Chainsaw Furniture
This week's recap of episode 8 of Framework is one I wouldn’t mind skipping, but….. here it is.
I started out dreading this challenge, I couldn’t get the thought of the chachki chainsaw furniture you tend to see at craft fairs in Reno out of my mind, you know, the type of thing you see sitting next to a repurposed wine barrel that's now a chair. I thought from the beginning that the last thing they should call this challenge was “precision”. To me, there's nothing precise about a chainsaw, and there's no security in the fact that we were relying on somebody else to do the cutting. But nonetheless this is what we had to deal with, so I’ll break it down.
I had a vague design in my head, one that included the stub of a huge branch that projected out from the Ash trunk I was working with. Here, I will skip the paragraph I wanted to write explaining how Big John (my chainsaw artist) and I had a severe miscommunication on which part of the line to cut on, and ultimately how I had to scrap my first concept ( I mean, when cutting with a chainsaw, it's not a strict line, many times, they have to cut out wedged chucks, like when cutting down a tree, thus, cutting on the wrong side of my line was a 6" plus mistake). For some reason, I have a knack for trying to stick to my original idea even when the material tells me not to. I did this on the first challenge, trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole, and didn’t learn my lesson. In retrospect. I should’ve gone back to the drawing board, and made something completely different, even now, I can think of a dozen things I should’ve done, but at the time my mind was thinking of only this chaise, that had now evolved into a bench because of the missing stub.
I spent the next 8 or so hours directing Big John on which cuts to make. 6 hours after that, I spent planing, grinding, and sanding it. On flat surfaces, I used the planer, while on the radius I used the Kutzall. For those of you who have never used a Kutzall (www.olivercorp.com) it was my secret weapon, by the end of the show almost everybody had either borrowed mine, or ordered their own. It's basically a grinding wheel with randomly placed carbide teeth, I used it for all my carving, and it worked great with the wet Ash log because it rarely gets clogged, and if it does you can burn the wood out of the teeth with a torch and get back to it.
Once I had the shape as precise as possible, I drug it out of the yard into the shop area, mortised a horizontal groove into the back for a piece of 1” x 2” steel tubing I had ordered the day before. My Idea was to wrap a steel frame around the piece using it as a base when it met with the floor, but also giving it a sense that the tree had grown around it. I’ve always been fascinated with how trees will grow around barbed wire, or metal posts and this was my effort to get away from that chachki stuff I couldn’t get out of my head.
Metal working is not my strong suit, but I enjoy it. I tend to treat metal tools a bit different than the average worker, for example, I made a jig and set it up in the horizontal metal bandsaw that I used to make a compound angle. I was quite proud of it, but I think Jason had a hard time wrapping his head around it. My real problem came when some of the 1/8” tubing I ordered was mislabeled and was actually 1/16” and was faced with having to weld 1/8” with 1/16”. Anybody who welds knows thats a "blowout" nightmare; I struggled through that, and after that is when I knew I losing the race against the clock.
More complications arose because the process was: I had to weld the base after I mortised it into the wood, so painting it had to be done before I fit it, but the welding had to be done after all that. I painted it where I could, and left the steel raw where I had to weld it, knowing I would have to come back and paint where I had welded. The tricky part was was giving myself enough time to let the paint dry and still have time to oil the wood around the metal. Looking back, I should have blackened the steel, but I wasn't sure I had the time.
It all went to hell about the time I had to oil the wood even though the paint on the mortised in metal wasn't even dry yet. And, I just realized I jumped the gun on the “it all went to hell” part, that was later. I spent a while trying to do a better job on being careful when I was oiling it, and touching up the parts where the oil had etched the paint away.
Okay, heres the part you’ve been waiting for: I had been working outside, and there wasn’t a flat part of the floor and the place I had chosen to fabricate my piece was no exception. when I sat in it I noticed a wobble, without thinking I took the track saw and cut a half inch off the bottom of the back base/leg. Turns out that half inch as the tipping point of where you could push it backwards if you really tried to, and the judges really did. Theproblem was that I never sat in it again after I cut it, so it was a shock when the judges pointed it out.
This challenge was humbling, not only because I choked so hard, but , Thom Jones was the guest judge. Thom is the owner of Semigoods (www.semigoods.com) although we had never met in person before, were acquaintances being in the same industry and is someone I have a lot of respect for.
