spain

claire and i went to ireland last week, and were lucky enough to spend the weekend with the wonderful spain clan. we had a great time, one might even say the perfect vacation, because it involved both wood and machine shopping, and the food was wonderful.

fergal brought us to the local lumber yard which was mostly full of exotics like sapele and iroko, with some american woods like cherry and walnut, and then there was a stack of oak that just needed some going through. so we went through the pile, and picked out two sets of three sister planks. it was pretty fun going through a pile of lumber with fergal, and we ended up finding some nice pieces, but they stayed behind.

these are some photos of fergal's shop. he has a really nice space to work in. detached from the house with some nice windows and big access doors. in this photo you can see a wine rack that is close to being finished.

this is the machine that we went shopping for. it's a viceroy bowl lathe that is soon to be a mortiser. the business end of the spindle has a morse #3 taper that will take a chuck, and then some sort of table with shims will be used in conjunction with free hand mortising. this is a stout little machine which should serve well as a mortiser.

here's an overall of the shop. wood storage is to the right and the mortiser is just out of the left hand side of the frame, with a ten inch jointer-planer in the foreground.