All of my Jointer planes (used to edge plane boards for gluing, such as tabletops, or for general leveling), were bought used, which saved me hundreds of dollars. That left me with enough money to buy a fancy plane blade for the 22″ long Stanley #7C (that’s the iron one, with a corrugated sole). It’s an extra thick cutter, made by Veritas/Lee Valley in Canada. It will seriously slice up some wood, even though it cost more than the plane did.
The plane is something of a mashup of parts, with a wrong sized lever cap (the thing that holds the cutter on), and handles of different kinds of wood. I did just order a new correct sized lever cap from Fleabay, as I have numerous projects which MJ has ordered me to complete.
Ebony, Cast Iron, Steel, and Rosewood–and a little Brass
However, when I really want to flatten some wood, I reach down in my tool rack under the workbench, and grab the German made old 23 1/2″ beech wood Ulmia/Ott jointer (also in the top picture). It’s light, sharper than a razor, and easy to use. It’s the only large plane that permanently lives under the workbench. It’s that useful, and I used to feel guilty about how little I paid those Canadians for it, on Fleabay. Used to.
And then there is the first jointer I bought, a Stanley/Bailey #31. It’s a full 24″ long, but they made these in two inch increments up to 30″ long, the last of which must have been a special order by Andre the Giant. These are called “transitional planes,” as they are wood bodied, but with iron adjustments. They were completely out of favor when I bought five different ones at an Indiana Flea Market, and I doubt I paid $50 for the lot. They are excellent tools.
For a good long while, hand tools like these were only sought after by country living Luddites such as myself. Now a whole boutique industry has emerged to make planes that are fantastically expensive. A jointer this size from one of those companies now costs more than the monthly payment on our Prius Eco. I’ll buy one, as soon as one comes out that I can ride to the Farmer’s Market at the Festhalle, like our Prius.
Tater digging time has arrived down here, and there will be lots of them. The first few plants yielded four different taters.
There are two yellow varieties in the bucket, and they are Gold Rush, and the standby Yukon Gold. The reds are Norland Red, which is quite attractive, so much so that I think I will eat them. The classic Russet rounds out this group.
I did very little for these roots except treat them with soil sulphur, to keep them from rotting, and a handful of organic fertilizer. With that little effort, we will be in taters for the rest of the summer. That’s taters, not tatters, though I do a really great Mick Jagger imitation, singing “Shattered.”
The giant Alabama based corporation Melanie Jane works for has rusticated her indefinitely, and possibly permanently. Then they tell her last week they have ordered her yet more computer equipment. Time for a new desk and some extra space. It’s not exactly Virginia Woolf’s a room of her own, but it is pretty nice.
I have one of the finest scrap wood piles in history, this having been salvaged from it. The Black Cherry wood is over fifty years old. How do I know that? Because the tree this wood came from fell on me. Hereby hangs a tale, as the Bard of Avon might have said.
Home Office, with Two Shelves of Cookbooks
The new corporate office above is overseen by a framed program featuring none other than actor Cleavon Little, who played the sharecropper Nate Shaw at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, in the play All God’s Dangers. Unlike Bob Marley’s song, Nate shot the Deputy, but he did not shoot the Sheriff. But it was in self defense.
At any rate, back to the story. My grandfather was one of the finest loggers for the brand new Tennessee Vally Authority, as they were building the giant chain of lakes on the Tennessee River in Alabama, which would be Wilson, Wheeler, and Guntersville. He would tell tales about trees so large that they had to weld two two man crosscut saws together, just to cut them down. So old growth forests were replaced by water, and the valley could have cheap electricity, and the world’s finest fishing for smallmouth bass. Everything is a trade off.
We had this beautiful tall Black Cherry tree by our house, when I was a small child. It produced massive quantities of black cherries, which were inedible for anything other than birds. The birds would eat them in mass quantities, and then crap black cherry colored crap all over the clothes on our clothesline. Note: no one we knew owned a clothes dryer back then.
My mother pronounced a death sentence for the tree. My father was dispatched as the executioner, and he grabbed his double bitted axe, and drove his old Plymouth down for me to sit, on, and witness his skill as a lumberjack. I was instructed to sit on the hood, and watch the remarkable display of skill.
Remarkable, it was. He managed to make the tree fall in exactly the opposite direction than he intended, and I was transfixed as the tree headed straight for my head. Only the limbs hit me, but the Plymouth took a strong blow to the roof.
I forgot about the entire incident, and soon enough went off to college for ten years. My father went on to join the choir invisible during that time, and so his sheds full of goodies remained untouched. I returned home for the summer before I started my first professorial job, and there they were–a double bitted axe, and a giant pile of cherry lumber, that had been drying for over twenty years. As a victim, I claimed all of it.
I was looking in my outdoor tool closet the other day, and found the axe. I had put a new handle in it, and I am about to grind it sharp, so I can also cut down trees in the wrong direction.
This reminded me of the great poem by Gary Snyder, “Axe Handles.” Here it is (copyrighted by Gary, btw).
One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own. A broken-off axe handle behind the door Is long enough for a hatchet, We cut it to length and take it With the hatchet head And working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! “When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off.” And I say this to Kai “Look: We’ll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with—” And he sees. And I hear it again: It’s in Lu Ji’s Wên Fu, fourth century A.D. “Essay on Literature”-—in the Preface: “In making the handle Of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand.” My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.
If you have a chop saw or a mitre saw, this is a thirty second project. I have what is probably a lifetime supply of 4″ pvc pipe, left over from the idiots who did our plumbing (they had our main drain running uphill). All I bought was this 4″ wye joint, and some test caps, instead of the more expensive plug ends. It’s only going to hold some chicken feed.
Total cost for this project was less than $15. It cost $250 to get my uphill drain fixed. This can be made in any size, but this one is small, to be fitted into our small coop. Next years project–a pen extension, another coop, and some Bresse chickens. Also an incubator, which I intend to build myself.
I had to include a gratuitous set of my old German tools in the picture, and my new 2″ bowl gouge, from PA. That thing can do some serious damage.
I knew that ISA Brown chickens grew fast, but these have gotten so big in such a short time that it’s almost scary. As stated before, this variety was the brain child of the French Minister of Agriculture in 1975. It is now apparent that he was bent on world chicken domination by the French (think of Volaille de Bresse, the famous blue legged meat chicken from Bresse, which a few years ago sold for forty dollars a bird in London).
So the French wanted the best eggs, to go along with the finest chicken meat, and they wanted mass quantities. Though the heritage of these birds is considered a corporate secret, it is apparent that a large part of the genetic line is the Rhode Island Red chicken. Apparently the Rhode Island White is also involved, as the roosters of these birds are always white.
And talk about hyper! The big fat Barred Rocks we have don’t even try to chase them anymore, as they can lap those big birds in one circuit around the big coop. They are also great at thieving the food out of the Rock’s giant feeder. Today’s project is making them a feeder of comparable size, out of PVC pipe. Film at eleven.
Here on the river, we have seen otters, a dog sized raccoon staring in our window, a red tailed hawk that opened up a gallon of fish fertilizer, and then wallowed in it, and a king snake that crawled between my feet to catch a toad, and swallow it whole. Wait, I left out the flying squirrels who like to nest in our bird houses. However, this is the first hummingbird nest we have ever seen.
It was lying in our front yard when we found it, under a white oak tree. The little hummers were obviously gone from it, and according to research, these birds will nest up to three more times this year. That’s a lot of ruby-throated hummingbirds.
This is a marvel of architecture. According to the interwebs, it’s woven together using spider’s web, and the outside is covered in lichen, as camouflage. Pretty clever for a bird that size. That, and they get free food from our two hummer feeders. Lucky them–this is too small for the flying squirrels to nest in.
Southern Fusion Cooking 