All posts by Tom

I'm the guy who writes the blog...
Tom

Have you kept your promises?

4 Comments

I can remember exactly where I was. Work had just started for me at my office in Clearwater, Florida, and a few of my co-workers and I walked next door to the convenience store to get some coffee. As I walked in, there was some confusion between myself and the guy who was walking out… I walked in when he thought he should have been walking out, and as he passed, under his breath, he muttered what kind of a rude son of a bitch I was. I dunno why I remember this so vividly, but that’s just how crazy the memories of that day are.

After that, I came back to my desk to get started with the work of the day, when the lady who worked one just beyond the wall of the next cubicle said loudly enough for everyone to hear that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York City. That split second before I turned the corner into the office’s conference room that had the television was the end of something.  The end of the thought that the United States was invulnerable. The end of the period of relative peace that we had been living in.


An awful lot changed that morning as I  – and hundreds of millions around the country and the world – sat transfixed, watching the deadly terrorist attacks unfold. As the towers burned, my mind flashed back to a church youth group trip I had taken back in the summer of 1985 to New York City. We had seen Wall Street,  the South Street Seaport, had a late lunch in Little Italy on Mulberry Street, and, the last trip of the day was an elevator ride to the observation deck of the World Trade Center. As the bright summer sun started to fade into the west, I gazed down upon Manhattan and New York harbor.  Billy Joel’s song New York State of Mind was on my Walkman, and I was humming along to it.  As a tall skinny kid from across the Hudson River in New Jersey, I felt a connection to the city I had never really felt before.

And, as I blinked back the tears in my eyes that morning, I knew that peaceful memory was being taken away from me. It would never be the same.

As that fateful Tuesday wore on to the end of the day, my co-workers and I spent a lot of time talking about what was going to be different. We talked about living in a new world, where friends and family in the military were going to be thrust into warfare in a far-away land, removed from their loved ones. We talked about how we would never feel truly safe again inside the borders or our country. And we vowed that we were going to take the time every single day to love our families more, work to bring more beauty into our lives and the lives of those around us, and how we were going to pull together as a nation, putting aside our differences to realize that ultimately – at our core – we are all Americans.

Today is the tenth anniversary of those terrible moments in New York City, Arlington, Virginia and Shanskville, Pennsylvania.  And, as I look back on that terrible day one decade ago, I wonder if I have been keeping my promise.

Have I done everything possible to show my family how much I love them? I feel like I have, but I think today is the time to redouble my efforts to do so. My two sons were three years old and six months old when the attack happened… what have they learned over this past decade? Have I done everything I could to show them how much I love them and spend the time with them? Have I taken the time to show everyone else how much they mean to me? Or, were those words an empty promise that I made?

Have I done what I can to bring more beauty into my life and the lives of others? Somehow, I feel that woodworking – my fledgling hobby back in 2001, has done so. The pieces I have built have not only brought happiness to me and the people who have received them, but it has also allowed me to meet dozens – if not hundreds of other woodworkers I would have never met before who have inspired me through the years. Not only by their woodworking ability, but by the obstacles they have overcome, the determination they have shown and the friendships we have shared.

Have we pulled together as a nation? I think – tragically – that we haven’t. The partisan bickering today  in Washington D.C. is a far cry from the can-do spirit that existed after the attacks. When everyone – Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative pulled together to tell the world in one voice that we are Americans, and no cowardly act is going to make us forget that.  I hope and pray that our leaders will find ways to make our country the place we envisioned after that horrible day.


Today, we think back at the loss of that day ten years ago and feel the strong pangs of loss and sorrow. But, I can guarantee you, I am asking myself I have kept the promise I made in my office’s conference room ten years ago.

And, I hope I have.

 

Link of the week

Link of the week

5 Comments

Wooden Gear Clocks

Part art. Part practical timepiece. All woodworking challenge.

Making a wooden geared clock puts your woodworking precision, artistic talent and grand vision on display for all to see. Plus, the clocks are also practical WORKING time pieces, so no one will question when you put your lovely project out to be enjoyed.

If you are looking to get into building your own wooden geared clock. the folks at Wooden Gear Clocks. com offer precut kits for you to assemble, or for the more adventurous, plans and hardware to build your own from whatever wood you choose.

Don’t you think it’s about time you built your own?

 

Experiences

Bon Appetit!

4 Comments

So, with my recent illness, I spent a goodly portion of my holiday weekend lying on the couch watching TV. And, the only thing drifting through my mind most of that time was Bruce Springsteen’s  song from 1992’s Human Touch album entitled 57 Channels (and nothin’ on). (Yes, mom, I finally got a Bruce reference in for ya!)

Fortunately, I had a few other diversions to occupy my time. I read a book about the Apollo program, brushed up on a few tool manuals I had neglected to read and I surfed for online movies.  Yup, I was putting my Netflix subscription to the test!

Love ’em or hate ’em, Netflix is one of the largest players in the online DVD rental and streaming video world. And, as I glanced through the offerings, there was plenty of material to choose from. Action movies. Sci Fi. Comedies. Classics. While I was searching for movies, I came across one called Julie and Julia I had seen last summer. This 2009 movie told the story of Julia Child as she struggled to interpret archaic French recipes, and the story of Julie Powell, a blogger who set out to cook every recipe in Child’s classic work Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Why did this movie stick out for me?  Well, as far as I can tell, it’s the only movie that is based around the struggles, trials and successes of a blogger.  The other part was the towering achievement Julia was able to make reality. The movie showed in great detail how this one time OSS operative (Yes, she was a spy!) during World War II had to struggle to merely be accepted as a student at the prestigious La Cordon Bleu culinary academy.   Her work in bringing these arcane cooking techniques to American kitchens was a seminal moment for home chefs and foodies. Yes, people who list cooking as a hobby owe much to Julia’s determination.

Why bring this up?  As you can imagine, there are many lessons that a woodworker can learn from Julia Child. For instance:

  • Method is essential. If you are going to make Hollandaise sauce (one of the five French mother sauces), should you melt the butter and pour it in to your egg yolk and lemon juice mixture? What if you put the butter in cold and stir off the heat?  How about using more lemon juice?  These may seem like trifling details, but they can mean the difference between a rich sauce that will make your Eggs Benedict the stuff of legends and bringing an oil slick to the dinner table. The same thing goes for woodworking – should you cut your dovetails before or after the final sanding of each component? What order  should you glue up that complicated project so you don’t get yourself into a sticky situation?  When you think your process through, you can save yourself a lot of headaches later.
  • Make the most of everything.  “Save the liver!” Oh, how I laughed when Dan Aykroyd lampooned Julia on Saturday Night Live. While it was a funny sketch, the lesson was profound. Chicken livers could be saved and made into pate. Bones from cuts of meat could later be boiled down to a rich stock – or, even better – a demi glace that can transform a ho-hum meal into a dish you would be proud to serve your guests. This one’s easy to take to the shop. If you leave a larger offcut, be sure to stash that sucker somewhere you can get to it later so you can build something smaller. Look at your tools as multi-taskers… how much more can you get out of your table saw or plunge router? if someone is throwing out an old piece of furniture that has seen much better days, maybe saving the classic pulls, knobs and hinges would help make your next project something special.
  • Nothing is insurmountable. Just imagine sitting down to learn all of the intricacies of French cooking.  Now, go beyond that and attempt to take these centuries old techniques and methods and translate them for the average American kitchen. When no one who is instructing you believes that 1) you can do it and 2) that it should even be done in the first place. So, when you balk at cutting your first mortise and tenon joint, making those dovetails or building your own doors for a project, why let something as simple as ‘I’ve never done it’ get in the way?  Just remember, someone had to go down to the water’s edge, grab a craggy looking stone-like animal with sharp edges from a reef, break it open, look at the glistening sliminess, scarf it down and say, “Hey, I think oysters taste delicious! Who’s going to invent Champagne?”
  • Enjoy the final product. During the production of The French Chef (one of the first cooking shows on television), Julia would whip up some exotic recipes from her masterpiece.  She did the show live to videotape (the woman had some serious guts to have attempted that), flubs and all – to show how to prepare those sumptuous dishes.  And, just before the credits would roll, she would turn to the camera, her face beaming with her trademark smile, and bid her viewers farewell with a cheerful “Bon Appetit!”.  I often find myself at the end of a project eager to get it out of the shop and off to the client. But, that’s just so anticlimactic.  One thing I’m going to start doing more is to take the time to appreciate that final piece. Take pictures of it.  Run my hands over the smooth surface one more time. Just notice what I have built and appreciate how happy it’s going to make the client.  That’s why I got into woodworking…

As for me? Well, I’m more of an Italian food guy myself.. but, I’m giving serious thought to changing the approach I take to my work. Ya know, that French chef really knew her stuff.

 

Experiences

The only labor I’m doing today…

Leave a comment

Is labored breathing.

What a total bummer on a holiday weekend here in the States. I mean, three days off from work, and the head cold I had last week came back with a vengeance as an upper respiratory infection.  Complete with antibiotics… Grrrr….

Before I was totally laid up, I did manage to get a little shop time in on Saturday morning. That bookshelf project that’s taking me forever to get done with it finally moving into the final phases. I took the opportunity to finish rabbeting the shelves and fit them into the notches I cut in the sides.  Here’s a look at the piece clamped up …

Now, I just have to cut some back pieces to be mounted across the back of the shelves that will prevent items from being pushed back too far and to provide some resistance to racking.  I hoped to have both units assembled this weekend, but hey, that’s the way life is.

I also discover that sharp tools start to lose their edge  while you are in mid project.  Rather than hook everything up to do a total resharpening, I ran those dulling blades over the strop wheel of the Tormek.  They were back slicing cleanly after just a minute or so of work.

The cherry that the guys over at Bell Forest Products sent is  something else! I’m really digging the way it works, and this project is going to look some kind of sweet when it’s done!

Now, if I can shake this bug, maybe I can squeeze in a little shop time this week!

 

 

Link of the week

Link of the week

5 Comments

Popular Science’s Living Room Workbench

Oh, you love woodworking, don’t you? Well, just how much do you REALLY love woodworking?  Enough to put a bench in your living room as part of your suite of furniture?

This week, let’s break out the woodworking way back machine and head back to the year 1965. This offering by Popular Science magazine offers some pretty clever storage solutions for hand and power tools, a sturdy work surface and even a simple technique for controlling dust.  Just so the lovely lady of the house doesn’t go ballistic on you. That’s what the magazine article claims, at least.

While I don’t think there’s a tremendous call for living room workbenches, it’s still a pretty interesting read.  Who knows, you may even want to work some of the ideas into your shop!

Spotlight

Species Spotlight: White Ash

Leave a comment

Take a quick look through the garden section of your local home improvement center. Check out the handles of the wooden handled tools. Then, drive to the nearest sports supply store and see what kind of wooden baseball bats are in stock. While you are at it, head to a house wares store and take a look at the wooden bowls and cooking utensils.  There’s a very good chance that  you are looking at ash in action.

“Ash is one of those woods you see a lot in your everyday life, but rarely pay attention to,” said Eric Poirier of Bell Forest Products. “That’s a real shame, because it is a very handsome wood, and, when you think about it, it’s the kind of wood you can use extensively in your woodworking.”

Different species of the genus Fraxinus can be found in Europe, Africa and Asia. They  are closely related to olive trees, and Norse mythology often referred to the European species of ash as the mighty tree that supports the heavens, while its roots reached down to hell. One of the more common woodworking varieties is the white ash – also known as the Fraxinus Americana.  These trees grow extensively in the central and eastern United States, as well as the southern areas of Ontario.  Individual trees can grow as tall as 100 feet with a trunk diameter of two to five feet.

The wood itself looks almost like a very light red oak. The grain pattern is quite visible, creating cathedrals in plain-sliced boards. It works similarly to oak, and can be sanded or planed to a very smooth surface for finishing.

One of ash’s real strengths is its shock resistance.  “Louisville Slugger – the famous baseball bat company – mostly uses ash in its famous bats. This is mostly because it is flexible enough to take a great deal of shock from hitting baseballs, and its high strength-to-weight ratio. A strong, light bat helps the hitter get the bat on the ball faster, possibly turning a foul ball into a good hit.”  This property would be great if you were building children’s toys that were going to have a lot of loving abuse thrown their way.

Another great characteristic of ash is its ability to bend. Before modern aluminum and composite materials, most tennis rackets were made of steamed and bent ash. Add to that wooden frames for fishing nets and wooden snowshoe frames. The flexibility of the boards makes the easy to bend from a steamer, and an outstanding choice for bent laminations.

While ash is one of the most commonly planted and managed hardwoods in the United States, danger looms on the horizon for this popular tree. A pest from Asia, the Emerald Ash Borer – was accidentally imported in the 1990s. This insidious beetle lays its larvae inside the bark of ash trees of all species in the genus. While the larvae grow, they tunnel through the sensitive xylem and phloem of the tree, preventing these tissues from transporting water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves and vice versa.

So far, this pest has killed between 50 and 100 million ash trees in the United States and Canada, and poses a clear and immediate threat to the nearly 7.5 billion remaining trees. “The potential impact to the ashes in North America rivals that of the Dutch elm disease and the Chestnut blight that felled so many of those species,” said Eric. “I hope that the horticulturists find an effective way to control these things before they do too much more damage. It would be a shame to lose another classic North American hardwood for future generations.”

While the future does look cloudy for this species, you can bet your ash that it’s one wood you should be working with.