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1 February 2014 at 4:06 pm #26980
Just a quick update for whoever might be interested or is thinking about doing something similar:
I roughed out the staff and left it to dry in the garage. When it felt dry to the touch I took it inside to dry further (it’s cold and wet outside and my garage is detached from the house and unheated) and that’s when disaster struck. I have some very deep and rather wide cracks, all around knots which are plentiful in this piece of wood. This wasn’t going to be a nice and straight cane anyway so I decided to leave the cracks and just hope the wood is strong enough despite them. I made the mortise and tenon for the handle before shaping and I must admit it’s far from perfect. But it fits snugly, so combined with a wedge in the tenon it should be solid.
Lessons learned:
1: don’t get impatient when drying wood
2: buy a marking gauge and practice M&T’s20 January 2014 at 11:13 pm #26281Oh, about that band saw: I found this site while looking for a better way to get into woodworking rather than spending €6K+ on loud, bulky and dangerous machines, but from what I’m learning here a band saw might be the one stationary machine worth buying. But for now I’m still looking to expand my arsenal of important tools like handsaws, a spokeshave, a gouge etc. I did get an eclipse coping saw and some scrapers from amazon recently, and I really enjoyed shaping the scraper to the curve I wanted. Turns out a screwdriver works great as a burnisher.
Any progress on the staff will be reported here, ofcourse.20 January 2014 at 10:58 pm #26278Sorry to reply so late to this, I must have set my email notifications wrong for this forum.
Thanks a lot for the input, especially from Paul himself of course.
On a another -Dutch- forum I also got the advice to seal the ends with candle wax to dry the wood. I have graciously chosen to ignore such good advice and just followed my own stubborn mind. After cutting a few spoons from the green wood and drying the rough pieces before finishing them, I decided to use the same procedure for the cane. The one branch that was long enough for Paul’s hiking staff (I believe that’s what he called it) was very crooked and had a distinct bow shape to it. I split the wood to about four times the thickness I want and then axed, chiseled and planed it so that the bow was minimised as much as possible thinking that a slight curve is going to be a good thing while an overly pronounced curve would be cumbersome on the trail. I’m a proud veteran of Hadrian’s Wall and the Pennine Way, so I think I can follow my intuition when it comes to walking canes.
I sort of squared the piece of wood, without wasting time on removing any twist. The end result will be more or less round, so who cares about twist? The squaring does help in gauging the thickness and the overall shape. And I will want to have a flat reference face for the tenon of the handle of course. I a few weeks when everything is dry I’ll try joining the staff to the handle. My brother in law doesn’t know I’m making this for him, so if it all goes pear shaped I lose nothing and gain a bit of fire wood.
Here is a picture of the wood half way split and roughly shaped for drying:Attachments:
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