What I'm Up To

Squares and Beams

The past few weeks I've spent a lot of time working on a few of John Grade's newest projects. One which involves making and placing hundreds and hundreds of small wood squares. The other involves cutting up massive wood beams.

Here are some pictures of the squares after they have been taped on both sides and then individually hot glued onto the form. Once we finish placing all the squares the gap between each will be filled with resin

It takes quite awhile to place all the little squares. For the most part it's been done by me and one of John's other assistants, Helen. Here is a picture of Helen hard at work. She's a hot gluing machine. Don't mess with her, she'll hot glue your face off.

Last week I finished up with the process of cutting up the large wood frame pieces from the Wawona. With each beam we were usually able to get three pieces that were 4 inches thick, roughly 10 inches tall and a number of varying lengths. Some of the beams were taller then 5 feet which made them pretty hard to handle on the band saw. Here is a time lapse of myself pushing through some of the medium size beams.

Each beam was like a little surprise when we cut into it, some beams had some very unpleasant smells while others had some very pleasant ones. Every beam had amazing colors to it and they all varies slightly, no two beams were alike.  Here is a picture of one beam that was cut into three pieces.

You can see the great color and grain of the wood, as well as the trunnels that are throughout all of the beams. For now all the pieces I cut up are drying for the next few months but I will have more pictures later on of all the carving that will go into each of these sections. I'll also have more pictures every week of all the other projects I'm working on.