back

well, we got home the other day. so i had to get some wood ready. my dad and i bought a log a few years ago, a huge cherry, 16/4, heavy as all get out. so heavy, that we decided to split the nice board down the middle with a chain saw. it was pretty checked down the middle, so no harm done.

the log wasn't as good as we had hope, but there is still alot of wood there. the color is beautiful, but there are loads of checks to work around...

the cherry is going to become a convex wall cabinet soon.

there are a few things that need doing in the shop before i get going. sharpening knives, claiming valuable floor space with a lumber rack, watching for bugs. there's the chunk of cherry on the left.

when i was loading up the rack, i had to move a few pieces of red elm. on the elm, i found these little buggers boring hole in the sapwood. i hope that they didn't populate anything else. the elm is now in quarantine.

musée des arts décoratifs

we went to the museum the other day when we were in paris. it was pretty nice. they had this mobi boom exhibit going on, so we went to see it. it was just ok. there were a few wooden pieces in it, a wall desk that i really liked, but most of it was kinda like what the guy below is sitting on. lots of 'new' materials and metal, and strange plush sofas.

the rest of the museum was pretty fantastic, although i missed a bunch of it due to inattention. spent a bit of time in the art deco room where they had alot of ruhlmann on display, maybe eight pieces or so. it was pretty neat to see the pieces first hand.

doors didn't stay flush back then either.

this was a big tabletop, around four feet by six or seven.

this piece was pretty cool too. all compound curved surfaces, and lots of curved glass. a big, imposing piece by marcel coard, from 1915.

this one's called 'chiffonier' by andré groult from 1925. all leather over compound curved substrate.

needless to say, they had some neat stuff in this museum. visiting is fun and all, but i miss being in my shop.

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.

cour à bois

claire and i were out for a stroll the other day in france, and guess what i saw... that's right, big ol' boules. so i went to check it out some more today.

most of the stuff i saw was flitch cut. the majority of what they had was sapele, sipo (a close relative to sapele, only more stable and not quite as dark... this is what i was told), some mahogany, ash, white and red oak, iroko, and some more regular construction stuff.

wood here is sold in cubic meters, like in japan. hard to visualize this measure. buddy at the yard was telling me that a cubic meter of sapele is worth something like 1100 euro. he broke it down to this: a meter wide piece of sapele, four meters long, not sure how thick but at least an inch, went for 200 euro, about 260$ CND. not too bad.

but they did not have any boxwood, so i'll have to visit some more lumber yards. oh well.

in this last photo, the pile is about four feet wide, and probably twelve quarter. i think this was sapele.