I have some samples of wood pre- and post-planing, just to give an idea of what a planer can do. The first two photos are angles of the same stack of wood: Rough sawn yellow cedar from our tree, oak from a pallet, rough sawn maple from our trees, and some salvaged western red cedar.
and
That little chunk of oak was filthy and rough sawn. Now it looks like this:
The yellow cedar has a lot of knots in it. We'll probably use it inside closets and drawers as it has a spicy scent. Also, you can see the nick in the blade of the planer leaves a raised area in the wood.
We have tons of maple, most of it clear, some quartersawn. This piece had a bit of mildew on it, but it cleaned up nicely.
This western red cedar is tongue-and-groove 1x4 that came out of a house built in the 1920s or 1930s. There had been wallpaper on it that had been hung with wheat paste---I think.
One bummer---I hit something hidden under the wallpaper. It doesn't look like a nail, but I didn't check for nails before planing. Usually anything salvaged gets a good going over with a hand metal detector because a nail can gouged the bed of a tool or mess up the blade. Now I have to swap out the blades before I wanted to. Well, I've done dumber things than that before.
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can't go wrong misquoting ogden nash
because somehow the misquotes always seem to end up having the same sense as the original. people seem to generally absorb both the image and the rhythm, and repeat those back pretty faithfully, even if the words are sometimes off.
when hurricane ivan came through a few years ago, it split and knocked down most of the small oak trees around me. the whole neighborhood for days afterward smelled like a woodworking shop, taking back to the days [way back] when i had a 4-bedroom house with a huge organic garden and giant compost heap and a shop building that was nearly as big as the house. hardly a stick of furniture in the house [because i was going to make all my own] but i made sure the shop was well-furnished: iirc there were two table saws, 2 or 3 routers, a band saw, a planer/joiner, at least two workbenches [hammers galore! and lots of chisels and such, woodcarving being being my first love]... and mice. the dog was hell on those poor mice.
never did get my lathe, though, dangnabbit.
was this the dying of the light you were thinking of? cuz i'd have to agree with you on that one [and on bishop's one art too]
beautiful wood, wonderful photos! thanks.
Yes, Dylan Thomas, not Joyce
Still, villanelle as a form hammersmashed utterly with both poems. The two poems are the same yet wholly, and utterly different, bookends perhaps. I'll have to think about it.
I heartily approve the furnishing of the shop before the house. That is a message I can get behind.
Oak is a funny thing. I love the trees, but am not wild about the wood, unless it's wrapping up some red wine. Perhaps a childhood on oak hardwood floors or something. The oak I planed gave off that tannic scent and I immediately felt thirst.
The yellow cedar---it may not be yellow cedar, it may be incense cedar, which isn't even a cedar at all---has a spicy scent. Definitely not western red, which smells sweet to me. I love WRC, always have. The colors are often like Neapolitan ice cream.
Tell me, if you want, about your shop and house. What was the dog's name? What sorts of chisels? What did you carve? What sort of wood did you work? What did you make?
wrapping up some red wine
definitely a good use for oak. i'm with you, oak looks best as trees, live oaks being my favorite.
oak was my ex's favorite wood [yes, we bonded over woodworking, as well some other things ;)] and to this day the scent evokes vivid and fond memories. he was the real furniture maker, and i only caught the bug from watching him. me, i started out as a sculptor, going around to construction sites, or dumpsters, or wherever, picking up odd scraps and figuring out hmmm... what does this want to be? [usually an animal, sometimes something else]. but stuff happens, and about houses and gardens and furniture and lovers and woodworking shops: i'm not really up for anything beyond what elizabeth said and what dylan said.
the mouse-catching dog lived a long and health life though. he's the fence-biting red dog that was the center of all the ruckus here.
Oh, God, what a great story
about the dog and the fence you linked to. And how fabulously you told it, so that I was hunched over my desk in agony, feeling the fence and your anguish, and braced against an awful end to the story. Thank goodness.
I've never lived with a dog, so these are agonies beyond my ken. But I now live in the country with three cats who go out during the day, and had an earlier one lost most likely to one of the many different predators hereabouts, so must go through a daily experience of major anxiety every evening when I call them in, not knowing how many and which of them will have survived the day.
Life without animal companions is inconceivable to me, but unless we confine them 24/7 like babies, the risk to their physical and our emotional lives is just huge.
Thank you for linking to the story, or as a latecomer to the site, I would never have discoverd it and its power.
The red dog!
Indeed, a great story!
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
you're welcome, gyrfalcon
and thank you for the very kind compliments. the four-footed ones, they really do become our best friends and family members, don't they? [and finned and feathered and scaly ones do too, actually]
Joys of Planing
I've done quite a bit of wood salvaging myself, the transformation of old wood from a planer is a thing of beauty.
My garage is studded up with Douglas Fir 2x4's salvaged from a 1920's county highway garage. The building was 1 3/4 stories and the studs are actually 2 1/4 x 4 1/2. It was amazing how many of them were not only straight, but completely clear. Old growth for sure.
Was the garage balloon construction? Probably...
So those studs would be, what 16'? Nice. That old growth stays true, that's for sure..
A neighbor told me that something like 70-80% of hardwood used in the US goes for building pallets. I don't know if that's right, but she's right about a lot of stuff. (I should look it up, but right now, I'm reading about FSK paper.)
I'm lucky in that this material came from pallets my neighbor JT took apart. Removing nails and staples was JT's therapy for years, but he doesn't want to do anything with all the material he salvaged, so he came over with a bunch of it in the bucket of his tractor a couple weeks ago. Says he has buttloads of the stuff I can have. I have great neighbors, especially now that the tweakers got evicted. JT lets me use his tractor whenever I want, too.
(Lambert, if you want to talk insulation, my head is full of it right now---full of insulation, not other stuff my head could be full of. I'm not allowed outside to "help" the heating guy. He didn't say anything but I can tell when someone just wants me to go away. That happens a lot.)
Yes, it was
And they were 16'. Which was perfect as my garage is 1 1/2 stories tall. The attached garage's floor is about 3 feet below floor level in the house. When I built the garage (it L's off the side) I matched the peak of the house so the garage roof has a steeper pitch, but enough height for a walk-up attic.
FeraLib, what are you going to do with the attic?
Storage? Or are you going to finish it?
This goes back to the insulation thing. We're insulating our roof in an unusual way because I can't do anything, you know, normal. But Lambert was wondering about insulation last week and I had to track down some FSK paper, so now I'm curious about how you'd insulate and finish your attic.
And did you take down the 1920s structure or did someone else? That's some dangerous work, even a small structure is fraught with things ready to fall on you.