wood and tools and stuff.
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Tim gave me some beautiful woodworking tools for my Christmas present and I finally needed the hacksaw today, not for anything big, but just to cut some timber to make a window box support. I’m already getting really excited about the plants that will grow on my window sill, but I’m also pretty excited to be using the tools.
I’ve been tardy in documenting the little boat that Tim and I built over the beginning of this year. It was an act of love and learning and freezing to build a boat in the middle of an Austrian winter. One of the things that I learnt from the experience is that I love working with wood.
The boat that we built is an 8 foot punt and she’s mainly waterproofed building plywood and cheap spruce and pine framing timbers. But still, even a boat made out of wood reinforced plastic is officially a wooden boat and I learnt many things when I was building her: How to use a jigsaw, an industrial belt sander, how to use every clamping device in a work shop, how to loft boat designs from a tiny sketch onto full sized timbers and most importantly how not to panic when something goes wrong. I already knew how important tea drinking was, but I’m even more sold on tea as both a warming and meditative device to help you approach a difficult design challenge. It wasn’t until I was almost finished with the project that I realised I was most of the way to ticking item 23 off my list of 100 things to learn.
A couple of weeks ago Stubby visited Berlin and while we were out with his friend Lars I saw a dilapidated dining table on the street. There’s a lot of curbside furniture in Kreuzberg, but mostly it’s chipboard furniture that has seen better days. This table however, had also seen better days, but underneath the cracks and poorly applied paint, the sad old table was solid wood and a lovely shape.
As a result of working on the punt, I felt confident enough to assess the work involved in the repairing the table. There’s some glueing and screwing to be done and I have to repair the crack across the top of the table before it can bear the label of eating or work “surface”. And that’s before getting to the prettifying stage of sanding and sealing. Still, the table showed promise so I made Stubby and Lars help carry the table at least a couple of kilometres back to my flat.
I’ve got a lot of work to do on the table, but what I’ve done so far just reminded me of the Time’s Up workshop and boat building with Tim, of my Dad and the projects he’s worked on. Most of all it started me thinking about all the wooden projects I’ll work on in the future too. Tables, yurts, at least one more boat – really, it’s so exciting!