Project 2: Picture Frame

The last days of college before the Christmas break were spent frantically trying to finish a walnut picture frame. The trouble with a complete frame is that it only takes one mistake and the whole thing is a mess, and you only find out after you’ve put all the parts together. Compared to this, making one tenon join is easy.

As I’d messed up my practice attempts that wasn’t exactly comforting.

Making one of the joins with a 6mm chisel and mallet. The other half of the join is is on hand for testing purposes.

Frame assembled, showing some quite hideous wonkiness on the nearest corner. Fortunately these vanished during the gluing stage. There were a disturbing number of cracks in the joints as well, but it’s remarkable what can be hidden using a mix of sawdust and glue. The finished frame was just straight enough to become a Christmas present for Beautiful Wife.

My Japanese saws: these cut on the pull, not the push which allows them to be finer because even I am less likely to break the blade when cutting. For the picture frame I used my Dozuki (nearest the camera) which has especially fine teeth for cutting tenon joints.

Notice friend and hideously competent carpenter B in the background, working hard with the Raubank while I’m messing about with a camera. This explains why he got a higher grade than me.

Wanted: one piece of Elm.

Or: Advantages of being a carpenter #1: Christmas presents are easy.

Our local Christmas market is full of “hand crafted” wooden ornaments and utensils, some of which I realised I can now make myself, so last week I spent a couple of hours in our workshop sorting our our Christmas presents for this year.

The wood came from the pile of ‘waste’ beech wood that was left over after we made our first project a few weeks ago. It had knot holes or splits and as such was destined to be burnt, but now it is a lot of interestingly shaped tea light holders and I don’t have to worry about what I’ll get people for Christmas.

Anyway, about the Elm.

In college, we’re all supposed to get a piece of wood and do a small presentation on it. I was away on the day the varieties were given out which I think is why I got Elm. Elm is pretty hard to find in Germany since many were killed by disease, but as far as I know it is a little bit easier to get a hold of in the UK and USA.

If anyone is willing to send me a piece of Elm (of any variety) by the tenth of January, I’d be more than happy to swap it for a tea light holder, made in a genuine German workshop by a genuine British apprentice using sustainable beechwood.

The brief asks for a piece of Elm wood 24cm by 16cm by 5cm (about 10 in by 6 in by 2in) but given that the chances of getting hold of anything at all is pretty slim, the school isn’t going to be fussy about the dimensions.

Any offers, let me know in the comments or the contact form and I’ll email you.

Philosophy for nomads.

Just over a fortnight ago we quietly passed the eighth anniversary of our moving to Ostfildern, so I’ve now lived here sixteen days longer than I lived anywhere else.

People occasionally ask us if we’ll ever move back ‘home’, meaning the UK. This rather misses the point that Beautiful Wife is Japanese, and even if we decided to go to the UK, it isn’t like we’ve got roots in a certain place anyway. Theoretically our family name comes from Wales but I think we’d have to go back a few hundred years to find that connection, and at that time the other side of the family was apparently living in Dundee with a German name, so it looks like we’ve a long tradition of making things complicated.

I occasionally have daydreams about moving to Wales or Scotland and living off grid, but unless we have a total collapse of the Euro or fall off the end of the Mayan calender, our boys have a much better chance of getting a decent education if we stay in Germany. And as much as I whine about it, our cycle provision and public transport is far ahead of anything in the Motherland, even here in Mercedesville.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really have a ‘home’ in the normal sense. And that I’ve probably spent far too long thinking about it.

Do the twist

The carpentry apprenticeship continues. Last week we spent a day trying to fit a set of doors into crooked door frames in an apartment in Stuttgart. Apparently many of the older buildings on the edge of the city centre were solid enough to survive British and American bombs landing quite closely during the war, but they were shaken so badly that they were knocked out of alignment. Now doors have to be fitted very, very slowly and tailored to each frame, which involves much carrying of doors back and forth, a job done mostly by the apprentice.

The irony of this is not lost on me.

 

Light the way, sort of.

Winter has kicked in with a vengeance, and for the last few weeks I’ve been leaving home before dawn and arriving after dusk on weekdays. Once out of the village it is pitch dark, and the wonderfully retro bodged halogen light I fitted on the commuter bike hasn’t got enough oomph to break through the dark and fog that are a feature of the ride, especially on the section where the local council has thoughtfully closed the pedestrian/cycleway to accommodate building work* and I have to navigate over the fields and around some trees largely by memory. When I’m riding in traffic I’m fine while I keep moving but as soon as I stop I become invisible.

I reckon I’ve got at least eight more weeks of this, so I’ve finally got a modern light, which actually lights up the road, and stays on for a few minutes when I’m not riding. It’s a bit of a risk having a better quality light on a bike I’ll leave in a public space most of the day, but the bike parking space seems pretty safe, and weighed against crashing into a tree or being run over, it makes sense.

If I muster up a lot more self discipline than usual, I may even fit it to the bike and take photos before next March.

*Because it isn’t a road, so it’s not like anyone important will be using it.

Project one

Here’s the first project from carpentry training, or at least the first one fit to show on the blog. It took several hours of cutting, planing, filing and sanding to get this together.

In our corner of Germany this is called a ‘Vesperbrett’, ‘Vesper’ being a mid-morning break where people usually eat a sandwich, traditionally using wooden plates like this one. In the UK I expect we’d call this a cheese board.

In a few months we’ll be making things far more complex than this and I’ll probably look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, but for now I’m feeling pretty satisfied just to have made something that looks vaguely like it should, and hasn’t fallen to bits within 24 hours.

Stalled Garden.

I appear to have stalled on the garden front. A combination of changing my work situation right when I should have been harvesting, and inexperience meaning I planted everything at once so I ended up with more Kohl-Rabi than anyone will ever need, and left half a dozen things too long so they got caught by the frost and pulped, meant that  despite a good start, we didn’t finish so well this year. We’ll probably have a lot more on the compost bin than in the carefully stored jam jars.

And the brambles made a comeback.

We live and learn, and hopefully I’ll still remember all of this by next spring.

A major problem is that we live across the village from the garden, and there’s still no shelter apart from our rather ramshackle shed which is breeding leaks. It’s hard to get the boys enthusiastic to go to the garden if they have to run about in the mud all the time just to keep warm. It’s also a pain that when it turns cold or starts raining/snowing/blizzarding, I’ll have to drop everything and ride home in foul weather.

What we need is a decent garden house so we can spend a day at the garden whatever the weather is doing. A privvy would be good as well.

Which means I need to think about what, for me is a pretty daunting construction project. But if we’re going to get any further in sustainable living, I’ve got to face up to this sooner or later, and as I progress on the carpentry course I’ll be running out of excuses not to have a go.

First step is to go and find out what we are actually allowed to build here, which means going to yet another office…

Feel free to give me a kick up the blog if I keep procrastinating on this one.

Jumbo Plane

This is my Raubank, or jointer plane. It’s 600mm (about 2 feet) long. We don’t use this sort of thing in the carpentry industry today: we have machines that can plane wood almost as well as by hand in a fraction of the time, so it would be too expensive to pay a carpenter by the hour to hand plane wood any more.

I prefer hand tools to power tools because they are simpler, easier to maintain and last longer. In the UK and USA, hand planes are usually metal, but in mainland Europe still use these simpler wooden planes, where the blade is positioned by tapping it with a hammer and secured with a wooden wedge, which I prefer as there are no moving parts to go wrong.

I’m slowly building up a set of basic carpentry tools, and I’m trying to get as many as possible second hand, partly because it appeals to my inner tree hugging hippy (Less damage to the environment and no money to the evil corporations, et c.) and partly because I’m broke. I got this plane for a fraction of the price of a new one, even though the base is Guaiacum wood, instead of the usual (and much cheaper) beechwood. Probably it looked a bit too tatty (It was described by the seller as ‘Looking like the Titanic’) for most people to be bothered with it.

The Real Carpenters at work think I’m very strange to be excited about a tatty old jointer plane, but as I repeatedly turn up to the workshop on a Bakfiets, it’s just another eccentricity to add to the list.

Besides, when the inevitable collapse of civilisation comes, I’ll at least be able to make nice shelves.

Fraxinus Excelsior

One of the most common plants in our garden is the ash tree, Fraxinus Exclesior, a fast growing native hardwood. The owner of the garden loathes them, but I’m letting them grow just about wherever they chose to self-seed, or wherever the bird poo carrying them lands. I’m doing this because I like them, and because they grow fast and give good quality wood which I may be able to use in three years, but also because recently a fungus called Chalara fraxinea has come from goodness knows where and seems to like eating them. Alarming numbers of ash trees are dying off all over Germany.

Until February this year there was some hope that the UK would be spared: as long as no ash trees from the continent were brought in the fungus may not make it over the channel. Unfortunately no-one told the politicians this (or if they did, the politicians didn’t want to hear it) so they allowed the trees to be imported and exported, and Chalara fraxinea turned up as well. In several places.

The brilliant minds of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), formed  ‘Emergency Committee Cobra’ which has come up with such gems as “everyone should be responsible”. and advise people visiting forests in the UK to “Wash your hands afterwards“. Thanks for that.

According to this very comprehensive post on the Ubiqitous Blog this is nothing new: scientists have been repeatedly ignored when their concerns may inconvenience some corporate interest, and one who was asked to investigate a similar fungal attack on trees in a park had a gagging order placed on them to prevent them saying where the outbreak may have come from.

At the same time, the  Environment Secretary (who supports a third runway at Heathrow, a badger cull and fracking, but dislikes wind farms, just as an aside) has suggested that the current outbreak of fungus causing ash dieback is ‘possibly just wind borne’, which is interesting because two weeks ago a forester in Germany old me no-one is sure how the fungus spores are transported.

Which would mean that in the UK, a scientist commissioned to investigate an outbreak of fungal based dieback cannot publish his or her findings for fear of legal repercussions, but a politician known to support corporate interests over the environment can make statements which happen to match up with the desires of the industry to keep going as usual, and that’s okay.

Is this a very strange situation, or am I  missing something?

[Edit: Check the comments. It appears Ash seeds are wind blown rather than carried by birds. Thanks Kim.]

Labour Relations.

It’s half term holidays which means this week I’m working at the Carpentry instead of the college, ie. carrying stuff for the Proper Carpenters and trying not to trip up or break anything in the process.

Fortunately today is a public holiday so I got to lie in.

Even better one of the Real Carpenters talked to The Boss yesterday and persuaded him that as we only work four hours a day on Friday anyway, we may as well stay at home and make a long weekend of it.

Now that’s the sort of labour relations I can work with.