A couple of weeks ago I had a three-day training class down in Charlotte, NC. My wife decided to make a vacation out of it and picked me up when the class was done, from which we drove to the Asheville area to visit some friends in the Blue Ridge Mountains. This gave me two different woodworking tales to take from the long weekend:
1)In Pisgah Forest, NC I got this chance to meet local cabinetmaker John Dillon of Wood Crafters, Inc. John’s shop is in a barn that actually dwarfs the small house in front of it. In the center of the shop are two old Powermatic table saws, one with a single blade and the other dedicated to the stacked dado blade. The saws sit at opposite corners of a large work surface so that the out-feed support of one table is actually the right wing extension of the other saw. The other large tool I noticed in the shop was a really old, 18″ General band saw.
The feature of John’s shop that most caught my eye was the wood. Racks of wood. Shelves of wood. Wood in piles. Wood in the barn lofts. Wood under tarps outside. John had thousands of board feet of all kinds of wood: maple (spalted, figured, and otherwise), cherry, chestnut, pine – and that was just what I noticed. As it turns out, living in the Blue Ridge Mountains has a few advantages if you’re a woodworker. Mainly, he gets almost all of his wood for practically free. He doesn’t have a large plot of land that he’s clearing; people bring wood to him! Most folks who know him (it is a small town) will bring him whole tree trunks that they have cut down – for free! All he has to do is pay a guy who has a portable saw mill (similar to a Wood Mizer) who makes those trunks into boards for about $0.30 a board foot.
The thing that kept me from leaving fully green with envy was John’s graciousness and generosity. There I was, some kid (relatively) wandering around his shop while he’s trying to complete a beautiful cherry cabinet for a kitchen commission he was building – yet he took time to talk to me, to answer and ask questions. He was also extremely giving person, as he asked if I had room in my car to take a couple of pieces of wood home with me.
A cross-section of a spalted log:
and a plank:
of amazingly figured maple:
While we were talking, he had asked if I owned a draw knife (I do) and mentioned that he was curious about getting one. With a couple of quick searches on eBay and a few weeks for shipping gave me the opportunity to return the kindness he showed me:
2) If any of you are on Twitter (follow me!), you may have noticed Kari Hultman of The Village Carpenter tweet a link to a new blog about workbenches: Bench Vice. The author of Bench Vice (and Wood Therapy) is Tim Williams, a woodworker in the Asheville, NC area. Some readers may notice that Tim is the designer of the Joinery Bench that Chris Schwarz blogged about a few months ago. When he’s not building his own pieces or teaching at the Asheville Woodworking School, Tim gives free demos at Asheville Hardware – a local Rockler reseller.
The weekend I was in the area, Tim was giving a demo about hand planes. By the time I got to the store, Tim was well into tuning a block plane that one customer had brought to the demo. After some time lapping, sharpening, and the other fiddling Tim had explained how to make a $40 block plane perform like one that cost five times as much – which is what that gentleman now possessed. Tim ran the whole gamut of bench plane topics: what the numbers mean, how they are different, what order to use the planes, etc. After a while, Tim and I started talking about benches: his Joinery Bench and how it came about, my plans for a bench, and his love for twin screw vises.
Those serendipitous trips made for a quite a wonderful weekend – and that was all before the actual vacation part!
That was a great trade! That figured maple is going to be fun to use on some project. I owned one of those Wood-mizer sawmills. I’m still using the wood I milled years ago.
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