At six in the morning I poured the last of the kerosene into the heater and set it afire.  The shop in the woods was cool and slow to heat, as it always is, and a dark monolith standing in the only clear island amidst a small ocean of sawdust was cold to the touch.

Today, the day the monolith Diorama sets sail to the north.  This Sunday today.  Up until 15 hours ago we didn’t know if today would happen, whether the delivery was a go or not, what small miracle would need to happen for all of this to fall into place, this cabinet made into something that will touch and affect so many and so much.

Maybe I’m making more of it than is really necessary.  Then again, maybe not enough.  I spoke a few days back about things taking on a life of their own out in this shop and boy, has it ever happened this time.

A few practical matters first.

I commented to JK on the phone last night “My God, I’m six feet tall and I can’t see over top of the darn thing.”  Shown here without the front door, which is ten feet away in the prone position getting a stain bath.

It is, by all standards, a monolith.  Dark indeed.  Remember the sidewalls of this shop are 12 feet tall, so it may not look as imposing as it would in your living room (not that you’d want it there).  I’ve got it sitting on some of those sliding coasters that have been hanging around the shop on a dusty shelf since Pterodactyls flew and might just send them along with the unit.  Either because I don’t want them or they might just be needed to keep it from depressing somebody else’s concrete floor (I kid, it’s impressively heavy but not that much.)

The aforementioned door, just stained.  Hoping that this stain will blend with everything else.  Wood being weird and especially since it’s oak, the stain tends to do weird tricks in the light, different shades appear then change as you walk around it.

Like here.  In bright light it looks like almost a natural finish, but it ain’t, not by a long shot.  I nicknamed this hinge “Old Stiffy” since it came from the maker without the natural floppy action of its mates.  Happens to work quite well with the door that will go on it, so all the better.  The door needs to drop open and remain somewhat stationary.

All the mundane details.  The screws I found to fit these hinges, for example.  Only available in stainless steel.  Chrome stainless, to be exact.  Not exactly a match for bronzed metal.  But a shot of black enamel paint and they blend in pretty well.

Or the turntable, which I dare not photograph less the natural order of the universe be disturbed.  26” in diameter, it sits atop a spinner mechanism that is 12” round.  It’s heavy since it’s all hardwood, glued up from 3” strips.  And since it’s hardwood it has a mind of its own and wants to warp and move and the whole apparatus has to be balanced and screwed and shimmed and bolted so that it spins (through two narrow as hell slots!) naturally, and smoothly.  Delicate is not the word.  Exasperating might be.

But spin it does, and slowly, as it should be for a display unit.  Can’t really make it spin fast and you wouldn’t want to, since the pictures that will set upon it should be viewed slowly I should think.  Deliberately.  With critical eye.  The point of this whole cabinet is to display the Diorama and make the unit fade into the background.  I had to keep that in mind the whole time and it wasn’t easy.

The bottom drawer again.

JK asked about the costs involved in this thing, and I have a rough idea.The hardwood and plywood and stain and all the little stuff is probably in the range of $700 American.  That’s materials.  Easy.

The labor?  Good lord.  Look, I know how much my labor is worth (some of my colleagues would say “not a speckled damn”) and about how many hours are in this thing.  It’s part and parcel of what I do, or should know how to do.

Usually pricing labor for a customer is a matter of figuring how many hours and hoping you’re correct about the time involved, multiplying by an ever variable labor rate per hour, gasping at the total and then wondering just how much this poor soul can afford to pay.  That’s the way I do it, anyway.  A better business practice would be to get the labor and be hard hearted no matter how much it is, probably throw a fat markup and profit factor on it as well.  Such a practice on 60 hours of labor would put this thing at well over $5,000.00 for the total.  Possibly more than that.

It’s a prototype, as JK keeps reminding me.  It’s also a necessary part of her Masters Thesis.

I‘m not charging for labor.  Have no desire to, because it’s my way of helping this project along.  I haven’t the funds to contribute to her project in any other way.  You charge meagerly for prototypes in this business in any case, and hope for repeats on final design (and I can assure you, there needs to be many design improvements from my plain offerings on this one).

And practical things again, it still needs to ship north.  All the way to New York City, where it will be shipped again and reside in a museum.  Can you imagine?  Still haven’t wrapped my mind around that concept.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The shipping.  There’s no way to make a long story any shorter than to speak of something so ordinary as shipping a cabinet from the Carolina woods to the bright lights of NYC, and all the whys and all the soul that will go with it.  Out of mind.  Out of heart.

We will speak of this later today.

. . . what to say.

A tragedy came to our door today, in the midst of progress on the Diorama.  Seems that tragedy stalks this family with a relentless and determined pace.

In the mechanics of such things that were pre-ordained to happen, I submit some pictures of the past 48 hours of work.  The unit is stained and ready for clear finish, which is normally very fast.

The turntable finally spins.

Right side.

Spinning another arc for a surprise feature, more structural than decorative.

Assembled.

The upper unit, dry fit for hardware.  Immediately disassembled for finishing.

Face door dropped.  The arc, to support the upper sides and create a stereographic effect is revealed.

First stained item, the bottom drawer.  I looped one of the picture frames around the drawer front for color comparison, it’s pretty close.  Once dry, I’ll check and see if it needs more toning,

The top lid masked with tape and ready for finish.  Flat black inside, stain outside.

Sorry for the brevity.  It was a very productive session.

So we left off with a bunch of glued up parts and racks of materials.

Start from the ground up, I always say.  Here’s the base of the Diorama, looking for all the world like an upside down end table.  3 x 3 legs planed and cut to length.

The legs were haunched  to create a shoulder where they enter the base, then bored, screwed and glued. The screw holes were plugged with oak bungs, milled on the drill press with a cutter nobody else has, a stainless steel sweetheart, and I’ve got 4 of ‘em.  Keeps me warm at night, such things.  Holes, meet bung.  Thank you Beavis.

The drawer is made and installed.  This will hold nothing more exciting than sand, as a counterweight for something prone to be top heavy.  The drawer pull finally arrived and wound up being the first of the hardware to see action.  Has to come back off before stain is applied, but what the heck?

The Diorama base completed.  Laid the next level on there to feel out the turntable.

This might have been the most fun thing of all.  Whipping the big router (no longer made, something about too much horsepower and just totally unsafe, heh heh) around to make a perfect turntable circle.

Here’s a thought.  Let’s make the upper unit a little more, shall we say, Victorian.  Panels for sides, instead of just a flat chunk of plywood.  There’s one of the cool hinges (which the bastards didn’t send any screws for, and caused me no end of running around).

A tighter look at the panels.  This will be the upper unit and lid.  Most of it anyway.  Lot of work in these little pieces of goo.

She breaches!  The upper unit from the front without the drop down door or front of the lid.  A keen eye (and enlarging the picture) will show the turntable poking through the side in a narrow slot.  Lost a year off my life on that slot, I did.  The turntable is offset to allow this spinning function and it slots out on the back as well.  Call it a touch of whimsy.  Or physics.  Round meets square and all that.  Cool 26 hp tractor in background.

The two “fronts” will be flat instead of panelized for a couple reasons.  They were originally intended (and still could be) as a surface to mount a viewfinder in, like a stereoscope.  And the bigger drop down front will be used as a surface to mount a map or instructions on the inside face.

A gnarled hand showing where the hinges will go for the lid, on the back of the upper unit.  Now mind, surface mounting these hinges in no mortice, or leafed in like a conventional door would be, goes against all modern construction methods.  Mounting like this, like a steamer trunk hinge, is just plain wrong.  Unless you paid a small fortune for a decorative hinge from Victorian days.  In which case it’s all good.  Had to admit I wrestled with this one for a while, just to defeat the paradigm.  I’m thinking the front will be similar, an exposed hinge.  Plus, more bung holes!

Ally picked up the finish and flat black paint for the inside.  Once the front is finished and mounted, we paint.  We stain.  Then we is done.  This thing ships to NYC this coming weekend assuming my driver isn’t off chasing skirts again.

And we all know how that goes.

Hey JK, any thoughts or concerns?

The frames arrived today.

This is important because we match the pre-finished frames for color to the Diorama unit.  The frames are white pine, there are 4 of them, and Julio in Juarez spent his lunch hour lavishing them with staples and shrink wrap.

Just kidding.  I’m sure Julio would have no end of good things to say about me.

The visible opening is 15½” x 19½”.  The matte cut size (see, I know some art stuff) is 16 1/8 x 20 1/8.

A close up, or at least as good as my poor camera can do.  The finish is very flat and very dark!  They all appear to have arrived in good shape.

Now if JK could just leave a comment, here’s a question.  Do we want the finish as flat as the frames or is some semi-gloss okay?  Or should we whip out the steel chain and do a little distressing on the Display (that’s another artsy term, distressing) just to give that aged appearance?

I might just clobber it with a club for the hell of it.  My planer broke down and put me behind schedule for a day and I’m looking for something to beat on.

Next update should show some structure and have much hilarity.  No time to be sitting here making entries, I got work to do.

I’ve always divided builds into 3 equal parts.  Transport being the first, the mobilizing and shipment of materials.  Reckon it’s safe to say that a great deal of that was completed this week.  Part two would be the construction phase and three – the finish and hardware stage.

Plywood and some of the hardware was picked up on Friday and a couple hundred board feet of red oak hardwood on Saturday.  Some of the pre-machining was accomplished at the big shop where I spend weekdays slogging for the man, a major help when it comes to processing plywood that only comes in 4 x 8 sheets.  Whacking that up in my little shop can be problematic to say the least.

Here’s the oak hardwood, fresh off the truck and already serving as a handy horizontal surface for other things.  This generally takes, oh . . . about 15 seconds after it lands on the sawhorses.

Pre-cut drawer parts and cabinet components for the “Other” job, the Kitchen Island.  Shot one side with catylized lacquer prior to assembly, a quick way to get some of the interior finish out of the way.  That Devilbuss spray gun is the Ferrari in an otherwise Chevy shop, and I’m continually amazed at how cool it really is.

Proof that I really do look at the drawings.  Just before changing them on the fly.  Continuously.  The Spinner (my hardware guy insisted on calling it a spinner, rather than a Lazy Susan) can be seen to the left.  Simple ball bearing goodness and very low profile.

A drywall cart full-o-parts, plywood parts in this case.    Somewhere in there are two cabinets.  Or one cabinet and a piece of furniture, to be accurate.

My ancient guy, 15 years old and falling apart (at least the unimportant OSHA parts, like a proper guard) but still cutting dead nuts square.  Eighty bucks worth of blade, and I’ve got several of them.  All to get that hardwood to rough length, then to the table saw for rough width, then the planer for thickness and finish width.

Which yields you this.  A stack of like parts.  And there are many such stacks to go.  Doors and panels, drawers, tops and components.

Gluing up the legs for the Diorama.  There are 4 separate legs in there that will net 2½ x 2½ square.  At this point they’re a little long so I can cut to net length later.

Gluing up the turntable for the Diorama, the heart of that piece.  It’s way oversized in both directions too, and will be cut into a round circle when the glue dries.

Not shown are all the door parts (Island) and panel parts (Diorama), the Butcher Block top for the Island, and about 30 pounds of sawdust.  And all the resulting kindling wood to be fed into the fireplace and oyster pit.  Seems a pity ‘cause it’s some darn fine kindling wood.  Expensive, too.

So at the end of the day we’ve got a bunch of stuff pre-cutand roughed out, always the nastiest and messiest part of the build (although the raised panel stuff is a pain too).  Glue is drying.  Have received the Diorama latch, awaiting the hinges and pull and the pre-finished picture frames with the all important stain color to match.

Fastest part of the whole affair.  Assemble on the Island carcass is done, with the drawer and tray slides in place.  Simple.  The inside has the clear finish already done, the outside will get a stain but it’s relatively light.  I call these my battleship cabinets, since they’re built to a spec that only the US Navy could appreciate.  I mean, who on earth still uses solid oak drawer slide backers?  Let alone veneer core plywood at $65 bucks a sheet.  I shall always be poor, but my stuff doesn’t fall apart.  Not ever.

Because it all has to start somewhere.  And isn’t that a lovely little fire coming from the kerosene heater on a chilly March day.

For a few frantic posts, I’m going to relate in semi-live time the goings on at the little shop in the Backwater. The one behind the house.  The one elected to produce a special piece of furniture for someone special indeed, the sister of Ally, who will use this as part and parcel of her Masters Thesis.  I don’t know quite how many posts will  occur as part of this (not that, you know, a lot of them occur at any rate) but this is an easy way to put pictures and history together for the building of this thing.

Plus I got the shop all cleaned up and wanted to show off, if you want to know the truth.  Lookee.  12 foot side walls.  A concrete floor laid and smoothed by one of the finest finishers I’ve ever worked with.  A modest handful of small machines and a boatload of hand tools, most of which aren’t shown here.  But will be, soon.

I’ve worked in better and worse.  Hell I work in the most advanced place in this part of the country every day with millions of dollars in equipment and edifice.  But better is not always the best when it comes to the stuff you do on your own. You’re wanting the quiet and stern emptiness of the discipline on your own, without several dozen opinions standing nearby.  It’s more peaceable, sure, you can slurp a beverage and curse freely if need be.  You often do a little of both.  I’ve done so for nearly 35 years now and like the selfishness of spending the time away from all others in pursuit of . . . whatever emerges, I guess.  There’s a plan to this of course.  I know what to build.  But sometimes it takes on a life of its own, somewhere amidst the sawdust and the screaming machines.

Here’s a chunk of scrap wood.  I ought to burn it in the fireplace or the oyster pit, I really should.  But I look at it and it has a beauty in that end grain, and I’m old in the way of looking at things like this.

It ought to say something about how I roll that a planer and a propane grill occupy bench space all at once.

This weekend, the madness begins.  Short timeline, much to do.

And in the truest sense of feast or famine, a nice lady has requested an island cabinet for her kitchen.  Same time frame.

Let the madness begin.

But hardly is it meant for that.

It sits upon a filthy concrete floor, a floor made all the thicker by liberal spraying of contact cement that misses the target and falls wetly to the dust, accumulating and drying, forming its own soil of sorts.  Dust, and wet spray, and saw shavings and the usual debris that this sort of place produces everyday.

‘Tis home, ‘tis.  A workbench meant for constructing things of value that a shop such as this can sell for prodigious fees.  Fees that trickle eventually into my pocket, muchly watered down of course, what with the need for power and light and paying the various higher ups who conceive of such things as I build.

And scattered like homesteads on a Nebraska warehouse floor are the workbenches of the noted, the chosen, who flit amongst my day and all the days gone and to come.  Some are commandeered by captains old.  Who’ve been here since time out of mind.  Some by eager children scarcely thought of when I started in this trade.

It is a trade that was beginning to die when I started.  You could buy your cabinets from a giant mill by then, a vast and automated place that was destined to become the understood matter of course for a kitchen, a bathroom.  Having some local place churn out something masterful at three times the cost withered in the heat of advertising, of the slick and color, of speed and schedules.  Still does.  The trade was evolving towards the narrow slice of world touched by architects and heavy duty money, commercial accounts and layer upon layer of input from the hierarchy of beautiful things produced to impress.

Should you walk into a bank, say, and behold the teller line festooned with walnut and stone and staffed by waifs clad in Dior, you would see something that might have started at my workbench.  It looks fairly effortless when seen in finished form, but the labor.  God the labor to make it so.

They bring drawings to the bench and I consider, and doodle, and generally fool around for a few hours, a day even.  Elbow time, we call it.  Doesn’t matter if I’ve built the same thing a dozen times, the boss and the managers would fret if they didn’t gaze across a shop floor and not see me lost in thought, elbows planted on the bench, pencil noting on the drawings and a legal pad filling with cutting lists of wooden parts.  “Not getting his head into the job”, they would murmur.  “Hate to see that.  Wouldn’t want to rush this one.  Better go speak to him, Ray.”

And Ray, being the foreman of this place, and in charge of all of the workbench dwelling operators, will sally forth.

“I see you’re already cutting parts, and getting started.  Think you’ve got this in your head already?  I mean, it’s a big counter.  Big job.  Wouldn’t want to make a big mistake in the layout . . .”

He will say this over the scream of a panel saw, or planer, some 440 volts of six-figure machinery inexorably churning through plywood or lumber and sucking sawdust up a collection chute and into a dump truck parked in the muck outside.

I’ll lean slightly to the left, yank a side of headphones from an ear and offer “Wha’ say?”

“I said did you do a layout, a cutlist?  Got this thing figured out?”

It’s crucial that my countenance changes not a whit.  For we have done this dance many, many a time.  Yet every time is the first time, of course.

“Oh sure.  Surest thing you know.  Ready to rumble here, we are.”  The pause for effect just before jamming an 8 foot slab of $400 elm burl plywood back into the saw.

Ray will nod, not convinced, for it is his job to not be convinced.  But he can be placated to a degree. And in ambling off to his next victim, I am left in peace.  If you can call slinging a thousand pounds worth of product into various machinery with a very tender touch, and a cacophony of industrial noise a sort of peace.  It is peace indeed when you’re lost in it for days at a time.  It is your mind and fingers floating out somewhere away from you and the filthy floor, the rusty carts full of materials, the cold from a warehouse that cannot be heated properly.  It is the soul of mechanics and operators before you, most dead and long gone who whisper in your ear, who show the way to run to that very fine line, sand to a mark.  Savoring the old chisel with an edge honed by your own hand and deadly sharp.

It is a dying trade, has been since I started doing it 30 odd years ago, and I stand sometimes at the workbench and marvel that it is still intact at all, this way we work.  That men like me are yet at it in much the same way.  It makes me the old one to these young guys, to be held in some sort of benign reverence, that I have lasted this long.  Much as I feared the old ones when I started, missing a finger or two here and there, and eyes dreamy with memory.

They were gifted, and forgotten, and left it all to me to ponder.

At the old place.  Worked there for 11 years.  In the office.  That was almost 15 years ago.

I’ve now worked there 1½ days, Fridays being a half-day.  Most common question, from the stalwarts who have been there ever since I left?

“Has the place changed much?”, followed closely by “You doin’ okay?”

Well no, it hasn’t changed much.  Not in that ethereal thing we call work mojo, not a bit.  Physically changed, oh hell yes.  They now have CNC machines that do every thing shy of running a hand across a fine bit of woodwork to pronounce it sound.  And the place is bigger.  Like two new buildings bigger.  With the resultant couple dozen of busybees to swarm therein.

Why they ask me if I’m doin’ okay is a sort of balancing act for me.  They ask as if inquiring after my mental health.  “Sure, ‘course I’m doing okay, thanks got everything I need, yup”.  Safe, sane answers.

I’ll get a free week or so to re-learn stuff.  To reorient my brain to building woodwork of a commercial nature instead of just installing it, as if it were any other building product.  I miss the field work, the freedom, the very outlaw nature of that.  But finish carpenters are common, and nobody’s hiring them in any event.

No one at all.

Best to be cheerful, and puckered for the inevitable derrieres that will wander by.  Where previously in this place, I had the derriere.  I was the one to be feared or respected.  Not quite the same, you can imagine.

Stories will abound.  This place has never lacked a wellspring of drama, and smarmy woodbutcher goodness.  Stay tuned.

Possibly the most overall talent I have seen on one of these bl*g things, if you count graphics and verbiage-smithing and damn funny combined as talent indicators, and I know you do.  Spent most of Saturday reading the whole thing which is immeasurably rare for me.  Plus, she has this thing going with weasels and I just know Pam at Sixweasels would shoot me if I didn’t get her in on this.  So there ye have it, possibly the only place online with these two weas-writers extraordinaire stacked together.

http://sweasel.com/

Go ye.  I knows good when I sees it.

For one thing, I’m not 21 years old anymore.  Tossing sheets of plywood around all day isn’t the effortless thing it used to be, if it ever was.  Working indoors in summer heat makes arabian headgear a necessity.  In winter it’s thermals and layers.  The place has a reputation of being one of the best in the Southeast, and it’s well deserved, but that doesn’t mean paradise for the talent that shovels the wood all day long.

http://sippicancottage.blogspot.com/2009/01/killing-two-um-in-bush-with-umthe-birds.html Sippican has a story that illustrates a conundrum.  I remember well breaking into the industry in 1980, when the economy was even worse than it is now (hard to believe, isn’t it?).  Nobody buying houses because of prohibitive interest rates, super high unemployment in construction.  It was bad.  Yet I strolled into a lumberyard two days after getting married and landed a minimum wage job in a cabinet shop.  With the recommendation from a good friend who worked there.

Ally and I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.  I don’t remember either of us bringing home $100 a week for a very long time.  Rent was $250 a month, I had a $165 truck payment and the usual utilities, groceries.  We did nothing.  I mean nothing for entertainment or dinners out or weekend vacations. There was no cable tv, no internet, no VCR’s.  Man it was weak, and you just sweated and pushed and kept going because there was no other choice.

Looks very much like we’ve come full circle, doesn’t it.  There is no whining allowed because I accept it.  I don’t particularly like it, my freedom’s down the tubes and I value that as much as anything, but there it is.  Work to eat.  Hope for better days.

Guess I’ve got a call to make.