|
|
Sawdust
One of the highlights of 2011 was flying to Western Australia in November to visit a Canadian mate on a teacher exchange from Vancouver Island. When I lived in Canada, John taught me how to design and cut cabriole legs on a bandsaw as well as how to fletch an arrow. Back home John builds laminated compound bows with his senior students (a project that would not be allowed in Australian schools). The bows themselves are elegant poems in wood and fibreglass, while the jigs used to create the components are wonders of problem solving. At the beginning of the year I had sent John a Gifkins dovetail jig kit to experiment with and then take home to Nanaimo so he could spread the good word in Canada. Spending time in John’s Margaret River workshop was a real treat. I was very impressed with the salad tongs he had designed to exploit the intrinsic strength of 5mm-thick jarrah (his laminating experience had come to the fore) combined with the simple but elegant use of brazing rod as a pivot pin (take a look at “all about” on page 17 to see for yourself). The Gifkins jig had a real workout, lots of boxes built in local hardwoods like tuart, marri and karri and speckled jarrah, species that the eastern states just don’t see. John is a jig king. He had left his dado blades behind and so had to design a new system for cutting box pins and trenches. His simple solution was to build a set of cradles that slid across a router table. We will review John’s novel box pin cradles in Issue 92. The jarrah, tuart, karri and marri forests that thrive in the sandy soils south of Perth were just breathtaking. The tuart were stout fellows clad in bark like chainmail while the karri reached for the sky like snow gums on steroids – straight, tall and true, perfect for bridge building. The whole south-eastern coast of WA owes its origins to forestry. Busselton Wharf was the southern hemisphere’s longest wharf (1,850m) built to feed a hungry export market of jarrah sleepers in the boom years for railways across Europe, Russia, India and the US. Building a set of jarrah salad tongs back home in Sydney had a special significance now that I have ticked the box on a near perfect corner of Australia. Good woodworking! Chris Clark © Paragon Media Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Powered by Net Maintain. |
From
the editor's desk,