reading oaks

I have been thinking lately about what makes a good oak log for joinery. I walk by a large pile of oak logs each day, and I decided I can show you what doesn’t make a good one. These logs are all in the parking lot at work, and will be used for one thing or another by the artisans’ department at the museum; house parts, fence pale, etc. If you haven’t been watching their blog, here is the link again. It’s well worth a visit, says me. http://blogs.plimoth.org/rivenword/

Learning to read the bark is an inexact science; but many things can be worked out…one problem is that experience with bad logs will teach you a lot about what’s going on there. I am reminded of the saying:

Good Judgement is the result of Experience

Experience is the result of Poor Judgement.

example # 1 – quite simple, clearly a loser for joinery. Knots, two hearts at the bottom nearest the camera, weird, mis-shapen bole.

red oak

Next, another red oak I think. Pith of the tree is way off-center. Usually a sign of a tree that has grown on uneven ground – a hillside most commonly. That results in tension within the log. Twisting and warping in boards made from this log. Rarely reliable stock inside.

off center

Now this one shows some promise. White oak this time. Nice tight furrows in the bark. No big lumpy bits, a kink near the far end, or that’s a short log lying right against this one. Joinery most often uses short sections. 4 or 5 feet is about the longest you need.

this one shows promise

Then I looked at the end grain. Off-center pith, wind shake (large tangential cracking) bole is oval not round. and an injury or buried metal near the bottom right hand segment of the end grain.

walk away

What next? The long scar in the bark of this white oak indicates some trouble inside. Might be lots of good wood in this log, but right along where the scar is will become waste.

scar in the bark

More? This one might be all right for a while. Not the roundest, and some knots after five feet or so. But a short log near the bottom of this trunk might be worthwhile.

semi OK red oak

This is more like the shape I want in the end of the log.

nice & roung

This one has some checking from sitting out a while. But these can help you when you’re shopping. Look for end grain checks that are flat. If they curve ,the wood inside curves also. Here’s a good end grain view.

good splits

Now the easily worst of all. Anybody could see this one’s a bummer.

weird growth rings

 

joined stool seat

I finished the seat for the joined stool the other day. It had dried on its surface enough to be able to plane it smooth. First I created the thumbnail molding on its edges. Where I had made a rabbet all around the seat, I just used a plane to bevel the edges down until they hit the general shape I was after. I do the end grain first; and use a skewed approach. The plane should be nice & sharp.

planing the molded edge

after doing the two end grain sections; I then cut the long sides. once the molding was done, I gave the top of the seat a going-over. To do this, I shoved the seat against a board nailed to the end of the bench. This way, the teeth of the bench hook didn’t mar the finished molded edge.

Planing the top

Then I position the seat on the stool’s frame. This I usually do by eye & feel, as last resort I will use a ruler. If it looks all right, then it is all right. At this stage, the top of the frame and the bottom surface of the seat need to both be flat. Trimming the top of the frame needs some attention; in this case I did it back when I trimmed the stiles…

positioning the seat board

Then I depart from period methods, and use a handscrew to clamp the seat in place for boring. Alexander and I have often speculated and tested different methods for how they might have held the seat in place; at one point we nailed it down, then pulled one nail at a time, bored the hole & drove the peg. All speculation aside, the method I used yesterday is simple and efficient. I think when I get to this part of the text, I will just say we don’t know how this was done; and here’s a compromise method we use that is not too far out of  whack.  

clamping the seat

I bore the holes so the pegs fix the seat to the stiles. Some stools have pegs driven into the rails instead. Both methods work. I sight the holes in line with the stiles, aiming to for the area between the joints – it turns out to be a small target. The bit is aligned to bore at an angle close to that of the end frame of the stool. This way the pegs are pinching the seat down. Sooner or later, someone picks a stool up by the seat; and if the pegs are just straight down into the stiles, then the seat can come off.

boring for seat pegs

 

I bore one hole, peg it, and then bore the next. The pegs are square with essentially no taper to them. They must fit as tight as can be, without being so tight as to split the stile. You can drive one into a test hole, to check the size. I split them from dry oak blanks, that were riven & set aside to dry out. I keep a large supply of this peg/pin stock at all times. Any straight off-cut over 4″ gets busted out into these blanks. I split them with a knife, and then shave them with a 2″ wide framing chisel. I like the weight of this chisel for this task; most folks don’t like shaving them this way. for me it works well. The motion comes from the upper body, I even lift my right foot up, shift my weight up and bring it down to drive the chisel. It takes some practice, but I find it works well. The first hundred or so feel clunky. then it levels off.

splitting pegs

 

shaving pegs

 

Then hammer them in. As I said, I do them one by one. Hold it firmly while hammering; any errant blow can split the peg apart. Turn off the music & listen to the sound it makes, when the sound deadens, the peg is home. I trim it a half-inch or more above the seat then hit it again sometimes.

driving a peg

 

The peg needs to fill the entire hole, there should be no cusp beyond the faces of the peg. This one fits well.

driving the peg

 

I had no deadline with this stool, so I left the pegs still proud of the seat, and will come back in a day or two & hit them one more time. then a trim with a backsaw & chisel to pare them flush with the seat. Maybe then one or two more passes on the seat itself with a sharp plane, set to take a light shaving.

joined stool, nearly done

 

plane body made of oak

oak plane body

While discussing unusual timber choices for plane-making the other day, I said there was one oak plane in my collection. Here are two shots of it; as you see, it’s pretty decrepit. Maybe about 9″ long, it weighs 20 ounces. I wondered if it is “live oak” (Quercus virginiana)  from the Southeastern US, but I am not familiar with that wood, other than in legend.

There are no marks on the plane anywhere, so no idea of its age. You can see that the opposite cheek is split badly, there was a cluster of knots and difficult grain right where they chopped the slot for the iron and wedge.

split in oak plane

One last shot, showing the arrangement of the plane body in the wood:

oak plane

Well, it makes me want to keep my eye out for some fast-grown white oak. With that I would try an oak plane. Remeber that in the Mary Rose (1545) planes oak out-numbered beech as the wood of choice.  Technically, the oaks are part of the beech family, and I have often wondered why beech became the standard timber for planes. It’s not terribly stable from what I know of it. Maybe even harder to dry than oak…

It’s not that I have nothing to do, but now I want to root around in my collection to see how many non-beech bench planes I have. I know of a couple more…

 

Splitting green red oak

I’ve been rumaging around a bunch of off-cuts of oak lately, and have planed a lot of nice quality short stock…it’s great autum work, being outside splitting. Nice to rescue some oak from the firewood pile as well.

But now I have a new red oak log I started splitting the other day. Usually I split the best material first, but right now my time is limited, so I wanted to start at the top of the log, and work through some short sections before I get to splitting the long stock. The log is 16 1/2 feet long, and at the tip it’s 22″ in diameter. There’s a nice clear log near the bottom that’s about 7 feet long at least. Beyond that the butt swell, or flared base of the tree is 30″ in diameter, and from that I hope to get panels and seats for joined stools. The top third is hit-or-miss; whatever I get out of it is a bonus.

red oak log

 

I was surprised (pleasantly) by the quality of the wood even in the worst cut in the log. Below I have a short section cut from the tip of the log, 29″ in length. There’s some big knots in it, but also enought straight grained timber to make it well worth the effort. It split nice & flat, which makes planing quick work.

 

The techniques I use to split this stuff is to score the log with a wedge right across the midst of it. This scoring really helps the wedges enter the wood, and encourage the split to follow the “fault” you create with the scoring. Then I drive 2 wedges into the end grain, just inside from the sapwood. A large wooden wedge then is inserted once the steel wedges have opened up the log enough. I try to not tear it apart once it’s split, that way it stands up better while I proceed with the successive splits.

scoring with wedge

driving two wedges

splitting into quarters

 

new joined chest

 

chest with drawers

This is a new joined chest with two drawers, just finished recently. Oak, with white pine for the chest lid and floor, drawer bottoms and rear panels. I based it loosely on an example at Historic Deerfield. The original was made in the Connecticut River Valley c. 1680.

This pattern is unlike most from the period, in that it meanders across the framing members. I laid out the scrolling vine motif with a compass; the leaves that fill in the spaces are free-handed with various curves of the gouges.

The central panel also uses a compass for some of its layout; the balance is again freehand. The shapes of the carving gouges determine the shapes of the leaves. 

detail center panel chest with drawers

Like all of my joined work, the oak was riven, or split, from the log, and hewn with a hatchet and then planed at the bench. This work is best done while the oak has a high moisture content. This comes as a surprise to many people who think that green woodworking is confined to chairmaking. I first started as a chairmaker and never would have thought it possible to do this sort of work in green wood. But a carefully chosen straight-grained oak, when split radially, will work up beautifully and result in boards that are very stable. The benefit of working this way is the ease of handling the green oak, it cuts very easily when wet; once it has lost its moisture, it requires much more effort to work the stock.  

More on that process later.