College of The Redwoods Fine Furniture: Week 5

Week 5

The week started out with some unusual excitement. Wacker was out behind the shop steam bending in the typical Fort Bragg fog when a man in full fatigues toting an assault rifle rambled up out of the ravine and then beckoned for Wacker. There was a brief moment of panic as Wacker debated between running before he realized it was a SWAT team member, and not the murderer they’ve been looking around for. The rest of the afternoon we had a SWAT team patrolling the land east of the shop. Wacker didn’t go back to his steam bending.

SWAT team members looking for the bad guy.

The main exercise of the week was coopering, or putting a curve into a board. There are various ways to achieve a subtle curve in a board; one of them involves cutting the board into several staves with a slight angle on each surface and then jointing them back together. There was some minor trepidation as we realized this was like jointing the Prefect Board, only on angles and five or so times. Surprisingly the exercise went pretty smoothly for the class. Once the boards were glued up the sharp angles were taken out with our newly made coopering planes.

It was with relief, excitement and perhaps some nervousness that the lecture and exercise phase of the class ended with coopering. A few of us celebrated by burning our Sows Ears cabinets at the Elephant on Friday.  Hours upon hours of work put to flames and turned to ashes. It’s not so much for the physicality of things that I think most of us are working. It’s to learn and to do. The value of the work put into my Sows Ear will carry me into future pieces, and into myself as I learn both new skills and how to work well. I do hope the products of my efforts will be pleasing to the eye, but I hope more for pleasantness within me as I move forward in woodworking.

My Sows Ear Cabinet in the flames.

With the end of the lecture phase various people started moving forward on their projects, designing, putting up cardboard mock-ups, and piecing together fir as they began the process of figuring out what they’d like to make and how to execute it. To see the pieces of furniture that have come from classes before ours is daunting while fully knowing we too will be attempting such fine things with our hands, and surprising that despite ourselves we will actually create such fine things.

Anton working on a mock up.

Poster in the bar, the Golden West.

I have yet to come to what I’d like to make, but its presence is felt in my mind. In the still, unfilled, moments of the day, before I fall asleep or just as I’m waking up I find my thoughts moving over cabinets and such, shaping their size and moving drawers here and there. I think these thoughts used to fall on girls and mountains, but there is not much of either in Fort Bragg, so it’s thoughts of furniture.