bashing wood

About a month ago I was rooting around in the crawlspace, doing damage to my knees that'll never come good in this lifetime, and on a whim drug out an armful of lumber someone had stuck in there years back. I was curious if it was in any kind of shape since last winter we'd had so much water under there; I half-expected it'd be warped to hell or all over mould, but no.

This was during the hot part of August, with the temps climbing past thirty, and I needed something to keep my mind off how miserable it all was, so I was happy to have a cache of 1x2s, 2x2s, and 1x4s, all about twelve or fourteen feet long, to mess with. I was thinking 'workbench'.

You know how it is, you want to get anything done, you need a place to do it. Even if I was the sort of person to clamp work to the dining room table I can assure you Nola is not the kind of person to suffer that in silence. Not by a long shot. The very thought makes me cringe, even more so than the thought of sawdust ALL OVER THE HOUSE. So I stayed outside. Yet though I could do stuff on the deck, it was hard going. I wanted a workbench, but it's no good trying to buy one. Carpenters don't buy workbenches, they build them.

I drug those boards to the front deck and eyeballed how much I had to play with, and then, hot as it was, nipped upstairs to plan.

I used to do my planning with a t-square, but times have changed. I launched Second Life and hied my avatar to a place where I had building rights. I mocked up boards to match my stash and in very little time had the skeleton of a workbench lined out. I didn't want to do drawers, because I hate having to root through them when I'm working. I like things all in sight and to hand. I also wanted plenty of clamp spots, so I planned in a gap in the top. Don't think I've ever seen that in any of the shops I've worked in, but by golly it's worked out well for me. Underneath, instead of drawers I made a pair of side-by-side runners for trays, and at either end a bit of shelf space for setting drills and such while I'm working. I took screenshots of it, and some more of it exploded, and used those to guide me. Second Life has got to be one of the cheapest and easiest planning tools around.

The bench took three days to build, mostly because I didn't want to work in the hottest part of the day, and then I took it most of the way apart again to sand off the paint on the boards so I could oil it all against the wet. See, the boards were mostly painted, white undercoat, goodness knows why my unknown supplier bought them that way, but that's how they were bought. Don't ever buy painted lumber, okay? You've got no way of knowing what you're getting, if it's full of knots or even has been pieced together, and a fair few of these boards were joined up, and no join is as solid as smooth running woodgrain. And then paint slapped on it and sold as 'improved' in some way, I'll bet. No skin off my nose, it was all found wood to me, but I wouldn't have bought it that way.

Now I'm working on a thing I'd promised to Nola for months, a shelter for our generator. Something effectively simple, but 'effectively simple' needs a bit of planning. This shelter has to fold up against the house wall when it's not in use, and has to shed rain and maybe snow when it is. So it has to be light, which rules out shingles on its top, by god I tried but they doubled the weight, and it has to be dead easy to set up since when it is needed is in the rain and in the dark. What I have so far is a two-sided hinged thing that will flop out into position, and hook the sides in one move apiece. And I hope it will work, but it's the kind of thing I have trouble visualizing. But there, I should have it finished tomorrow. I'd have it done today, except I spent yesterday cutting out and fitting a new handle to a cookpot. The handle to one of our smaller pots broke apart Wednesday night, it was bakelite and old and just disentegrated, and rather than throw the pot away I thought I could carve a handle from some spare cedar. It's a nicer handle than before, longer and more solid. Nola's worried that being wooden it's liable to catch fire, but I don't think so. Not unless we were to use it on a campfire, which we're hardly likely to do, we have camping cookware for that.

It was dead easy to turn out that handle, having a bench to work on. And that's the thing—it's dead easy in decent weather to knock together all kinds of things I think up to make our lives better. And if I were to go so far as to arrange for, say, a roof to keep the rain off and perhaps even walls to keep the warm in, why, I might have the makings of a regular workshop. Of course, then I'd be after a mounted spinning sawblade of some kind...