Back in the shop

Buenas dias from Costa Rica

Of course by now you know it is another sunny 75 degree day here in C.R with the possibility of a sunny 75 degree day tomorrow.

Well I went back into to the shop today and did the big clean up. After an evening of hulling my coffee beans, I recently learned the yellow covering of the bean after it has been removed from the red cherry is called the parchment, and removing is is called hulling the bean. I did it by hand, rubbing the beans vigorously between my hands, which was pretty rough on them. I found a video on youtube using a cheap blender and filing down the blades to where they don't damage the bean. I think I will try that when the beans I picked yesterday are ready for hulling. Soon I will  be roasting them on my gas grill, I rigged up a cage that is attached to the rotisserie motor , can't wait to put that to use. Also a new espresso maker will be arriving mid January. Costa Rica has a wonderful custom called 3:00 o'clock cafecito that I look forward to as much as Merry and Pipin look forward to second breakfast.. Everything stops at 3:00 p.m. for cafecito and you always have it with sweet and salty bread. Life is good here in C.R. my friends.    

Back to the shop, as I reluctantly entered my shop to start cleaning it I surprisingly encounter a friend setting up his home over my bench. You never know what you will find in a shop in the tropics. As you can see in the pictures it was pretty bad in there and after about half a day of cleaning the shop was looking pretty respectable and inspiring. There is nothing like a clean well organized shop to help your work. On the back wall the before picture I had a peg board next to my plane cabinet. It seemed to be good for collecting dust and nothing more so I took it down. To my surprise the back was half eaten and filled with termites. It also smelled really moldy. On the other side of that back wall is my neighbor's back yard. They are always watering the plants that must be on the other side of that wall. That in turn keeps that wall damp which wasn't good for a wood product to be screwed to it. I really want to build a tool chest like the anarchist's tool chest just because of the humidity here in C.R. my tools all develop a surface rust to them no matter how often I clean them. So I hope to eventually remove the wall cabinet.

To give you an update on the Chinese checker board. If you can see in one of the before pictures I placed the board on two pipe clamps and places some loose weights on it over night. That seemed to do the trick of straightening it out. I hope to get some finish on it soon. I am still pretty exhausted from the building marathon and the clean up to where I might wait until Monday to get back at it. One thing I have noticed is the wood pieces cut for the other projects are down to about 11-13% which is pretty good.

So the moral of this story is always give plenty of time for your projects. Never try to rush it, you will only end up rushing yourself to destruction. Give the wood plenty of time to settle in your shop to a workable moister level. And always keep a clean shop to inspire you through the journey. So take care my friends, keep up the good work, don't grow weary in well doing, and God bless

Mark Hynek

Do you ever NOT want to work in your shop?

Buenas dias from Costa Rica

Once again it is a beautiful sunny 75 degree day here in Sarchi. The winds have picked up quite a bit to where it sounds like bombs are going off on your roof. They use corrugated tin roofs here in C.R, Christmas went well with the cantata we held at our church. The people really enjoyed getting involved with it even if they only had 3 weeks to prepare.

On a personal note we had a wonderful Christmas has a family, which brings me to the topic of this post. Do you ever Not want to work in your shop? I pose that question after what I experience over these past few days. Right now I can say I don't want to be in my shop. It is not because I don't have a love for woodworking, I wouldn't have a shop if I didn't. It is also not due to my working with only hand tools, If you read Tom Fidgen's blog theunpluggedwoodshop.com you can read how he mentions that you really have to love working with hand tools when you begin to re-saw wood. The reason I don't want to be in my shop is I am just burnt out right now and don't have any motivation to open that door. As I contemplated why this was so I cam to a number of conclusions or  observed a number of variables that contributed to my exhaustion from woodworking. This all has come about from my building the Christmas presents for my family, which I wasn't able to finish on time. But it wasn't just that the environment in the shop also contributed to my lack of desire or motivation to continue.

Regarding the presents them selves, which weren't beyond my ability, was first of all the timing of the arrival of the wood. I was limited on where I could get the wood due to finances. A friend from church who has his own shop had bought my router table. all my bits, and a number of routers. He paid my cash for some and traded my with wood for some other stuff. He would bring some wood over when I needed it and deduct that from what he owed me. Unfortunately I couldn't get in contact with him until a week and a half before Christmas. When he finally brought over the wood it was way to wet to work with. I left it out in the sun and two days later was at a lever I though I could work with. Unfortunately that wasn't so and the wood was very difficult to work with and very stringy when I planed it. The pieces warp but I had anticipated that, at least I though I did, and let the wood sit after an initial planing. The second contributing factor aside from the wetness was the timing as mentioned before. I was trying to rush the process though I felt I was taking my time yet I realized I wouldn't get all of it done in time. The closer I got to Christmas the faster I began to work, which brought more frustration and sloppy work. Finally on Christmas eve I had worked all day until it was time to go to church, having not yet finished what I had hoped to finish. I came to a point where I realized there was no way I would get it all done on time so I opted to work on just a few of the projects. My plan was to come back to the shop after the evening service and work through the night if I had too. I thank the Lord that He didn't allow me to do that, a friend from church who had not been at the evening service called to invite my family and I to his house to celebrate Christmas eve, which we accepted. We had a really wonderful time and I know now that if I had tried to work all night I would have produced a horrible present for my kids. So I managed to get two projects finished to put under the tree and planned on getting back into the shop after Christmas. One of the projects, a simple Chinese checkers board looked fine when I had finished the building of it, I still have to finish it, but once I brought it into the house the board warped horribly. Our house is an open air house here in C.R. so the moister and temperature of my shop and house are pretty much the same. the board read 14% which is normal this time of year but still warped. That brought about even more depression regarding my perception of my abilities. I though, "wow I can't even build a stinking Chinese checkers board, what in the world am I doing trying to build fine furniture by hand?"'

Along with those circumstances my shop looked like, as Tom Fidgen put it, a bomb went off and I just was not motivated to work in that shop. There is quite a different feel when the shop is clean and well organized. that help motivate one to work well.

So here I sit in my ranchito with my shop only 30 ft. away, yet I have no desire to enter it. I am thankful for having other hobbies I can enjoy one being coffee. I have 9 coffee plants in my back yard and am in the midst of the picking season. I have already picked my plants four times havesting about 3 lbs. of coffee. Right now having dried the green beans in the sun I am removing the last covering from the green bean before it is ready for roasting. I am also watching Tom Fidgen's videos from his member web site . It is a very peaceful relaxing environment. Hopefully tomorrow I will open the door to my shop, begin cleaning and organizing it and get back to work but I thought I would share my personal experience when things are not as rosy as they are depicted on the web, in magazines and such.

On another note the funds are looking well for January to where I should be able to purchase the wood for the shaving horse and rocker, hopefully drier than what I got last time. If it is wet and needs to sit a while I still have the Christmas projects and a tool I am hoping to build for the chair project, a travisher. I just can't afford a new one and so I picked up some O1 steel 3/4 wide, 3/16 thick, by 18 inches and hope to make my own. Watched a few videos on youtube so pray for me on that one.

Well, my friends take care, keep up the good work, and God bless

Mark

Santa's workshop is up an running

Buenas dias from Costa Rica my friends,

Once again it is a sunny 70 degree day here in Costa Rica. I hope you have been enjoying the posts, although not much has been posted about the rocker project. Thanks for visiting though. I haven't been write any new posts for awhile, things have been pretty busy in the ministry getting ready for the Christmas cantata in the church.

The title of this post also explains what has been happening here lately. As I mentioned in my last post about how we has missionaries live on the field and how December was a tough month, it taught  us quite a bit on our priorities and what we wished to teach our children about Christmas as the world commercializes the holiday more and more every year. So I have been in full swing building the Christmas gifts. The wood arrived late as my Tico friend was really busy in his work and couldn't get here sooner, so I have a little over a week for the kids presents and a bit longer for the in-laws (their coming down on the first). As you can see in the pictures I got 4 planks of 4/4 Guanacaste about 24" wide and 7' long. It came wetter than I had hoped but we are getting by. This may sound like a lot of water to you all up north but the average for the wood was about 20%. As I said we are coming our of the rainy season and back in October, the peak of the rainy season, the wood can be at about 24%. During this time the lowest you can usually get it is about 14%. during the height of the dry season you will probably get it down to about 11%.. We live in a high humidity area being that C.R. is the size of West Virginia, and is surrounded by oceans. Here in Sarchi we are about 3500 ft. above sea level so that is why the temperature is rather nice. An hour drive away you will find yourself at the Pacific ocean with temperatures up around the 90's and very high humidity.

So back to the building of the presents. I rough cut all the pieces for the different presents, I am building two pochade boxes for my girls, three ring toss sets with six posts to play a form of Frisbee golf, a Chinese checker board game, a small marble hockey game, and a small Foosball table. Later I hope to build. for my in-laws, two small versions of the card catalogue project Tom Fidgen built. So what I did was cut the pieces out and then planed all the surfaces to expose the wood. I then left it a day out in the sun turning it periodically and now it is down to about 15% and really didn't warp much. I have to say it was quite the workout planning all that wood but well worth the effort. The immortal word of Hulk Hogan come to mind when after a tough round of wrestling someone asked him how he felt he said, "the pythons are hurtin brother."

 Here is the end result with all the pieces drying and waiting to be formed. Just so you know I didn't use the table saw. It has turned into an assembly table, but will be leaving the shop next month as I sold it to a fellow missionary. She was a faithful servant to me for many years and I will miss her dearly.

After a day of planning I filled three garbage cans full of shavings. First thing tomorrow,sharpen my plan blades. 

I don't know if you can see the different colors in the grain here but the darker lines actually have a purple hue to them. It is quite beautiful when you see it in person. 

 I hadn't put the handle on yet but I really enjoyed building this project. This box was for the young lady who has come to help us, for the next year, with our children's homeschooling. Since I get all my wood 4/4 I had to do some resawing to get all the pieces down to 1/2" thickness. Tom's kerfing plane and frame saw really came in handy for this. I have two more boxes to build so I will be resawing quite a bit very soon.

I will keep you updated on the progress and then post some finished pictures. Well my friends, keep up the good work, don't grow weary in well doing, and have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

God bless
Mark

Have you learned anything today?

Buenas dias from sunny Costa Rica. It is another beautiful 70 degree day as we come out of the rainy season, or what the Ticos would say "we are coming out of winter." The sky is clear with a gentle breeze passing through. My coffee plants are full and ripe for the picking. The mango trees are flowering and will soon produce some wonderful fruit, and our avocado tree is really taking shape. Might I say I really love living in CR. If you ever have the chance to visit please do so you won't be disappointed.

Back to the blog though, sorry I was gone for awhile with thanksgiving week having passed by, we still celebrate it here even though it is a north american holiday, and December's activities starting up in our church we have been pretty busy. First, I would like to thank Tom Fidgen for mentioning my blog on his web site www.anunpluggedlife.com (please visit it if you haven't done so yet). Secondly, I want to give you an update on the Maloof chair project. Right now I have had to change gears on put that off until January as I am currently making Christmas presents for my family here in the shop. As a missionary living in a foreign country we live by faith and the faithful support of our home churches. That being said sometimes our monthly support can be rather low, we never know what will come in each month but trust God to take care of us. So December started off rather low in the money department causing my wife and I to really reevaluate our priorities and what we want to teach our kids regarding Christmas and materialism in general. Hence we decided to pool together our resources and figure out, based on what we had on hand, how we could give the kids a memorable Christmas with out the trappings of the latest new toy or electronic gadget that in a month or so will have been broken, forgotten, or is out of date. So my work in the shop this month will be focused on that. Hopefully in January, funds permitting, I can pick up the wood for the shave horse and the seat of the rocker. I will post some pictures of the Christmas presents when finished.

On to the topic of this blog, "Have you learned anything today?" I am an avid reader always challenging myself to learn something new, gain knowledge, wisdom, and instruction. As I was working on one of the Christmas presents, the Pochade box from Tom Fidgen's 2nd book "The Unplugged Woodshop-Hand Crafted Projects for the Home and Shop" I was able to observe my ability or lack of when forming certain joints i.e. cutting dados and rabbets by hand. As I grow in my ability to use only hand tools I try to effectively evaluate every step on how I am doing. I can say with confidence that my ability to  dimension lumber has greatly increased to where I can take a rough piece of lumber and get a relatively flat square piece of wood ready to be formed into what ever shape I need. Dimensioning lumber has also help me in my ability to sharpen plane blades and chisel edges to where I can produce wonderful shavings and an extremely smooth surface using a simple Stanley no.4 Bailey plane. Taking that mentality into the finishing process has really caused me to evaluate my ability. I have gone to more traditional finishes i.e shellac. Oh, and on a side note regarding my search for a suitable alcohol to use here in CR, I went to the pharmacy and purchased their medical grade alcohol which was 96% pure but to my surprise was actually denatured alcohol. I had looked all over the country in hardware stores to no avail and there it was right down the road. So the shellac is mixed and is doing well. Back to my learning, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do french polishing or not but started viewing many videos on YouTube. What can I say about YouTube but, my word there is no end to people wanting to teach others and get their fifteen minutes of fame. I would say discernment is the buz word when searching on YouTube. I did fined a few sites regarding french polishing but was a bit confused regarding filling the grain. The wood I use here in CR is similar to mahogany and so I wanted to give it a try filling the grain. On a number of YouTube videos, especially guitar building ones, many of them used a rubbing pad with only alcohol and sprinkled some fine pumice on the wood, the wood had been coated with a spit coat of shellac before the pumice. On another video from Marc Adams school the guy used pumice and rubbed it with shellac in his pad. One said don't the other said go ahead. They both seemed to produce a fine finish but my complaint was they never showed exactly how long it took to fill the grain. They would always start then cut to the finished product. To say the least my attempt at filling the grain turned our horribly with using only the alcohol the results were that it didn't seem like the pores had been filled. With using shellac at first it seemed to work but then when it dried a white hue appeared in the shellac from the pumice. If any of you have had experience with this please leave a comment or suggestion.

So getting back to the point here is that each day I try to see what I have learned even if I am building something I had built in the past. One of the finest books every written, aside from the Bible, in my opinion is a book written in 1940 by Mortimer  J. Adler entitled "How to Read a Book." The premise is that many know how to read but don't really know how to read in order to gain knowledge, understanding, and skill. When most read they gain only information and nothing more. In a sense this is the art of observation. The author stated that "the beginning of wisdom is a just appraisal of one's ignorance. So the beginning of reading as a conscious effort to understand is an accurate perception of the line between what is intelligible and what is not." Take that into the shop to see where you are, where you need to go, and discover how you can get there. The author also stated, "we can learn only from our betters. We must know who they are and how to learn from them." Search for those who can help you grow in your ability, get to know them and discover how you can learn from them. In all again use discernment for there are many wolves out there disguised in sheep's clothing.

Take care my friends, and keep in touch

God bless
Mark Hynek