Popular Woodworking 2008-06 № 169, страница 57

Great Woodshops -

BY JEFF SKIVER

Woodworking With a Mission

Tillers International teaches sustainable skills to help improve lives.

M.

I ost woodworking classes start the same way - with the students introducing themselves and telling about their backgrounds and interests. The most recent class I attended, at Tillers International, was dif-

alongside a couple big fellows named Marco and Polo.

I arrived on Friday afternoon, well before the 5 p.m. start ofthe class, so I joined Marco and Polo and a few other staff members as

they gathered wood for the weekend-long Windsor Tall Stool class.

Throughout my life, lumber always seemed to fall into two overly simplified groups. Before I became a woodworker, the two ty pesoflum-berwere 2x4sand plywood. Afterl discovered woodworking, I tended to think of hardwoods and softwoods. Later, I found wood could be

kiln-dried or air-dried. Then, just four hours before the class officially started at Tillers, 1 discovered something that should have been obvious: Lumber comes from trees.

As 1 watched, Christian Guerrero drove

Marco and Polo (they're oxen, you see) into the woods where they picked up their prize. As they returned dragging a log of cherry behind them over the snow-covered ground, 1 struggled to visualize the finished Windsor tall stools that were hiding under the bark.

Then, outside the woodshop, as John Sarge used a chainsaw to segment the tree into the lengths that instructor Dave Abeel requested, I struggled with the concept of a log becoming usable furniture without spending either years as rough-cut boards air drying in stickered piles - or at least a few days in a kiln. However, as I helped wheel the cut logs into the shop, time started to roll back, as I began a weekend where 1 discovered tools and techniques that although new to me, date back to the foundation of woodworking.

Straight from the source. Christian Guerrero drives Marco and Polo back to the woodshop from the wood source - the forest. Guerrero, from Ecuador, is completing an internship at Tillers International on harnessing animal power.

A Simple Machine

Fittingly, it started with a wedge, one of man's original six simple machines. Abeel and his assistant, Jim Crammond, said the key to splitting logs is to divide the mass. So with this thought in mind, 1 began driving the wedge into the end grain of a cherry log along a line that went directly through the pith (the center of the tree). Feeling like John Henry, I swung the sledgehammer, driving the wedge deeper into the frozen log, eventually ending up with two halves. To divide the mass of each half, the

wedge was placed and driven again and again until the log was quartered. Each quarter was large enough to provide blanks for three legs. This was done by splitting off the pointed front of each pie piece, then dividing the remaining section in two. For these smaller divisions it was possible to use a froe and a large mallet to separate the log quarters.

The quickly learned lesson of turning a tree into workable stock is to always use the coarsest tool possible. A sledgehammer and wedge are used for splitting. A froe and mallet

12 ■ Popular Woodworking June 2008