Boy, you sell a few dusty old tools & watch the readership soar! Oh well…it’s back to shop-work. Today I planed red oak for a good while…

planing stiles in red oak

This is my favorite exercise - hewing &  planing. When I have good oak stock, I can do this for days on end. Here I am working on stiles for a grossly over-sized joint stool – it’s like the joint stool book on steroids. 

planing detail


These are 3 3/4” square, and about 37” long. I weighed one for fun, 17 pounds…no wonder I got tired. They are for a joined table, like the one I saw at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT.  http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/revisiting-a-well-known-collection/

The oak is from that great log I wrote about last week, http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/splitting-a-nine-foot-log/

Here are the four stiles, and a joined stool for a sense of scale.


Tomorrow I have to clean the shop – all that red oak, it’s rather fragrant.

About these ads