Illtyd Perkins Woodworking

Yesterday the teak and concrete table (plus benches) was finally finished. J. & I drove up in the morning and I gave the exposed-aggregate panels a coat of clear sealer, lightly sanded the bare teak, and drove down the mountain to deposit a cheque and wander comfortably through the crowds at the Ganges Saturday market. Ironically Jesse the concreter was strolling there too, with his new baby strapped to his chest. What the hell, I thought, and stepped through the ambling tourists to express some regret for our "disagreement". I rather think he had to restrain himself from an impulse towards physical violence. Perhaps the baby was in the way. Anyway he made an angry noise and disappeared into the crowd.

A little history: after learning that the panels were unacceptable (previous post), I tracked down a much more appropriate aggregate. This was not difficult - I simply asked the concrete supplier. Oh yes, said a bright eyed young man, there's a bit of our old pea gravel over there - it's been there a while...
I took a bucket of the new gravel home, called Jesse, and he said he'd make me a new sample panel before the weekend. The weekend passed, and on Monday morning he rushed in with a sample panel on his way to work. He had clearly prepared it in a rush, washed it off too soon, and said he'd do another one next  weekend. High words followed, and he stormed out of my driveway in a spray of gravel and smoke, incidentally  breaking my old rack-and-pinion  latch as he slammed the workshop door in anger:

Obviously I hadn't handled this well. Telling a new young father that he wasn't going to get paid until the job was properly finished was not tactful, or, probably, even fair. But I was cross, and my assumption of a rather pedantic calmeness (how one loves spell-checkers: I'm offered "calmness" or "clamminess") clamminess must have been particularly galling.

Obviously this working relationship was going no further (he did get paid, by the way, by the simple expedient of driving to my clients' house and demanding his wages...), which left me with  really only one alternative: do it myself.
This was not a new idea, and various friends had suggested it, apparently on the grounds that if one is a competent craftsperson in one field, then surely it wouldn't be hard to pour a little exposed aggregate? This argument does have an appeal, but over many years and several failures I've come to distrust it. Norah and I once tried to learn paper-marbling from a book. It looked to be simple enough: buy some oil pigments and some ox-gall, a bit of cellulose wallpaper paste, soak some paper in alum, and we'd be making marbled endpapers in no time. What we in fact made was a lot of mess, and a discovery (not new) that the devil is in the details. So much so, in fact, that the whole experience still stands as an object lesson in the unwisdom of ignorantly undertaking projects with multiple interdependent variables. (In the case of the marbling we did at least learn what they were, if not the nature of their interdependence.)
I had a feeling that concrete ("Oh, anyone can do it! Just mix it up, spray on the retarder and wash it off when it's ready!") was going to be rather the same, and that those who ignore the lessons of experience are doomed.....etc. etc.

In the end, however, it proved otherwise. My friend Roger loaned us his concrete mixer; I bought a new shovel, and a snazzy little wheelbarrow with two wheels (designed, I think, for the "more mature" worker), a load of pea gravel, a load of sand, three bags of cement, new re-bar, re-constituted forms, a gallon of retarder, a pencil vibrator and a garden spray. (This last after I blasted my first test panel with a standard hose-nozzle and washed off all the exposed aggregate and made a large hole in it.)
Then one bright morning J. & I set to work - J. on the mixer, I. on the panels with a pencil vibrator and a length of 2x4:

(Note the rejected panels on the ground behind the concrete mixer)

We happily mixed, filled, vibrated, screeded, and sprayed retarder when it seemed time (the directions on the container were vague on this point, and not only vague, but downright inconsistent on when to wash the surface layer off: we were getting too close to marbling territory at this point), and then finally covered the panels with plastic, tidied up and went up to the house to have dinner, watch a bit of the third season of Doc Martin, and so to bed.

I can't quite remember when it suddenly came to me - perhaps whilst brushing my teeth -  that I hadn't checked the dimensions of the largest of the forms. The forms were made originally by using ply panels which had been accurately fitted to each of the table and bench recesses. After the first pour, I'd used the largest template for some other purpose, naturally and quite wrongly assuming that I wouldn't be needing it again. When the forms were in fact needed again, I assembled the largest without the template, meaning to return to the table (now up the mountain) and make another template. By chance the newly poured panel might be correct, but this was an exceedingly unlikely possibility. We'd have to do it all over again.
The next morning I realized (always sharper in the morning) that the largest rejected panel was at least the right size, and would serve as a check. I went down early, and confirmed that the panel would in fact have to be re-poured.

At such times, fortunately, I am able to remain calm, competent, and decisive. Some people faced with this sort of thing might panic, but age and experience do bring some benefit besides a monthly cheque from a grateful government. I dumped the wrongly dimensioned panel on the ground, cleaned up the form, assembled it correctly, bought more rebar, and we were ready.
J. was summoned, the tools re-assembled, and we began mixing. Very quickly J. pointed out that we didn't have enough gravel. More could not be fetched (closed on Saturday), so we substituted the old rough aggregate for the lower layer. Then it became clear that we didn't have enough sand either. (Closed on Saturday.....) so I drove around hunting for sand as the mixer churned away, and finally came back with a bucket of quite nice sand, but not the right sand.... a different texture and colour, actually, but it would have to do.

(Anybody who has read this far knows perfectly well how this is going to end. We knew too. (Well, J. did, but then she has mysterious powers of prophecy.) 

It was now approaching four o'clock, and the rented vibrator was due back. A reluctant J. drove it back to Ganges, and I carried on mixing the last load. (In extenuation, I'll say that we had to leave the island the next afternoon to take our sailboat over to Canoe Cove for its biannual haul-out, for which we were booked on Monday morning. Additionally J. was due to fly out to Montreal on Monday, and I would not be able to work on the panels again until Wednesday).

While J. was returning the tool, two things became clear. I had barely enough ("barely" was optimistic) gravel, and not enough cement. Fortunately we did have some extra cement, although it had mysterious calcified lumps in it. I ran up to the house, grabbed the flour sieve, and J. returned to find me crouched coughing over a bucket sieving cement powder.
Somehow we made enough concrete to fill the form, but the mix seemed wet, and the screeding was difficult. Moreover it was now quite late, and the weather was distinctly cool. Under the best of all possible circumstances I would be hosing off the top layer at 10.30 that night. Well, so be it.

The curtain fell on this comedy of errors, or this tragedy of hubris and ignorance (choose one or both), as I tried to wash off the uncured cement layer later that night by the light of a work-lamp. I need not say, but I will, that it was a complete disaster. (Of Kipling's "two impostors" much, much the hardest to deal with. Triumph is a piece of cake).

To be continued.

This morning a quick trip to town. GM is leaving on his annual summer sailing trip to the north, so after dropping him off outside the hardware store, I drove up to the rental shop on Rainbow and reserved the following for Saturday: a floor jack, an engine hoist and a heavy duty appliance dolly. These should allow me (and as many young men as I can lay hands on) to accomplish this well considered plan, viz.:

1. The table frame and bench frames go up to the  house tomorrow morning at nine via Five Star Moving and Randy Severn. Under S.'s direction we place them on the patio and move them around until she's happy, bearing in mind that once the concrete panels are in place the table will weigh some 1200 lbs or more, and the benches will not be light either. Everything must then be perfectly leveled.

2. On Saturday morning my neighbour John will bring his flat-deck (equipped with a crane), and with help from Jesse (of the concrete) & friends load the ten panels for the table and benches, still attached to their moulds and frames.

3. Then up the mountain again. We don't have vehicular access to the patio, only a footpath, Hopefully a combination of a piano-movers' dolly and the appliance trolly will serve. The heaviest panel weighs in at about 400 lbs., so this might be a challenge.

4. Using the engine hoist, each panel in turn, removed from its mould, can be lifted and positioned above the appropriate recess in the table frame. Then it will be lowered to rest on two 2x4 bearers; this will allow the slings to be removed, and its position adjusted so that it lies directly above its recess.

5. The floor jack, underneath the table and centered on the panel, can then raise the panel a short distance, allowing the 2x4's to be removed. The jack can then be used to lower the panel very carefully into the recess.

6. Repeat as needed for remaining panels.

What a lovely word "business" is: bees are busy, of course, and they are filled with "buzziness"; successful activity begets a noun: "How's business?"; busybodies are always active, although it's assumed they'd be better off minding their own business; and "business-like": now where did that come from?
And, here: "unfinished business". Active motion, interrupted and incomplete, like  a clock stopped but with a wound spring; a drop of oil, a nudge to the pendulum, a change of air perhaps, and tick-tock, tick-tock, busy again: springs uncoil, gears move, escapements escape, hands move, time passes again.

All this, because on a quiet and rainy Sunday afternoon I opened the door to what is euphemistically and rather pompously called "The Showroom" - a small room opening off the workshop where repairs and other small jobs patiently await their turn. (Perhaps "Waiting Room"  would be a better description.) Here's the view which greeted me:

So what is here? The usual suspects:  five chairs, all with broken bones, mostly legs, backs and arms; a nice little oak wall cupboard, and a corner cupoard, mahogany, with a curved door. This is sitting on top of a carved octagonal oak table which has a number of deep cracks in the top. There's also an arts-and-crafty oak sofa with serious joint problems, plus several small items that need fixing. In the background is a cut-down 18th.c. tall-boy, with replacement brasses and a flaking  finish of some hastily applied shellac.
What immediately caught my eye though, was the barely visible little quadrant of light wood sticking out from behind this same tall-boy, like a small ear. This is the unfinished business in question - not that there aren't many more examples, but this is a particularly bothersome one. (Probably rated number two on the all-time list of unfinished business. Still at the top of chart, where it's been since 1983, is the unfinished staircase in the house, up and down which we climb many times every day.) 

Almost out of sight (but not mind) the small ear belongs to the top of a double bass.

Here's the top in full view, along with other bits and pieces. Perhaps hauling all this stuff out will inspire me. (Well, it does in a way, but without any immediate result):

Visible in the foreground is the top, shaped and hollowed. There's still a little more wood to remove from the inside, but it's not something you'd want to rush......

In the background are the bending forms for the sides, which are technically known as the "bouts"; one has a curious little copper chimney poking out of the back, the remnant of a failed experiment involving a vacuum pump, rubber sealing strips and vinyl sheet. The bending forms are standing on the construction jig for the body of the bass.
All that's needed is some nicely figured maple saw-cut veneer for the sides, and two book-matched wedges to form the back of the instrument. These have proved to be remarkably elusive: occasionally something suitable is spotted by a scout, but inevitably it's not wide enough or thick enough or has the wrong grain or the wrong figure, and then it may not even be maple at all.
However, it's not the lack of wood that's the problem. It's the absence of  Edward, whose bass it is (was) intended to be, and who is also the other half of the bass-making duo. He's in Montreal, and to be honest it's entirely unrealistic to expect him to move back home  in order that we could finish it. Of course, I could go ahead without him, but that really wasn't the point, and besides, I don't play the bass; Edward, who is our son, does. On the other hand, although I'm probably immortal, in the event that I'm not I don't want these particular dusty remnants hiding in an empty workshop.......

Here's another picture, this time with the plans and the ironically titled book on how to do it all:  "So You Want To Make A Double Bass" (The lack of a question mark gives the title a slightly menacing tone. Perhaps it was intended to convey a bluff good humour) :

On our recent visit to Edinburgh to visit Norah, we spent an evening with her friends Johnny and Grant. Grant restores and makes harpsichords with meticulous and terrifying attention to detail and authenticity. He kindly gave me a copy of The Galpin Society Journal no. LXII  (April 2009), which consists almost entirely of his monograph on "The Single-Manual Italian Harpsichord in the Royal College of Music, London, Cat. No. 175: An Organological Analysis".

 The nautical rules of the road are clear on rights of way, and the relative duties of vessels that meet at sea. However, when a large and important vessel - a ferry, say, or a man-of-war*, meet a small and insignificant vessel (a pleasure boat, for example) in a narrow passage or restricted waters, then the rules change, and the dilettante must perforce cede to the real thing, whatever its position and course. 

This is altogether too large a topic to tack onto the end of these rather whimsical and not-altogether-serious reflections. To be continued in our next.

* A sign of over exposure to O'Brien. (Patrick, not Grant) 

The rooster likes to get his flock going early on these late spring mornings, so I often am awake before five. Early morning, with the first grey light is a good time for worrying and, occasionally, solving.
The current preoccupation is weight. How much are these concrete panels in the table going to weigh, and is the structure strong enough to support them? A lot of fretful musing has gone into this, but lacking hard data, has not really come to much except to reflect varying moods of mild hopefulness or vague pessimism.
So yesterday it was time to put some numbers into the mix. The table top is 10' x 5', or 120" x 60". There is a 2" thick frame all round, and one long (120") divider and two short 60" dividers between the various panels, This gives a total effective panel size of 112" x 54". If the panel is 2" thick, we'll have a total of  12,096 cubic inches, or 7 cubic feet of concrete. According to various sources, concrete weighs about 140 lbs./cu. ft. – which gives a total of  just under 1000 lbs.

Rough sketch:

There's some math somewhere that could give me the theoretical deflection of the three combined longitudinal beams over the 8' span with the 1000 lb. weight of the panels distributed evenly over the 10x5 surface. Where it is, I've no idea. As usual, I should have paid more attention to my sixth-form physics master. ( Was his name "Welsh"? - Chiswick County Grammar School for Boys, 1961).
It looks OK to me. On the other hand, I'm glad that whoever designs roads, bridges, ferries, cars and aeroplanes DID pay attention, and didn't think that skiving off to the library and reading "As You Like It" was somehow a much worthier use of  time.

I'll give it some more thought tomorrow morning.

"Mr. Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.
Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.......[explicit material omitted]...
Stuck, the flies buzzed.
His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty; it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely , Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion." 

Joyce, Ulyssses, Section 8.

"Hullo, Parliament's back!"
Mr. Wilcox glanced at Parliament contemptuously. The more important ropes of life lay elsewhere. "Yes, they are talking again," said he. "But you were going to say–"
"Only some rubbish about furniture. Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas––just imagine it!––rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them."
"Your sister always likes her little joke."

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Actually, I've been back for a little over a week. It's been a busy week, however, with new orders and even, for a while an apparent sale of a lying press, after responding to an enquiry from the United Arab Emirates. The latter unfortunately did not materialize which caused a little disappointment, but this was compensated for by the confirmation of an order for a teak and concrete outdoor dining table and benches. It's a large table (10' x 5'), and the concrete is in the form of panels with an exposed aggregate finish. 

Today I'll be on my bike heading to West Wind in Sidney to check out the teak supplies and arrange for shipping. (Why bike? Because a) Seniors travel free on BC ferries on weekdays (not, however, bicycles, even old ones. This is a strange policy. Bikes take up almost no space, are a desirable substitute for a car, and need encouraging....)*. Also Greg and I spent yesterday afternoon tearing the rusting box from my aging Toyota pick-up, in preparation for the building and installation of a nice new wooden flat-deck with removable sides. The downside is that until this is done, I have no truck.
Unfortunately the removal of the box has revealed some mechanical deficiencies, the most worrying being a broken leaf spring, rusted shocks, and corroded brake lines. (Not that Wolfgang Temmel, who works on the truck when serious mechanical work is necessary, didn't warn me about the broken spring some time ago - reinforcing the news with horror stories about errant broken leaves engaging themselves with wheel and tire at inconvenient times).

For now, that's it. I've broken the ice, made an entry, and now have two visitors due in the shop ("Can my teak table be turned into a chest?" "My child has broken our antique rocking chair which has been in the family for generations. Can it be repaired?". I suspect the answers will be No and  Yes. We'll see. And then off to the noon ferry.

More later.

* This is more complicated than I thought. Returning from Swartz Bay via the ferry to Fulford Harbour, I produced my "Experience Card", which entitles me to a discount on the regular Gulf Islands fares. The attendant in the ticket booth told me that this also entitled my bicycle to travel free. Hooray! Not so fast there, though. Since (as above) I'm a "senior", and travel free on weekdays,  I am not in fact "using" my Experience Card. If I'm not using my card, then my bicycle does not qualify for free passage, and I must pay the regular bicycle tariff of $2.00. Both the ticket agent and the management rep in the BC Ferries office agreed that this was inconsistent, but the computer is programmed this way, and sorry, but nothing we can do.
I will write a letter, though.

Yesterday I headed off to the dentist for my regular six-month cleaning appointment – thankfully someone in the family has dental insurance - but all was not routine: "Hmmm", said the hygienist, grubbing somewhere at the back with an explorer, "it seems a bit soft under that crown".
This afternoon the crown was removed, two root canals reamed out, treated and filled with gutta percha and "consolidated" with a hot tool, and a remaining piece of broken root levered out of my jaw  with some force. Functional reconstruction will follow on Monday, with impressions and preparation for a new crown.

Normally I detach myself from these difficult dental experiences by organizing a kind of mental slide-show of happier moments, often of summer sailing days; today however, I pretended to be a chair.
Well, not exactly; but as the drilling and scraping and reaming continued, I did reflect on the similarities between dentistry and furniture repair. Leaving aside the remunerative disparity, they seemed to have a lot in common. (I should add that I once had (briefly) a job as a dental assistant in Queen Charlotte City, for which I had no conceivable qualifications. Apart from passing tools, fitting rubber dams and polishing teeth, I was much in demand as a repairer of broken dentures, as I had developed an effective technique for reinforcing the repaired breaks in plates with short lengths of paper-clips.)

Take, for example, the unassuming late Victorian dining chair which came into the shop last week. The right front leg had broken off, leaving an ugly mess of softish wood, with a bit of the rail tenon still visible in the broken stump. Several newish Robertson headed screws had been driven at odd angles into the joints in a vain effort to stave of decay and collapse. The chair had an upholstered seat, with coil springs , webbing and some sort of foam padding, ancient enough to have turned to a dirty yellowish powder, which the chair's owner thought indicated woodworm. (The technical name for this dust, produced by the furniture beetle's activity, is "frass" -probably from the German "fressen", to devour).

     

This looks like a job for the furniture dentist. First remove the rotten and weak wood, then build up what remains with new material, as far as possible imitating the original. Chair legs are important functionally - like molars, so any restoration must be functional as well as cosmetic, and may even involve steel pins embedded in the wood.
I suppose this is what led me to muse, supine, while the #15 reamer was wiggling its way into the second root, on how dentistry seems to occupy an uneasy middle ground in the medical hierarchy. Dentists are definitely not doctors, tho' they do doctorish things on occasion. For the great majority of their practice, however, they, like the furniture restorer, are craftspeople; every act my dentist was performing on my lower left molar was an act of craft, to which on Monday will be added the crafts of taking an impression and mould making, followed by the lab's casting of a gold tooth to be carefully fitted and glued into place.

"......with a dismal headache, And your repose is tabooed by anxiety..." pretty much describes the 4 a.m. state of mind this morning. Should I  go the quick and dirty biscuit-joint route for the rebated frame on the no-door side of the display cabinet? On the other hand cutting  tenons with off-set shoulders is another of the great time-gobblers, especially on very long (8') rails. 
Then there's just all the stuff that seeps through the  semi-permeable membrane of consciousness in the small hours: do we need medical coverage for our trip to Scotland? ( I see myself lying in an NHS bed, with the meter ticking away). Is it reasonable to have only forty-five minutes to change planes in Chicago? If I'd made a sensible job of my twenties, would I now have a decent pension, an ocean view, and a rewarding hobby (perhaps woodworking)? Will I finish the Double Bass before....? Enough.
Doing my Times Jumbo Cryptic Crossword this morning in bed with a cup of tea, I came to the conclusion that the only possible answer to 10 down was "Nature Strip" ( "Grass has groups of characteristics leading to drug-induced experience (6,5)").  "Nature Strip" is not a phrase I know....Google to the rescue...it's just a strip of grass between a house and the road (Australian usage). This led me to a charmingly hopeless Australian blog (http://kateca.wordpress.com) with which I felt a sudden kinship. I'll only say it has to do with slightly doomed tasks performed in virtual anonymity (but not quite), has to do with wood (in the form of trees), and has a picture of a nature strip ("Nature's Trip" for crossworders).

Off to work.. mortice and tenon or biscuits?.......hmmm.

The view from the shop door on Saturday morning:

F.'s completed table is visible in the background, with a second coat of Tung oil just applied. In the foreground is a landscape painting by Judy C.. which is owned by someone who failed to crate it during a move. Ironically it was damaged by an errant moose antler, which pierced the plywood ground in two places:

(Yes, there are also moose antlers visible in the picture).

My part of the repair is to fill the holes, along with other minor dings and dents while disturbing the original surface as little as possible. I thought of simply drilling out two seven-eighth holes and filling them with a plywood plug, but opted instead for the less intrusive triangles shown here:

After this, a little filler and some feathering were needed to make the plugs invisible and flush. Now it's up to the skill of the original artist to re-paint the missing sections..........

While all this was setting and curing, I finished off the drawer handles for F.'s table:

   
The shaped wenge handle is ready to glue in place.                 The finished drawer front and handle.

With these projects out of the way, it's time to move on to the large display cabinet, of which more later. This move has been delayed by last night's wind-storm, which left our stretch of the Fulford-Ganges Road without hydro (our local name for electric power) for most of today (Monday). 

Time for an evening cup of tea, and Match of the Day (from last Saturday, with Manchester & Chelsea)