Resawing Logs to Lumber

Even in a modest workshop like mine, getting valuable lumber from downed trees is possible.

Let's say a tree comes down in a storm, and it is one of your favorite trees. As a woodworker, I've always wanted to make something special from that tree. Well, that happened. I rent workshop space in a group of buildings that, at one time, was the General Mills research and development complex (read about us in an online article linked here). Within is a secluded outdoor space we call the grotto. Two years ago, several hackberry trees had to be taken down. Because the grotto is a special place to me, I saved some smaller logs before they went into the chipper, hoping to resaw them into boards later on.

After considering several methods for resawing logs, I bought a Grizzly Industrial bandsaw sled this past summer. I used my 12" bandsaw with a Timber Wolf 3/8" 4TPI blade to resaw the logs into boards approximately 3/8" to 1/2" thick, breaking two blades in the process by tasking the bandsaw beyond their limit.

Since the grotto is a special place, I'd like to use the wood for something meaningful.

The Pluralist Pods Get Roofs

Autodesk Fusion renderings effectively communicate design assemblies and subassembly relationships.

If you can reasonably visualize something you want to make, you create dimensioned drawings and build it. If you don't understand, you prototype and iterate until you do. After deciding to emphasize object design and make something out of the ordinary, I extensively used renderings to prototype my vintage audio high-frequency driver pods before I began building them.

I found something unforseen while doing so. Renderings allowed me to understand construction processes without prototyping them in the workshop, saving time and the scarce lumber I had allocated to the project.

I also found that rendered subassemblies like the one included here on the right help me better understand their relationship to the main assembly, where I can divide a somewhat complex project into a series of subassembly builds.

The completed high-frequency driver pods with their angled roofs are shown in the photos here. I built the pods from scrap wood I had lying around. Red oak, jatoba, and mahogany were included.

The roof planks are trapezoidal in cross-section and alternate up-down with even spacing between them. I used black oxide screws to fasten everything together for an industrial look. Fusion provides added benefits, such as access to the McMaster-Carr catalog and its essential hardware components.

If you're interested in the finer points of speaker design, the center spacing between drivers should be no greater than the wavelength of the crossover frequency.

The Pluralists Get Pods

So they say blog posts are a thing of the past. My last post here was eight years ago. I used Instagram posts when I wanted to tell the story of some recently completed project work. It didn't take long to discover that Instagram was not the place to tell stories. I suddenly realized that this almost forgotten blog was. So let me say welcome back.

Nowadays, there is quite an interest in vintage audio. I became interested in it last spring when I bought a decades-old Harman Kardon receiver that closely resembled one I used to own. I designed and built a pair of small full-range speakers long ago and hooked them up to the Harman Kardon. Paired with the receiver, they absolutely sounded vintage.

 

Full-range speakers are known to have a problem. They extend mid-range frequencies. So, to correct the problem with mine, I made the speakers into bass units, added high-frequency drivers, and used off-the-shelf 2-way second-order crossover networks.

 

The high-frequency drivers needed small cabinets, which I designed and called pods. Their design was initially uncomplicated - too much so - so I reasoned that the pods created a design opportunity.

 

 

Work Life Tools

I purchased a book at the Weisman Art Museum some time ago titled Work, Life, Tools. by Milton Glasser. The book takes a look at the essential tools that a number of individuals use to accomplish daily tasks, and why they consider one special tool to be more important than any other in their daily lives and work.

Some of the tools that people identify with as most important to them are simple objects, and yet for some reason, that simple tool resonates with them in the way they use it to accomplish a particular task. The book caught my attention because there are things I build that stand out among the rest, and resonate beyond the simple tasks they were designed to accomplish. After some time, those projects are beginning to speak a common language, a philosophy that focuses on a list of well defined and essential aspects required of an object no matter what that object is used for, and then creatively interpreted through a specific design. Let me describe three very different projects in some detail that demonstrate this.


A BASIC KITCHEN CABINET

I built this cabinet during my early experience in woodworking to house kitchen plates and utensils during a time when I lived in a small studio apartment. The cabinet not only provides storage for kitchen items, but has casters so it can be positioned where needed while using the black Formica top as additional work space. The cabinet is sectioned into a space for larger plates and coffee cups. Utensils have their own drawer, and a separate space in front houses glassware and bowls. The unique design of the cabinet with its multiple compartments still makes it a favorite among friends. The cabinet has been in many places with me since I built it.

A ONE MANUAL CABINET PIPE ORGAN

Pipe organ building is still where I consider my best work is found. I built a total of three one-manual mechanical action pipe organs as an independent builder. One of them is pictured here. They each have no more than five voices, yet all provide exceptional function beyond any perceived limitation because those voices are vertically integrated in such a way that renders a surprising number of individual tonal possibilities. The organs of baroque southern Germany and France provide me with the conceptual basis for tonal design upon which tonal diversity is further generated in such small instruments. An organ built in this way does not have to dominate a musical setting, but rather contribute where most effective either alone or in combination with other instruments or voices.

A REAR DERAILLEUR EQUIPPED TRACK FRAME BUILT BICYCLE

When I bicycle ride in the city, I find that I almost never shift between the available front gears. So when I decided to build my own bike, I began with a light and agile single speed track frame, and added the necessary components to make it an urban commuter with a nine speed, rear derailleur only drivetrain. Using a mountain bike cassette rather than one intended for a road bike, I produced enough variability in gear ratio for almost any pedaling situation encountered with only one chainring and no derailleur up front. I built what a professional bike builder called my urban machine. The visceral experience of performance and simplicity are most important. Getting from one place to another is secondary.



SUMMARY

My design philosophy begins with some need expressed in the form of requirements that define an object in terms of its essential elements. I embrace disruptive change, and so my answer to a design problem is to often push beyond the expected. My work strives to maintain its focus on essential elements designed around an innovative solution which then produces an object that invites broader interaction between an individual using that object and the object itself. An individual who has his or her imagination further stimulated by the creative design of an object will further connect with that object as a result. That object becomes his or her favorite tool for work or life.

Storytelling

Good evening blog readers. Pipe organ building has been calling me back to it on and off for the past three years. I think that the time is right to seriously put some serious effort into exploring the possibility of building another instrument again.

To that end, I have produced a website for my workshop that focuses on the connection between my work as a studio woodworker and pipe organ builder. The website needs more work before it goes live, but one aspect that it will feature that is new to me is the concept of storytelling which puts my work in a sort of autobiographical context.

I can tell you this is not easy, but I think that I tell my story in a succinct way through a relatively new Microsoft app called Sway. This tool allows me to put my workshop photos together with text in a way that remarkably lets me tell the story of my work history online. I created three Sway stories that autobiographically tell the story of how I came full circle with regard to the possibility of pursuing cabinet organ building as a now part-time avocation.

Please take a look at the following, and let me know what you think. This is new for me. Posting photos is easy. Telling the stories behind them when it involves your thoughts and experiences is a bit more difficult.

- as a pipe organ builder with a music and engineering background.

- as a studio woodworker with a technology and organ building background.

- as a pipe organ builder with a studio woodworking background.

The Obsession with Metrics

This photo makes no sense to most people, although it stands as one of my favorites. I happened to have a camera with me one day that I inherited from my dad when I stopped by this local grocery store.

The camera was an older Nikon E5000. I had some work done to it before I could use it. I think it was one of the first sort of affordable Nikon digital cameras. It was only a 5 megapixel camera, yet the optics proved its value as this photo demonstrates. The camera was really on its last legs before I took possession, but some great photos still came out of it. I think this is one of them.

To me, this proves that numbers don't always count as 5 megapixels is small standards by even most newer cell phones today. I think I said something like that before. This camera because of its lens and sensor made the photos it took stand out with more expression, more human in the way it could photograph everyday images.

This photo says a lot. It says that simple numbers are not always most important.

Surrogates

I would use the term surrogate to describe some of what I design and build. These projects function as a surrogate or stand-in for concepts and methods I want to explore before applying them to projects that really matter.

The molding profiles I used to form up this cabinet top section are surrogates where the cabinet project itself was a surrogate design for an organ case architecture concept I wanted to develop. I have a number of profile cutters that are sold as colonial period molding router bits. A person will usually run a short length of profiled molding from scrap stock to see how that particular shape will look. I wanted to get a feel for how these period profiles could combine to form the more complex shape of a historically referenced cornice, so I created this cabinet top section to experiment with that some. The design profiles can also be applied to new design work now that they are modeled in computer solids, a none too trivial task in and of itself.

This particular top section design is fairly complex, and might not be realistically used in a real project, although organ case trim of a typical northern European Baroque pipe organ was similarly complex including the varied use of color to set off each different layer of trim.

This certainly gives a better impression of what is possible with respect to the use of combined profiles, and how I might attempt to successfully combine diverse profiles in a commissioned project to produce just the right effect.