Evening sky

(Click to enlarge)

I spent the day breaking down large slabs of white oak and black walnut that I had stacked in my shop 7 years ago when I moved here. It is time, I am not getting any younger. One large slab of white oak was so heavy I had to ask my neighbor's son to come help me with it - he's 75 and a tough old bird and between the two of us we got it out onto the saw horses and I was able to saw it into manageable sized pieces. I cut the slabs lengthwise to remove the sap wood and the pith, plus any checking that had occurred in the middle of the pieces, then cut them to 18-24" lengths so that I could resaw them and then plane them. Ended up with a nice selection of pieces which I can now use for smaller projects - there doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for furniture made out of giant pieces of lumber.

I cleaned up the shop and the yard and ended up with a big ol' pile of chips and scrap - soon I will have a nice fire to keep me warm out there. It's getting cold. I know, it's all relative, but it didn't get out of the 40s today, so I was happy to be doing heavy physical labor to keep warm.

Right at the end of the day my Border Collie mix took off running after something - usually it is some animal wandering around in the neighbors' yard but in this case a hawk had flown in and roosted on a branch of my catalpa tree. This particular dog has always been more attentive to avian life than any other dog I have ever had - she always pays attention to buzzards and hawks, crows, not so much. So when a hawk landed within 25 feet of her she took off after it. The hawk wanted no part of that and took off too, only in the hawk's case, it actually took off and flew away. Fascinating stuff...

Bobby Manuel, my cousin's coworker.

Edit:

 Let the chips fall where they may.

Fire!

Oh yeah - we have achieved fire - not all that hard really when you have a ponderous pile of flammable material drying in the hot sun., to wit:

Bradford pear root and branch, twigs, leaves, sticks, chunks, random shop scrap - how brightly it will burn!

All it took was a bit of scrap paper and voom! 

It didn't take long to burn down to this:

At night it looked like this:

Who brought the marshmallows?

It is still smoking this morning, and I hope, burning out the silver maple stump that the fire pit is built on.

We had a nice sunset, probably due to all the extra smoke I put into the atmosphere:

Nice sunrise this morning, too:

No, wait, that was a couple of days ago, but it is still a good one.

My Mexican sunflowers are blooming - they are a treat this time of year. They are growing next to a white oak tree I transplanted from my old place - they hitched a ride in the root ball and are currently taller than the oak tree. Cool!

It certainly feels like it.

What, another post?

Colorblind me saw this display of peppers at a friend's booth at the market this morning and thought "Those look colorful". So I took a picture. Then I told everyone I know to go do the same. 

This bowl is white oak. It is not popular.

Windbag made me do this:

Dolly.

Speaking of executing ideas...

Deborah mentioned that she has ideas but doesn't execute them. I had an idea this week and executed it - is that a good thing or a bad thing? If I sell it and get money then it is a good thing. To wit, the Robox:

White oak, ash, ambrosia maple and metal hardware.

Because why not?

The story of a white oak tree

Back in 2015 a friend told me she had some oak pieces in her back yard and asked if I wanted any. "Red oak, right?" "Nope, white oak - it was struck by lightning the other night." "Did that wake you up?" "Yep, it was only 30 feet from the house."

So I went and investigated - by the time I got there most of the good pieces had been split for firewood, but I did manage to get a couple of nice pieces:

I rough turned it, coated it, set it aside to dry and this week set about finish turning it. Here's what it looked like after drying for three years:

I took the picture at that angle to show how much the piece had distorted while drying. It was a real struggle to turn - I used the Jumbo Jaws (tm) to hold it while I turned the foot round - it had ovalized to the point that it was close to a half inch longer than it was wide:

The bowl also had a hole clean through it:

You can see daylight through it!

At this stage the piece weighed 5.15 pounds - heavy!

So I put it on my lathe, used a grinder to turn down the foot, and once that was done, reversed it and gripped the foot with the 4 jaw chuck. Then I used my 7" Makita body grinder to smooth it out enough so that I could begin turning it. The piece was so out-of-round that even a tool as benign as a scraper would cause it to fly off the lathe - can't have that.

After hours of grinding I was finally able to use my bowl gouge and get it to near net shape. Rough deal, I'll tell ya what!

But I persisted and this is what I got:

Top view:

Finished weight 3.75 pounds - still not light, but at least there is over a pound of white oak sawdust in my shop now.

All because lightning struck a white oak tree back in 2015.

I can handle it.

What is better than work?

Well, on a hot, sleepy Sunday, watching others work is much better than doing actual work. My neighbor mentioned the YouTube series Acorn to Arabella, the story of a guy in western Mass who decided to build his own sail boat. I have no idea where this story goes, but I have gotten as far as chapter 22 wherein our protagonist cuts down a spruce tree that his great-grandfather planted. If he succeeds, that will become the mast of his boat.

It has been an interesting story to watch - dude definitely works hard, is a very skilled tree guy and knows boats inside and out. His carpentry skills - well, he hasn't died as a result of his lack of skill when it comes to tools like a table saw, but that's a minor quibble. He does things like fell and mill the logs for all of various pieces parts that make up a wooden boat, shape a massive piece of white oak to form the main keel board, he scrounged up and melted five tons of lead to cast his ballast keel, built a boat house and so on and so on. So he has a strong skill set, inherited well and he is goal oriented enough not to be deterred by pesky things like building inspectors.

Things I have noticed - with simple tools one or two people can accomplish incredible feats that would baffle archeologists, who apparently have never done a lick of work in their lives. Even in places that have been logged repeatedly for 300 years there is an abundance of good trees. Dude has a horrible accent that borders on Canadian and what sounds like a speech impediment. The narrator is an up-talker. Vocal fry is annoying. But setting aside all of that those guys, and occasionally their friends, are working very hard and gittin' 'er done. That's a good thing to see. I have spent way too much time watching this series but now I want to see how it turns out. Does he finish the boat? Is he able to haul it 100 miles to the nearest ocean? Does it float? You know, details.

For those of you who wonder what it is like to top and drop a tall spruce, here is episode 22:

Spruce.

Do not watch this if you have acrophobia.

Nassau, the Bahamas.

Almond Bread

All this talk about food and microwaves got me hungry. But being me I branched out on another idea.

A couple of years ago a friend gave me a microwave oven that she thought was broken. It wasn't but so it goes. I buried it in a mound in the backyard as a decoy for anyone using metal detectors to find my buried treasure (editor's note - there is no buried treasure, but no one need know that). Over time the soil eroded and there it was - white goods (as they call appliances at the salvage yard) poking up through the dirt. So I dug it out and dragged it into the tractor shed.

While reading various trade magazines I kept coming across some interesting patterns burned into wood, to wit:

I thought that was kind of cool - has kind of an Asian vibe to it, and it's done with electricity, and one of the preferred sources for power is a used high voltage transformer from a microwave oven. Hmm, I have one of those. 

So I started doing some research and what do you know - now fractal wood burning is being banned by various groups due to people getting electrocuted during the process. That's not good. I mean it's a nice design and all, but is it worth dying for? Not to this old lumberjack.

A wiser approach would be to use software to generate fractals and Mandelbrot sets and Julia sets and all of the other, many variations on that theme.

Alice set set to Beethoven - trippy, man!

Anyway, I ended up taking the microwave to the scrap yard, got four cents a pound for it (what's that, a dollar or two?) and decided to stick with tried and true old-time woodworking using my 3D modeling software and my CNC:

The old ways are still the best ways, eh?

Who else could I link to based on the title of this post?

Walkies

Yesterday I saw a nice white oak just leafing out:

It has a number of other oak buddies nearby, including a massive willow oak which is close to six feet in diameter at its base. They are growing on top of a hill near a house that was once on a large farm, but now there are only about 10 acres of the original homestead left. The oaks are probably about 125-140 years old.

Today I saw some irises nearby:

They are giving way to other flowers as spring marches on.

Mama bluebird has filled her newly feathered nest with eggs:

That's it from here. My lawn needs to be mowed again. It will just have to wait.

How about some Scarlatti on the harpsichord?

This one's for CL

Q. We have some white oak lumber that has been air drying for about a year as we do not need it. I noticed that it seems to smell more like vanilla than the acid oak smell. Is this possible?

A. You have discovered one of the secrets about drying white oak for wine barrels. The oak aroma does indeed become more a vanilla smell. The wood imparts this aroma to any liquids stored inside the barrel, especially wine, adding bouquet to the wine. I was amazed when I tasted wine from a fresh oak barrel versus wine from a barrel made with aged wood. This concept has been well known in Europe. This new aroma seems to be encouraged by exposure to rain.

Gene Wengert, “The Wood Doctor” has been training people in efficient use of wood for 35 years. He is extension specialist emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That's not much of an article, but it is about white oak and it is related to Wisconsin.

White oak burns nicely.

I hate technology

I don't, really, but some days I find myself frustrated by "labor saving" devices. Yesterday, our first warm day in a while, was a good day to mill a bowl out of a big chunk of white oak, or so I thought. I had designed the bowl, created a toolpath, and started the CNC running, when about 90% of the way through the roughing stage the z-axis went nuts and milled straight through the bottom of the bowl. Nice. Now I have more firewood and a puzzle to solve - why did the machine break?

Why? Because I used it. That is my corollary -- machines only break if you use them. Of course, if you depend upon machines for income, one can become stressed about that. So I try to focus on repair, and let the chips fall where they may, so to speak.

My debugging skills always get a workout in this kind of situation, and here's what I have done - swapped cables to isolate the suspect controller channel, swapped out the known bad controller board with another of unknown condition, discovered that the second board has a bad y-axis, swapped in yet another spare board, which, surprise surprise, has no working axes.

At this point I contacted the manufacturer -- guy says "Your machine is an antique, our repair guy refuses to work on those old cards, here, buy a new one for $1,600." Well, there you go. I might consider it, depending on how many changes I have to make to my upstream design software. Oy!

So, since I can't run the machine I might as well read a book on my Kindle. But before I download a new book I figure I should tidy up the memory - there are books on there I have read and won't read again, so I can delete those, right? Wrongo, bunkie - them sumbitches is on there permanently, as near as I can tell.

I mash the button that says delete, they are still there. I touch the book icon itself it says "Downloading". NOOOO - stop it - I want it gone, not reloaded!

So I go to the Amazon site, search for "Deleting books from Kindle" -- you'll never guess what they suggest. They want you to buy a book that tells you how to delete a book. Holy schnike! You cannot be serious!

So now I am working with a sales guy over at the CNC company to see what I can work out - like the Scottish regiment -- repair or replace, for those of you who know that joke. "Aye, we've decided to replace!", which is the opposite of the punchline -- turns out I don't have to buy new software, so there you have it.

Now if only I could delete a freakin' book from my Kindle - grrr...

As long as we are talking about roots...