Jointer

I’m making a table out of butternut. Some components have to be glued up edge to edge before further work. In order to get the edges to match for a glue joint I run the edges over my jointer. A set of knives on the rotating cutter head cut the wood to create a smooth edge.

I was having some trouble getting the edges to match nicely and I wanted to get a pair glued up right away so I was tempted to forge ahead. Instead I stopped everything, unplugged the jointer and set about re-adjusting the knives.

The work piece is pushed from this end of the jointer with it’s face tight against the vertical fence. The fence should hold the piece so that the knives cut square to the face. That is if the knives are adjusted to be parallel to the in feed and out feed tables, the two surfaces on either side of the cutter head.

You can see the in feed table to the right in the image above, I’ve dropped it some to gain access to the screws that hold the cutter knives in the cutter head. The out feed table is on the left side of the image.

The adjustments are made as a fixture magnetically holds the knives just right.

Once the jointer was adjusted correctly I was able to cut the joints easily and they went together with a sweet, satisfying whisper of a “thwump” as the cushion of air escaped perfectly evenly.

Such a satisfying sound. The joints will be sound, the effort was worth it. The pieces go on to my glue up rack.

Been out on the water

I’ve been surfing lately. It’s the season around here, as the weather systems start dropping down out of Canadian cold and blow across the still warm lake. A good friend of mine and award winning film maker, Ryan Bigelow, put together a quick video of his session this morning along with some shots of a session from a few days ago. My son is featured which is very nice for me. I made it in just after they left this morning.

Click either image to go to the video.

Triadic

I walked into my studio this morning and was struck by the colors that seem to have infiltrated it.

Whoaa what happened here? I’m really not a big fan of these pastels, much less this triadic scheme. But there they were.

The boat was something I bought a year ago. I bought it because I have some questions about that particular design. It’s called a Car Topper. It was designed by the innovative and somewhat eccentric boat design Phil Bolger. “Dynamite” Harold Payson has written about building them and sells the plans. This boat was built by the father of a friend of mine. I had been thinking of building it myself but the price was right for this one so I bought it. It needs restoring and I have yet to get around to that.

Anyway, my friend’s father painted that boat those colors. I suppose he may have been thinking of tropical pastels or something. Something  like the way houses are painted through out the Caribbean. I don’t know. The odd thing is that my friend is an artist, a pretty well known artist who has many public art commissions in his portfolio and is known for his use of colors in his sculptures.

The surfboard is in for repairs. It’s a Robert August design and was shaped for the surfer I eventually bought it off of. Same color scheme as the boat! What is it about those colors?

Take a look at a color wheel. It’s set up based on the three primary colors arranged equidistant around a circle. That’s 120 degrees apart, which is what is meant by triadic colors, they are 120 degrees apart on the color wheel. Using triads creates a high energy kind of buzz of a color scheme. Adding white tones that down somewhat and shifts the scheme towards a pastel look but it still cries out for attention to me. Hey mahn, look ‘a me mahn, I’m over he-ah. Or something.

I’ve been thinking a long time about getting into boat building professionally. I’ve built a few boats in the past for fun or as the need arose, but now I’m looking to build boats for others. It’s a very daunting prospect. I realized a while ago that I needed to learn a lot more about boats and boat building before attempting this. I’ll be posting more on all this in coming posts. One of the reasons I bought the Car Topper was to do some initial tests on the water and to get my hands on a boat about that size. I’ve moved into a very different direction since buying it and am going to build a very traditional design, lapstrake boat but I still plan to restore this boat and use it for odd jobs around the water.

The surfboard is being repaired where an earlier repair, done before I got the board, failed a few days ago. I was out on some pretty decent sized waves, the first waves of any size for a long time around here. It’s been a very flat summer. About an hour and a half into the session, as I was paddling out and ducking into an oncoming wave as it broke over me I had my hand on the rail and could feel it flex and as it did I felt a crack open up. Not good.

I took the board into the studio a couple of days later (luckily I have another board that I used or the clean up session the next day, which BTW was awesome!) and inspected the damage. An old plug of pink builder’s foam had worked loose and created the crack. I had to grind down quite a lot of the rail, fill with epoxy and micro balloons and have just layered in some fiber glass cloth and resin. It should be ready in a couple of days.

I’m still working through a lot of material on boat building but hope to be starting a boat in a week or so.  The surf season is starting here so I’ll be quite busy for some time. I’ve got a new coffee table design I’ll be showing here as soon as I get it rendered the way I want and I’ve been commissioned to build another coffee table to be shipped down to Florida. Did I say I was going to be busy?