{"id":577,"date":"2010-09-05T23:13:40","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T23:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.atomicnewstools.com\/pages\/?p=577"},"modified":"2012-01-28T23:14:13","modified_gmt":"2012-01-28T23:14:13","slug":"it-is-time-to-start-making-sawdust-furniture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/it-is-time-to-start-making-sawdust-furniture\/","title":{"rendered":"It Is Time To Start Making Sawdust \u2014 And Furniture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>

Woodshop season is about to commence. Summer\u2019s dog days are slinking away, at long last. A few folks here have blamed my migration from Texas for the unusual heat wave. I apologize, though my powers are vastly overrated. Heck, I can\u2019t even get my kinfolks to vote right. But it appears that summer is truly headed out the door, which means I\u2019ll be able to use the woodshop that was a large enticement for leasing this house up on the hill. Woodworking isn\u2019t much fun when it\u2019s 100 degrees, and the shop has no air-conditioning. I\u2019m not so dedicated to this hobby of building mission-style furniture \u2014 primarily to give away to friends and family \u2014to sweat profusely for hours on end.<\/p>\n

I spent several hours last weekend, which wasn\u2019t terribly hot, perched on a stool in the shop, flipping through a decade\u2019s worth of woodworking magazines. When I took up this pastime a dozen years ago, I taught myself the necessary skills by subscribing to a half-dozen different magazines, plus buying an armful of books on different aspects of the craft \u2014 cabinet making, building chairs, how to set up a proper shop, and so forth. After a decade, I figured I had enough magazines to last a lifetime and canceled all the subscriptions. Each contains plans for several projects, so when I decide to build something I flip through the magazines and find a number of projects on which to embark.<\/p>\n

First, though, I had to drive back to East Texas, an event that took place over the Labor Day weekend, when you likely are reading this piece. That\u2019s where my cache of lumber remains, in a storage unit. I ran out of time to move lumber up here, so I\u2019ll be hurtling back to Kansas early next week with my utility trailer filled with as much rough-cut black walnut and red oak as my dinky hybrid SUV can pull.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been hauling this lumber around for a while, but it\u2019s worth it. Over the past dozen years, I\u2019ve bought piles of lumber from folks who kept it stored in barns or covered with tin, and finally decided to sell it for next-to-nothing. I would write a column about building furniture and somebody would holler at me, offering to sell me a trailer-load of black walnut for $100 or so. I never said no \u2014 in fact, anybody reading this who wants to unload some decent hardwood lumber knows where to find me.<\/p>\n

Anyway, by the time I get back early next week, I\u2019ll have enough lumber on hand to get busy as the nights get cooler, as well as on weekends. I am ridiculously slow at building furniture. It\u2019s one of the few parts of my life where deadlines don\u2019t dictate. Accordingly, I refuse to build anything for money. If I charged by the hour, this prairie sofa, for example, where I take a 20-minute nap after work in the study most days, would have to sell for \u2014 well, let\u2019s just say I\u2019m not that<\/em> good a furniture maker.<\/p>\n

This is what I do instead of fishing. Thus I have all the tools and gadgets one needs to build anything out of wood. Part of the joy of woodworking for me is relearning how to set up, say, the biscuit joiner, which is used to join to pieces of wood together for a desk or table, for example. Or how to tune up the bandsaw, so it will cut through a four-inch piece of red oak with breaking a blade.<\/p>\n

Soon I\u2019ll have to plane some rough-cut lumber. That process is extremely noisy and messy, creating barrels of shavings that work well as flowerbed mulch. Luckily, though I live in town, my house is pretty isolated. It backs up to a cemetery, so nobody behind me is likely to complain about the noise. The rest of the neighbors are far enough away that it shouldn\u2019t result in any police calls for disturbing the police.<\/p>\n

Using power equipment that can slice off fingers in a flash if you\u2019re careless does force one to concentrate. It takes your mind off the worries of the world. I enjoy knowing that I\u2019m building pieces of furniture that will outlive me. I seriously doubt anybody other than the occasional curious descendant will be reading any of the few thousand columns I\u2019ve written over nearly three decades years from now. But somebody \u2014 though they probably won\u2019t know who made it \u2014 probably will appreciate that coffee table made out of recycled tongue-and-groove two-inch thick red oak with a black-walnut frame, long after I\u2019m gone. It\u2019s sturdy and built to survive lots of beer cans spills and chili-bowl sloshes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m ready to fire up the planer and start making some noise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Print this entryWoodshop season is about to commence. Summer\u2019s dog days are slinking away, at long last. A few folks here have blamed my migration from Texas for the unusual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[39,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-39","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}