shaving chair rungs

a short video

eight eighths

It’s been more of the same, over and over lately. Rick & I went back & got the rest of the red oak. The picture above is deceptive - with no scale other than the sledge hammer. These pieces are 7 feet long and the ones on our left have radial faces about 12” wide.

At the shop I now have heaps of this red oak as well as some white and as I wrote earlier, now the work will be two-fold. One job will be to wrestle them into some reasonable storage situation. The other will be to begin breaking them apart to hew, plane or shave them into parts. I don’t know how this work compares to bringing home 235 board feet of hardwood boards. But in this form, it’s a blast. There is an attention-span problem though, because I pick out a piece to bust open and I’m instantly faced with so many possibilities - chest panels, chair parts, framing stock, joined stool parts and more. I’m planning to make several carved boxes - one a desk box like this:

PF carved desk box, red & white oak

This time of year the shop gets pretty dim about 4pm - even on a sunny day. So yesterday I went out & split some stock from the white oak. It was easier to process some of it than to figure out where to store it. I got that log specifically for chairmaking - so first thing this morning was to shave up some rungs I split at the end of yesterday.

ladderback chair rungs

I shot some video about shaving those rungs - I’m rusty at the video work, forgot to plug in the microphone - but it’s a bit about what I look at as I process that material.