Woodworking

It would be nice to be a fine woodworker skilled with router and lathe. Not to be. Not enough time left. Too many other things to do. But I enjoy working with wood. Fortunately there is one area of woodworking for which I am qualified. This is a category of woodworking requiring little or no finesse. Compared to making a beautiful table, my woodworking activity seems brutish. Nevertheless, it is satisfying.
I like to gather, prepare and haul firewood. There is something primal about firewood. Firewood is the essence of survival. It means warmth; symbolizes shelter. It’s been years since I had the chance to work with wood. One year in college I worked for the Forrest Service building trails. This taught me how to use an ax and my more favorite tool, the Pulaski. I was not deemed qualified to apprentice on the chain saw. This was okay with me as it was a humungous saw and the operator had to carry it. In the ensuing years we sometimes had workable fireplaces but always bought wood which was delivered and stacked by the seller. Spending time at Lummi Island has brought me back into contact with firewood. A wood stove provides primary heat. We have lots of big trees and windstorms knock them over. The trees have to be sawed into rounds, the rounds stacked for drying, then split and moved into the woodshed. I enjoy everything about the process. I like the tools including the chain saw, of course, which my friend Dan taught me to start like the big boys do, holding it in one hand and pulling the rope with the other. I am still terrified of the chain saw which I think is a good way to be. But it is also exhilarating to use one. Last summer I visited another friend in Vermont. Jim has two wood stoves and has to make it through the entire winter, the entire Vermont winter. He has a logger deliver a truckload of logs and then spends a good part of the summer making these logs into firewood. I invited myself out to help him one afternoon. The first thing I noticed was all the safety equipment Jim was wearing. He was pretty much a poster boy for chain saw safety: hard hat, steel-toed boots, metal fabric chaps to protect his legs, gloves and safety glasses. I mentally gave myself demerits for my lack of personal protection at home as he led me to the hydraulic splitter. The hydraulic splitter is a wonderful tool and necessary if you have to ready a log truck load or if you are a commercial firewood cutter. I enjoyed using it, watching the wood resist, then give way to the overwhelming power of the the machine. I split a lot of rounds and had a fine time. I don’t use a hydraulic splitter. I use a little tool called the Bazooka and a sledge hammer to break the rounds in a half. I tap the Bazooka into the center of the round which sits on a cutting stump. The sledge is, of course, very heavy and raises blisters easily especially after your hands become pitchy from handling the wood. I try to make the sledging and cutting into an exercise, swinging the sledge back past my left side then letting the pendulum to swing forward again, catching its forward motion with my right hand and lifting the sledge over my right shoulder. Then I sort of push it up with the right hand and whip it down at the target. It is amazing to me how often I hit the Bazooka dead center. It’s a lot like golf with hand-eye coordination required. Yesterday I was breaking Doug fir and big leaf maple rounds that were about 14” in diameter. It took eight or nine blows to split the wood apart. This wood was quite green and full of moisture and as the Bazooka dug in water oozed out around the metal. A fissure appeared and then the log split apart like a watermelon. In a perfect world the final stroke sends the Bazooka point down and impaled in the cutting stump with the two halves of the round dropping right and left. I used to use an ax for the next part. I like the ax; enjoy keeping it razor sharp. I still use an ax for fine woodworking. But the ax has several deficiencies. It is dangerous. If you miss you can cut yourself. And it gets stuck in the wood and you spend all your time extricating it and wasting lots of energy. Getting stuck breaks up the rhythm of the process. Dan, again, suggested I buy a cutting maul which has a sledge head on one side and an ax-like edge on the other. I say ax-like because you don’t bother to keep it sharp. It has enough of an edge that it can slash into the wood. But it’s the momentum of the tool that causes the wood to split. And, if you miss and hit yourself it will hurt but probably not require a tourniquet. Plus, it doesn’t get stuck.
I like the look of it and the smell of the wood. There are lots of different colors. The bark is an abstract painting of grays and reds and licheny green. There are a variety of textures. Rough, smooth, wet, sticky. And the smells are wonderful. I’ve always wondered why there’s no after shave named Douglas Fir. The pile of split rounds stacks up; fatigue increases; accuracy wavers. The back begins to ache. The rounds seem heavier. Blisters and calluses form. Pitch covers the entire hand. The wet wood, bright and shiny, a pale yellowy beige, is stacked up in the shed next to the darker, brownish orange wood that has been drying a couple years. The woodshed, which we had quite emptied out is filling up again. More woodpiles are waiting in the wings. Warmth and shelter is guaranteed.

Comments

[Noble]

I'm looking forward to chopping wood. Although I'm not touching that chainsaw. Unless you have one of those metal chainsaw-codpieces.