sides at the same time.

Just a matter now of applying glue to the edges of the pieces , arranging in the proper order and clamping up.

Using this process I was able to get 4 sets of sides glued up per day while sanding sets waiting for glue to cure.
Next step is doing the inlays—stay tuned

After all of the 9 degree cuts are made, another trip through the jointer cleans up the edge. It is a little hard to hold the tapered piece on the jointer so I made a jig that has 3 sharp brads that bite into the blank which allows me to push it through the jointer with no problem.

It is vital that all of the side pieces are exactly the same width on the top dimension which is cut at a 9 degree angle so another jig is made for the miter saw that measures the exact length when the pieces are loaded on the saw .

Cuts are made in pairs

Here are the 10 side pieces for one knife block.

Only 240 more to go.

All 250 pieces ready for glue-up

In order to keep all of the components consistent I had to make several jigs to help me in this process as you will soon see in action. I have gathered up all of my rough sawn lumber and have made all of the final modifications as per the client. Let the fun begin