It's a little rainy today as we begin to come out of the rainy season. They have a saying here in CR that the rainy season officially ends on November 15th. I always wondered if the president had a switch in his office to turn it off because it does happen pretty close to that date. Anyway I am continue to work on a project for a fellow missionary here in CR, who needs a vanity top for his bathroom. It is a small area for the sink and will be a floating top with out any cabinet underneath. I will see if I can get some pictures in on the next post. I am doing that while still waiting for some tools to arrive for the rocker, should be the end of next week. Along with that I have become even more unplugged, or should I say less apt to fall to the temptation of using a router table. Today I sold my router table, router, and all the bits to a fellow Costarican woodworker from my church. This is his profession so I wanted to help him out and gave him a good price for quite a few nice bits and a good router, I think he will enjoy it. He is also a great resource for wood and getting it at a great price.Down here in CR if I go to a supplier alone they are likely to give me a gringo price which will be a little higher.
I have learned their system of determining the board feet of a piece for pricing. They do something different which in place of selling a piece of wood according to the board foot they sell it according to what is called a "Pulgada" or literally translated "an inch". As with many Spanish words, just as in English they can take on different meanings (you should see how many meanings they have for the word "Taco" here in CR). What they do is measure the width, say 12 inches (and they do use inches in this determination although the country uses the metric system) and divide that by four, so you have 3. Then you multiply that by they length which is measured in "Varas", which means pole or yard stick. The length of their "vara" is 33 inches, don't ask me why. So say you have 3 varas, you would multiply your first 3 by 3 and come up with 9 which is then designated as how many pulgadas you have. I hope that makes sense. Then you multiply the price per pulgada by 9 and you have your total for a board. The average price right now is 1,000 colones, the currency used in CR which is about $2.00. So 9 pulgadas times 1,000 colones is 9,000 colones which is about $18.00 for a 12 x 99 x 4/4. They do measure the thickness by inch and usually stick to 1, 2, and 3 inch thickness rarely going in between those numbers. So I hope you enjoyed that lesson in buying wood in CR.
As you can see down below in the photos from my shop I am using metal posts for the structure and then corrugated tin for the upper sides and roof. My father was a welder for 40 years in Milwaukee making car frames for the Detroit car manufacturers, so I picked up that trade from him. His younger brother my uncle had the cabinet shop that my brother eventually bought and where I eventually worked for 7 years, with my brother before being called into the ministry. I enjoy working with metal and welding but still find more joy in working wood. I would not brag on my welding abilities, the beads are kind of like giant blobs but they hold and the shop hasn't collapsed yet, praise the Lord. I really enjoyed building this building (kind of redundant) but wouldn't want to do this for a profession. As I said originally this was going to be a power tools wood shop so I added plenty of outlets, my dad was also a great electrician and taught me much about that trade as well. I think the shop turned out well and I am truly thankful for it. Is it perfect, who knows because in a subjective way perfect is different for each person, in an objective way no one can really know what perfection is, so in one sense it is and in another it isn't.
I also included more pictures of my first Maloof rocker I built.
Again thanks for visiting my blog and please let me know what you think
God bless,
Mark Hynek
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