Hawkins Bar

     I've been asked to work on a Jim Groeling designed house in Hawkins Bar. This is an opportunity not to be turned down, Jim not only designs beautiful redwood homes but he is also in the redwood salvaging business. This means the quality of wood he uses is that of a century ago when the virgin redwood forests were being logged at an alarming rate. Back then it seemed these forests would last forever, today we have only 2% of those redwood forests remaining.

     I agreed to take on building doors for the house, we would start with the exterior doors and then move on to the interior. Before I began I got a call from Joe Yonts asking me if I had a shaper and was it in working order. He wanted to run window sash stock through it because the Lighthouse Road Shop's shaper was down. This turned into a much larger project, all the stock was rough milled so it all needed it's final milling and then pushed through the shaper. At this point Joe's back went out and he could hardly walk. 

     At the same time Shane Miller's truck was discovered abandoned in the Mattole. Shane's wife and two kids had been murdered in Redding and he was a suspect. Dozens of police officers showed up in our rural valley, estimated between 60 and 70 officers. Sheriffs, Marshalls, Redding Police, Fortuna, Rio Dell and more. Roads were closed and Joe couldn't get home so he had to spend the night at our place.

     I ended up glueing up 33 sashes and sanding them too. Just as I finished sanding me and the family packed and drove south for our son's college graduation. 10 days later we are back and now I'm working on the doors. The frames are mortise and tenoned and the birds eye panels have been cut to size but I had to break away and get back to the Yellow House to bat proof it. Since we've been gone they have been pissing and shitting on everything, even the freshly painted walls. One more day of house work and I'll get back on the doors. Time to get to work.

Tool Box for Stained Glass

Tool Box for Stained Glass, a set on Flickr.

I took a material science course at College of the Redwoods, CT-7 Glass. I couldn't wait to get my own tools and start making my own stained glass creations. I was commissioned to do a stained glass window for a patron's sauna so I decided to build a tool box to organize my stained glass tools so that they could all be in one place. I wanted to build it with wood but decided to make it out of plywood first in case I wanted to modify the design after using it.

Refinishing a kitchen

     I refinished a kitchen today and yesterday. I built this kitchen ten years ago, back when I only wanted to use shellac flakes dissolved in denatured alcohol as a finish. No fumes for me, no polyurethane or penetrating oil please. I was so anti-toxic finish, yet I used plastic laminated MDF as the carcass material. I never used MDF again after this project. Not only was it extremely toxic when cut but it was fucking heavy. I remember getting our boys and a couple of their friends to help lift the cabinets into the truck and then into the house. 

     This was one of my first kitchens, I bought the maple at Almquist Lumber. They had a fresh shipment of locally milled (local to Humboldt) maple limbs cut into one inch boards. The wood was full of interesting qualities. There was spalt, fiddle back, live edges, quilting and more. I had fun resawing the wood and matching the book-matched grain. There is so much character in every one of the panels, I was a joy seeing them today after a decade.

     Check  out my flickr site if you are interested in how I refinished these cabinets.

   

Horizontal or Vertical

   I don't know why I feel the urge to write down what I am doing in life, but for some reason I do. I've been keeping a journal since I was 10 years old. I work alone most of the time and enjoy figuring out how to accomplished woodworking tasks. All of my projects are custom and I rarely use the same kind of material. Sometimes its plywood and store bought lumber already planed and jointed, other times its material from a stock pile of lumber salvaged from old wooden gates or feeding troughs, or maybe some painted siding from an historic building.
     My current project is a bathroom cabinet made from maple milled on the land the house is sitting on.  I used most of the wood already on the kitchen, vanity cabinets, the breakfast nook and the window seat. Now I am picking through the remains. Mostly 2 inch slabs that are bowed, twisted, checked, warped... you name it, these are the culls from the other projects.
    I had some left over panels and offcuts that were long enough to use if they were horizontal, I intended to have vertical panels. I made the panels and dadoed the frame to find that I was about 2 boards shy. I spaced the boards to see if that looked good, I slid them together, I tried to randomize the colors so there was no pattern. I didn't like any of them.  I don't know if it's the different colors of wood or that they are side-ways instead of up and down. It's been probably two weeks now and I need to gat back on it. Temperature in the shop is in the low 40's so that makes it hard to get motivated to work in there.
   Here is a link to the Mattole Craftsmen Flickr site for this project.

Dewalt 321 type 1

This Dewalt jig saw is a saw I bought in 1999 just before we built the Mattole Half Pipe in Petrolia, Ca. The part that holds the blade broke two weeks after I got the saw while we were building the ramp. I had to use my mother-in-laws saw that she owned in college (in the late 1960's) in it's place. That saw built the half pipe, it cut the transitions and all the notches for the ribs. I had the new saw repaired and have been using it for over 12 years.

Mattole Half Pipe summer 2012

Twelve years later the shoe got bent, so I put it in a vise to bend it back and the cast part snapped

Can you believe that there is not a replacement shoe available for this saw! I searched the internet and I also took it to our local tool repair shop. I ended up having to buy a new saber saw. This time I bought a Bosche, I should have done that in the first place. What a shame that this tool is no longer usable, even though the tool itself works fine. If anyone knows of a replacement shoe for this saw please let me know.

House Progress

Progress on the Yellow House. This is the final wall, the last corner of quoins have been installed and the last gable peak that was damaged from woodpeckers and barn swallows is about to be repaired. 

East Side

East Side, a set by sirdaveygravy on Flickr.

These are photos showing the progress of an 1888 gothic revival preservation project.