Galootapalooza North
Darrell in Oakville
>I'm finally back from holidays. Had loads of fun, and even did some woodworking!
I sent out an invitation to a woodworking weekend at our cottage (camp some may call it) up north of Kingston Ontario, on Bob's Lake.
Four intrepid Galoots made the arduous journey, and succeeded in finding our cottage, despite my best efforts to misdirect them with contradictory instructions and maps. Craig from Oakville, Gump from Renfrew, Terry from Ottawa, and Rick from Napanee.
On Friday night I led a scraper session. Gump and Terry said it was an eye-opener. Scrapers are difficult to master unless you actually see it done, and you can try for yourself with the tool you saw working only moments before. Hey, how come it works for you?
Saturday morning we scurried off to the Crosby Flea Market. This is usually a good place for tools, but alas, I had forgotten that that weekend was also the Odessa Antique Show. Many of the flea market dealers were at Odessa I suspect. Tools were in short supply.
Then we zoomed off up Highway 15 to visit Rideau Antiques. These guys are definitely accumulators of the worst sort. The stuff is piled so high and deep now that there is no room to put anything when you try to dig through the piles.
Here's Terry in the back of the "tool room". The stuff is piled so deep that it's like a glacier. Everything at the bottom is being compressed into a squished mass of junk. It's starting to flow I think.
We picked up a few things at the shop, and then drove back to the cottage for lunch and The Main Event. I rolled down the car window as we passed Wolfe Lake and shouted "Hi Art!". Hope you heard me Art. Too bad you couldn't get away for the afternoon. Once we finished lunch we set up the pole lathes and shaving horses.
I had two poles set up in front of the cottage. Terry put his lathe under one, but found the pole was too limp, so we cut the end off it and shifted the brace to stiffen up the action a bit. His lathe is quite tall, so us short guys found it harder to use. We also noted that the length of the treadle makes a difference in performance. Terry's treadle is about 3 feet long, mine is closer to 4. You get lots more revs per stomp with a longer treadle.
Here's Gump shaving a leg blank down on Terry's shaving horse. Craig is offering some advice, or perhaps heckling, or maybe he was asking Gump if he wanted another beer?
We shaved and turned three legs for a stool. They are not perfect copies, but I bet you couldn't tell them apart if they were thrown at your head all at once. I cut a tapered hole with my Emhof reamer to use as a guide when turning the tenons on the legs. Terry has been using an old bung reamer, and he was quite impressed with my Emhof. I hacked out a quick seat from a hunk of 2X10 and we bored and reamed the holes for the legs.
I cut some ash wedges and then we glued up the legs and seat, wedged and trimmed the tenons, and Presto! One stool. Too bad our Photographer was otherwise occupied when we finished the job :^(
We spent the evening sitting around the camp fire swilling beer, swatting mosquitoes, and exchanging stories about wood, tools, auctions, and suchlike.
Sunday morning the Galoots packed up their tents and tools after breakfast (Thanks Gump, 3 pounds of bacon was enough). Then we headed off to the Maclachlan Woodworking Museum in Kingston. We ate lunch when we got there and then we were given a tour of The Vault by Sandy Maclachlan (does that name sound familiar? :^). Sandy ran a lumber yard, and decided years ago to create a museum dedicated to wood and woodworking. He collected a large portion of the tools himself, and had stories about lots of the pieces. Here's Sandy showing Rick a mud shoe.
The collection is quite large now, with several thousand wooden planes, plus a host of other items for working wood or just made of wood.
I took some pictures of some of the odd or interesting tools in the collection. Lots to choose from!! Here's an oddball, a user-made sanding block. The knob and tote are hinged so you can fold up the front and back to slip new sandpaper into it.
Here's another one, a round plane that someone added fences to. Unlike most user-applied fences, these are nicely shaped. Stylish and probably more comfortable in use than just a scrap of junk wood nailed onto the side of the plane.
After the tour, we had a cedar shake hands-on demo. This was mostly directed at The Kidz (David & Michelle). It was really funny watching the poor girl running the demo.
"Can anyone tell me what-"
"A crosscut saw!"
"That's right, a crosscut saw."
...
"Now that we've cut a piece off the log we need to split-"
"That's a froe and a maul!"
"Right. A froe and a maul."
...
"Now we-"
"Use the drawknife at the shaving horse!"
"Right (clenched teeth)."
We were laughing ouselves silly and finally relented and told her that we were antique tool afflictionados and that the kids had grown up around this stuff. There were a couple of other people at the museum and they joined us at the shake demo. They were astonished at how much our kids knew, and shocked at how well mere children performed what they perceived as a difficult task. The museum presenter told them that this would have been a normal winter-time job for 19th century children.
At this point, we all went our separate ways, back to our respective Dens and Caves. We took off back to the cottage for our second week of holidays.
I'd like to thank Terry, Gump, Craig and Rick for being part of the weekend. I'd also like to thank the folks at the Maclachlan Woodworking Museum for putting on such a good show and putting up with us!
--
Darrell
Wood Hoarder, Blade Sharpener, and Occasional Tool User
