As a kid one of my favorite things to do was poke around the attics of my grandparents’ houses. Dark and dusty with all the relics of life past stored away. When I was young most of the ghost stories seemed to always begin with noises from the attic or basement. At that age a ghost seemed much more of a possibility than it does now, so that definitely added to the thrill.
The most interesting parts of old houses and buildings are often times for me the parts not usually seen. In these places construction details such as tool marks, Roman numerals on the joints between timbers and sometimes even mistakes can be found uncovered by plaster or sheeting. Of course there are also the things that did not get thrown out that tend to accumulate in these places, saved for whatever reason and are still lying around that often have their own stories and history as well.
Saturday I managed to slip off for a while and go on the attics and basements tour at Hancock Shaker Village. What an experience! Of the 20-plus buildings at Hancock many have areas closed to the public that can only be seen on the tour.
A few of the highlights for me: The upper stories of the machine shop. All kinds of lathes, belts, pulleys and various other equipment are stored here. An old drill press with its flat belts that run through the floor below, looking as if someone had just stepped away from using it but has not run in decades.
The upper floors of the brick dwelling where many of the artifacts not on display are stored. This area looks like time stopped completely in the many rooms, staircases and hallways.
Of course there is also the basement of the trustees building where there dozens of tombstones are stored. These were removed from the cemetery at some point and replaced them with a single large monument. The Shakers, being utilitarians, used some of the tombstones later on as ironing boards.
This is just a very, very brief summery of the tour. If I tried to write about all the things we saw it would be a volume too large for a blog post! The attics and basements tour cost a few extra bucks on top of regular admission price, and I highly recommend it.
Editor’s note: Below is the first post from Will Myers, a woodworker who teaches at Roy Underhill’s school and specializes in teaching a class on building a Moravian workbench and researching and reproducing Shaker pieces. Both John and I are huge fans of Will and are very excited to welcome him to our blog.
I am back at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass. I came up last fall for a quick visit and figured out that this was not a “quick visit” type of place.
There is so much to see; around most every corner are rooms and furniture pieces that give me a bit of déjà vu. Perhaps the feeling comes from seeing so much of this stuff in furniture books and articles over the years. Even so, the genuine articles are so much better than the photos.
On this trip I am attending the annual woodworkers and iron workers weekend. I will be doing demos on making one of the candlestands in Hancock’s collection all day on Aug. 6-7. I brought along a Moravian workbench as well (they have not kicked me out…yet!).
If you are in the area stop in and have a look around and experience the only genuine Southern hillbilly accent in Massachusetts!
I’m more or less following the script of The Naked Woodworker for my workbench, making adjustments as necessary to accommodate the differences in sizes and shapes of lumber that are available to me here in Ecuador. I used the two-bucket sawbench illustrated in my prior post to build a “real” Mike Siemsen-style sawbench, and then used that one to build a second, twin (fraternal) sawbench.
Workbench material
I’ve been amassing the materials for the workbench over the past few days, most recently with a trip to a different lumber vendor, Maderas La Morita.
Their sign could use a little work…A fraction of the lumber for sale at La Morita, several different species
I ran into a bit of a language difficulty while there, not understanding the difference between tabla and tablon (roughly the difference between “board” and “plank” in English). I would have thought that the two words were fairly interchangeable, but apparently not so. Anyway, I got confused, which made the person trying to sell me the wood confused, which made me even more confused. But it all worked out in the end.
I was looking for some 3/4″ pine, which they did not have. “Not a problem! We’ll just make some.” (Loose translation.)
And so they did. They took a thick pine slab and resawed it for me on the spot:
Changing out the blade on the tablesaw; the one that was mounted wasn’t quite big enough to span half the width of the plankA couple of passes through the thickness planer, and we’re good to go
The pine lumber that I have is surface planed and jointed on one edge, but rough on the other. The leg assemblies of the Naked workbench require the two sides of the leg plank to be (or be made to be) reasonably parallel, which would be easy to do if I had a workbench, which I don’t. So I screwed two pieces of scrap to a 2×6, so that I could wedge a board into the tapered gap between the scraps:
My first vise
The improvised vise holds the board surprisingly securely, and I only crashed my plane into the wall once.
The Kywi that I’ve been buying most of my tools and hardware from has a decent selection of screws for wood and sheet metal, but hardly any bolts at all, so I wasn’t able to get the necessary carriage bolts there. But have no fear, because just down the road from our house in Tumbaco is La Casa del Perno (House of Bolts), and they had just what I needed.
All the bolts you want, all the time
Elsewhere on the tools and hardware front, I previously mentioned that I might buy another saw and make it a dedicated rip saw. I did just that, and now you can see why I was hesitant to buy it earlier:
Shark? Maybe. Saw? Definitely not.
I’m clearly going to have to spend a bunch of quality time with the saw to get the teeth into reasonable shape, but so it goes. I did discover something that I had somehow missed on previous trips:
Saw sets. In blister packs.
Knowing that a saw set is available to me makes me less reluctant to fiddle with the set of the saws that I have.
Volcán Cotopaxi (5,897m/19,347ft) peeking through the clouds. Cotopaxi is about 50km from our house, and last erupted in August 2015.
I’m used to working up a sweat while involved in some heavy sawing or planing, but what I’m not used to doing is gasping for air and getting a pounding headache in the process.
The Andes are big mountains, and Quito is one of the highest-elevation metropolitan areas in the world. Fortunately, we are living in the suburb of Tumbaco, which is about 1600 ft lower in elevation than Quito proper. Unfortunately, that means that we’re still at 7800 ft.
The traditional treatment for symptoms of altitude sickness is mate de coca, or coca leaf tea. In Peru, commercially produced mate de coca, in teabag form, can be found just about anywhere, and in the higher elevation cities like Cusco, you can purchase large plastic bags of the dried leaves for only a few dollars. Just about every hotel in Cusco has a bowl of coca leaves and a pot of hot water in the lobby for you to brew your mate. Strictly speaking, I don’t think the bulk leaves are legal, but nobody seems to care (probably because they’re all drinking mate).
Mate de coca, the quicker picker-upper.
Mate de coca is far less common in Ecuador, apparently because of greater influence from U.S. Government policymakers. There is some tension between its classification as a harmful drug and its traditional use as a natural medicinal/spiritual plant. You won’t see mate de coca in a supermarket, but you can find it if you look. (I know of a specialty gourmet coffee and chocolate shop in Quito that stocks it, for example.) The only place I’ve seen whole leaves is at the market in Otavalo, and even there it’s in itty-bitty little bags.
The active ingredients in mate de coca are cocaine and related alkaloids (of course), as well as methyl salicylate, which is chemically similar to aspirin and has analogous pain-relieving properties.
Does it work? It seems to, although it might be that it’s the methyl salicylate that’s doing the bulk of the work, rather than the cocaine. Consuming mate de coca does have a couple of noticeable additional consequences: For one thing, it has an energizing effect (which the Incas used to advantage when they wanted their slaves to work harder). It also inspires confidence, which can be a good thing when one is immersed in artistic pursuits, but is probably not such a great idea while working with tools having very sharp edges. So for woodworking, I think I’ll stick to acetazolamide and ibuprofen.
How do you build a saw bench…without a saw bench? In The Naked Woodworker, Mike Siemsen shows how to begin with a length of 2 × 6 and a pair of 5-gallon buckets. It would appear that 5-gallon buckets aren’t really a thing in Ecuador, as I haven’t been able to find any. I did manage to purchase a couple of reasonably sturdy buckets, but they’re shorter than I would like.
Mark 0 saw bench
While it may be feasible to build a saw bench without a saw bench, I think even Mike Siemsen would have trouble building one without a saw. The only saws that I brought with me were joinery saws, and so aren’t suitable for rough cutting lumber to size. As I mentioned in my previous installment, the saw that I bought at the Mega Kywi looked passable but not that great. As it turns out, I was being optimistic. After a few cuts (in pine), I decided that I wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I sharpened the saw. As delivered, the saw was filed punched straight across (no fleam), with a rather aggressive rake angle. So it actually rips softwood decently well, albeit with so much set in the teeth that the cut wanders like an Amazon tributary.
There are plenty of instructions and videos available online (and also in The Naked Woodworker) that show how to file a saw, but they all involve two things that I don’t have: (1) a saw vise, purpose-built or makeshift, to hold the saw during filing, and (2) a bench upon which to mount said vise.
I spent a full two days pondering the question of how I was going to file this saw without these two crucial tools, but finally hit upon a solution: I removed the handle from the saw and sandwiched the blade between two 2 × 4’s held together with a pair of screws, passing through two holes in the blade. I didn’t yet have anything to mount this “vise” onto, but at least it was substantial enough that I could hold it down on a table top with one hand while I filed with the other.
Mark 0 saw vise
The vise ended up working pretty well, if not the most comfortable way to file a saw. It took me three passes of jointing and shaping the teeth until I was reasonably happy. These passes were straight across; I then took one more pass to add some fleam. The goal was to end up with a hybrid rip/crosscut saw, having a negative rake angle of about 1:4 (14°) and a fleam angle of about 1:5 (11°).
Four passes later…
The saw crosscuts decently now, and the steel is hard (maybe a little too hard for easy filing), so I think it will work. It still has far too much set, but I don’t think there’s much I can do about that without risking damage.
The proof is in the cutting.
Ripping is still a chore, but the saw was cheap enough that I might buy another and set the pair up as dedicated rip and crosscut saws, which should help. I’m expecting some visitors from the U.S. in about a week and a half, and I’ve arranged for them to bring down a couple of good saw files, which should ease the pain.
This particular saw had an interesting little feature that I hadn’t noticed when I bought it: a specialized bloodletting tooth at the heel of the blade. As I already donate more than enough blood while woodworking, I decided to defang my saw and remove the tooth.
The bloodletting tooth. Normally an extra-cost option, I got this one for free.
In related news, my first trip to Aserradero San Morita (aserradero = sawmill) was productive. I neglected to take any photos while I was there, but I will try to do so next time. The place is pretty big, and I only saw a small part of it, but there were piles and piles of boards in all shapes and sizes. It was in many ways a scaled-down version of Midwest Woodworking in Cincinnati, and I got the impression that they do similar kinds of things that Midwest used to do, selling some lumber, doing custom millwork, etc.
Even though walk-in customers are clearly not their main focus, the guy I spoke with was patient enough with my meager Spanish to help me out. It was there that I learned that my interpretation of colorado as being synonymous with quebracho (“axe breaker”) was incorrect, and that in Ecuador, at least, colorado is Eucalyptus grandis x urophylla, better known in the U.S. as Lyptus®.
Lyptus has a mixed reputation. Some people claim that it is unstable and therefore unsuitable for furniture and the like, while others say that it is great to work with. The difference in opinion may at least in part be due to differences in origin, as it is known that Lyptus from different plantations can have significantly different appearance and working characteristics. (You can even buy single-origin Lyptus from Uruguay, if you’re willing to pay the premium.)
Two Lyptus boards (plus one non-Lyptus board—can you spot it?)
I bought two boards, about 1 1/8″ thick by 9″ wide, and just under 8′ long. Both boards have some end checks and the like, but they’re straight, clear and show no signs of warp or twist. The price worked out to $2.50 per board foot, about a third of the cost in the U.S. In addition to the Lyptus, which seems to be the favored wood for furniture and cabinetry in Ecuador, I saw some seique (known as tornillo in the U.S.) and some pine that did not look like P. radiata. They clearly had other kinds of wood in stock, but I didn’t want to take up more of their time than I had to; I’ll do some exploring later.
