HTH Day 5

The final day of HTH was another good day. We essentially spent the day finishing our planing stop. We used air dried alder for it, and I think it was a bit too wet to work. This turned out to be true, as when I got home it had a crack in it. I'll either have to use it as a paperweight or patch it.

All in all it was an awesome class for the week. It was a much better experience overall than the class I took 2 years ago at the NW woodworking studio. I read on a WW forum in the past few months that classes are a great way to increase your knowledge and something like this makes me concur. I think that I'll definitely try to see what they offer next summer and repeat the experience.

Using a Veritas rabbet plane to make a groove. This is a very nice tool and now it's on the wish list. Unfortunately it's not cheap, as expected.

The planing stop completed.

At the end of the day Jim went through the process of saw sharpening. It was a great overview and I took a picture of his jigs to remind myself later which one is which.

HTH Day 4

Finished up the bench hook / shooting board today. Thank gosh - I needed a primitive shooting board, and now I have one!

HTH Day 3

Have not really been able to keep up with the blog, so high level stuff for the next 2 days:

Flattening a board to be used as our bench hook / shooting board.

End grain planing - very difficult to do unless you have a VERY sharp blade!

Got a chance to visit on Wednesday night with our friend Aaran and his cutie-pie daughter Callah (probably butchering her name).

HTH Day 2

Day 2 started up finishing up activities from day 1. We then proceeded to make winding sticks for the majority of the day. I've always wanted my own set of winding sticks, but have just never gotten around to making them of course. What a perfect opportunity - I guess I could have refused, but that would have been fairly idiotic.

We used planing skills the entire day. My arm was definitely tired. But jeeze, I've done more planing in the past 2 days then I've done in my entire life so far, so that's something. It helps that we've tuned them a bit (blade sharpening mostly). Was quite fun and relaxing.

Last night after finishing up some work (work-work, ugh) I headed over to this Japanese noodle place called Hanazono. OMFG!!! It was the BOMB! I had easily the best udon dish this side of Japan. I asked them if they would relocate to Portland. They would do killer business if they did!

Finishing up the straight edge from yesterday.

Much work done on the winding sticks. Making them trapezoidal.

Lots & lots & lots of shavings!

Almost done the winding sticks.

Special Udon bowl from Hanazano. Tempura, egg, shitake, chicken, fish sauce and lots of luv. Also, the tastiest sake I've had as well. YUM!!!!!

HTH Day 1

The first day of class is over, and it was well worth it. I'm very pleased about that! As expected, things got off to a somewhat slow start, but having no expectations resulted in exceeding them.

The school itself is in a neat old building on the old Fort Warden (spelling?) facility - it's kind of like a bunker. The room is spacious and it has really nice benches for everyone. The class size is 7, which is a really nice number (i.e., not too many). Jim, the instructor, is a super nice guy - very laid back but passionate about what he's teaching. They have a generous donation of tools from Lee Valley - I brought my own but it's nice to have these if you need them.

The day's activities involved making a straight edge - we started from rough lumber and crosscut and ripped the pieces. We did 'cheat' by using a bandsaw to rip them into 2 pieces, but that will be the only cheating we do today. But the main bonus for the day was face planing the stock - Jim helped tune up my 4-1/2 smoothing plane, and it was the first time I was able to succesfully face plane a board thanks to cambering the blade. The surface was super smooth. Some would refer to it as smooth-mo-'d'. Anyway, very nice to get such nice results!

Plenty of planes for all.

Everyone gets a plane!!! You get a plane, she gets a plane, you all get a plane!!!!!

My bench, my tools.

Nice and planed, to the smooth, to the d.

PT View

Here's the view from my room in Port Townsend. It's a cool little town, kinda small.

'Twas true what they wrote - last night at approximately 3 a.m. I was approached by a ghostly apparition - apparently one of the working gals that once lived here. She asked me if I knew someone named Ethel Lapinsky. I said no, and then she turned into a druken sailor and disappeared. Go figure...

The Ferry

The ferry ride from Seattle (actually, north of Seattle from Edmonds) over to Kingston, WA was kind of cool. There was a pirate boat and everything. They tried to board our vessel but we successfully repelled them with week old bologna slices. The battle was epic.

Heaven is just around the corner...

Well, this was the email I received this morning. It was announcing the start of my class next Monday, which is 'Handtool Heaven' at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. I'm looking forward to it - obviously the emphasis is solely using hand tools and I'm going to bring my small collection.

I'm staying at the interesting looking Palace Hotel in downtown Port Townsend. When you type in 'Palace Hotel Port Townsend' in Google the description appears that place is haunted. That, and it was a former brothel. So will I see the ghosts of former prostitutes? I sort of hope not.

Hopefully I'll post pictures of the class.

The desk(s) - continuing. Not much to show since it was well documented in the practice piece. So many other home improvement activities going on that it's tough to get down there these days.