Musical Grade Fiddleback Maple for a Music Box

A board with this kind of figuring is a rare piece.  You can either pay a lot of money for it or search through piles of lumber and hope to get lucky.

I found this beautiful piece a while back . . and I keep it for special uses only.  But a project like that great Heart-Shaped Wedding Ring Music box is perfect to show this off.


Painfully, I had to cut into it.

A Woodworking Tip:  When you're working on a piece that you are going to turn as a whole, but that will be in two pieces again when done (as with a heart that will open in half), glue two blocks together with a piece of paper in-between.




This will let you turn them together so they match up, but will also let you separate them easier on that seam after they've been shaped on the lathe.  If you don't have paper/ cardboard in the middle, the glue will seep into each half and it will be difficult to separate them in a straight line down the middle.  This way you are mostly having to take away paper when you are separating them again.

Warning: When gluing together this way, if a tool grabs onto that seam it can tear it off of the lathe sending wooden blocks flying.  Turn cautiously with light cuts.




It's such a special project, even my glue bear is all dressed up!

You'll see I cut enough to make 4 of the heart portion of this box.  This allows me some room for difficulties in turning or hollowing the piece out.  Things happen and you don't want to have to start over.   So instead I'll bring each one up to the same level together and hope to have 4 when I'm done.

Two Writers

ok you shoe'd people out there,

I've had a question or two from some of you....so yes I do have a partner.  She runs the business and I run the shop....

She also keeps my household and keeps me in line. I recommend getting one of your own if you haven't yet LOL.

At any rate yes she sometimes writes a blog or two here and you should pretty easily see the difference between out writing styles. Fact is though sometime I'm lazy and don't write often enough other times I SHOULD be writing about something and I just really don't want to...so she steps up hopefully you'll like hers as much as mine (sometimes I pray you will all like them better so I can stop :P)

An Uplifting Project

I'm starting a very interesting custom job.  The project: a custom box to present a custom wedding ring!

What the groom wants is for it to be a way to keep the ring safe from prying eyes before the big day, and a way to show it to his bride for the first time during the ceremony.  And I'm going to do my best to share some of the steps along the way.

I'll start with a very simple sketch that I created for the bid.  I said it was simple.   The concept, however, is a little more complex. I will be creating a heart shaped box that will raise off of the very short cylinder base (kind of the shape of a hockey puck).  Once the heart reaches the top of it's journey it will open into two parts to reveal the inner post that will be holding the custom wedding ring.

Oh and did I mention he's decided he'd like it to raise up on it's own and play music?   And, remember, it's got to be used to hide the ring until the big day, so somehow it must be kept from just anyone being able to open it.

Stay tuned to see this sketch become a beautiful piece!

No Fluff

Ok it has come to my attention that some people think I don’t post on my blog enough….  Well maybe that is true.  There are many things going on in the shop that I probably should post about.  But here’s the thing on that…I only post the things that I think are important and that I hope may not only be informative but that also can teach something.  While I –could- post 10-15X a day like I see some others do…here’s the reality of it …I believe it lessens what I post.  People simply stop looking or worse still block people who post too often…  Does it matter to you that I’ve made another trophy?(I make hundreds a year)  Do you care that my other ½ came into the shop today and that this is one of only about 3 days a year where I’m actually typing this from the shop instead of from home at night?

Point and lesson from today?...NO FLUFF!!!! I try not to post it…nor do I read it J

Growth Rings as a finger print

  

I may have my dates wrong on this, but I’m close.

About 1993 they found a Viking dragon ship in the muck of the bogs of Northern England.  Archeologists excavated it and did whatever they do to clean it all up.  But then somebody had the question, where did it come from.  So they started looking and tried to figure out how to figure out where this Viking longship came from.  After floundering for months, somebody came up with the bright idea to take a core sample from the keel of the ship (because typically on a wooden ship, the keep is the singular larges piece of lumber in its construction).  So they took the core sample and started studying the growth rings.  By studying the growth rings they were able to tell the weather patterns of the years during the trees growth (flood, draught, fire, etc.).   So once they figured out the weather patterns they started looking around for another record of weather dating back 800(?) years.  What they finally came to first start comparing to, was arctic snow/ ice core samples.  Comparing the two they were able to identify the exact year which that tree was cut down in order to make the keel.   Continuing with the fascination of the idea, they decided to see if they could find the forest used to make the ship.  They went around the port, that became the bog the ship was found in and finally found a “forest” of stumps buried a few feet underground a couple of miles away.   So they started digging around and digging up stumps and wouldn’t you know it, lo and behold they actually managed to find the exact tree that became the keel.  How did they know it was the same tree?  The growth rings of course.  

So they started looking around at other trees of this forest and comparing it to other parts of this longship and were able to identify several other parts back to specific trees.  Somewhere along during this the forestry ministry of England heard about what they were doing and went and asked them how accurate they could be.  The response was, they’ve been 98% accurate in identifying parts of the shop and various other artifacts that they had found.  So the ministry came up with a great idea. 

Now see there’s a little known problem around the world – poaching – of trees.  Some will call it illegal logging, but it’s basically the definition of going into protected lands and cutting down rare and endangered species of trees in order to sell them from profit.  But now we’re back to the fingerprints.  When you cut down a tree you leave a stump.  That stump has growth rings, those growth rings are the trees fingerprint, and now we can find and track the log.  So this is just what the English forestry ministry proposed.  What they proposed was simple, take a data base of the fingerprint/ growth ring of every log harvested.  

Somehow, somebody in NATO thought this was a great idea.  So around 2003 this became standard practice for any responsible nation.   Now, can we catch the random little tribesmen in the jungle cutting down a tree?  No.  Can we tell that a tree has been illegally harvested?  Yes.  Can we track that illegally harvested tree back to its source?  Absolutely.  At least as far as the first man who bought it.  And he of course is the problem.  So now we can lock him up and the villager or tribesman can get a commission to legally harvest when and where appropriate.  Thereby protecting the natural resources. 

So I’m thinking this is going to be one huge database at some point, with all of the gazillion trees cut down worldwide every year.  But, it’s kind of a nice thought that in a 1000 years somebody will be able to find my table and track it down to the forest that it started in.  Hopefully they’ll appreciate the work I’ve done.  

Peanut butter and cheese whiz jars

For me the repurposing is as follows: I will be making an old time tool box tote, sized to hold 10 large peanut butter jars (2 rows of 5).  These will be used to hold all of my various sized dowels.  Maybe even some biscuits, if I ever decide to get that technologically advanced. 

I use aniline dyes.  In my opinion there’s nothing better, but that’s for another blog.  My problem is, that they keep changing the packaging.  Making it impossible to make one storage device to hold all of the dyes.  So my fix is Cheez Whiz jars.   I’m glad I love the stuff.  They come with a rubber gasket and are made of glass, making them both clear and air tight. 

Where do ideas like this come from?
My grandfather used to have hundreds of baby food jars nailed to the underside of 2x4s all over the garage.  They were filled with nuts, bolts, this and thats.  Why is it that our grandfolks would repurpose everything and never throw anything away.  But we seem to think that I would have to go buy special jars to hold all of these things, instead of simply using what the grocery store was kind enough to give me along with the food I paid for.  This is one of the many lessons I learned from my grandfolks.  Hopefully some of you out there are young enough to learn the lesson from me.  Yeah trash is trash, but there’ s no reason to throw away perfectly good stuff just because “it has the wrong name painted on it”.  

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