Crocs

I’ve been enjoying doing very little today. I sat on the deck for a while, played my ukulele, read the paper, and enjoyed an iced chai latte. Ah the life of the lazy. At one point I looked down at my feet. I had on one of my two pairs of Crocs. When Crocs first came out I thought they were the stupidest looking footwear I had ever seen and I didn’t think I’d be caught dead in them. As you can probably tell by the fact that I own two pairs, I’ve changed my mind on that one.

I don’t remember when I got my first pair nor do I remember what made me change my mind about them. I know I had them in 2009 because I remember wandering among the construction materials when we were building the shop and having one of the workers suggest that if I was going to be out there, I should probably put on a more protective pair of shoes. I know I took them on the Chilkoot Pass hike in 2013. They are light to carry; you can get them wet and they dry quickly; they feel good and have pretty good air circulation when you take your feet out of hiking boots at the end of the day.

I’m pretty sure I bought my second pair in 2014 because the first ones were starting to look a bit worse for wear. I was going on a solo trip to London, England, and I wanted a pair I could wear around airports that I would easily slip off and on while I was on the flight. Another reason for acquiring a second pair is the first pair I bought was baby blue. I suspect that was the only colour I could get that fit me. This time I got black ones. Much less likely to attract attention.

Since I got my first pair, crocs have accompanied me on all our camping trips, all our cycling trips, and all of our plane flights. My black pair came to Australia and NZ with me and they have been to the Arctic as many times as we have. I also use them at home. I keep one pair at the front door and one pair at the back door so I can slip into them if I need to make a quick trip out to grab the mail or put out the garbage. I even slip them on sometimes in the winter if the snow isn’t too deep.

Today, as I looked at my feet, I realized how grubby they were looking so I hit a few YouTube channels to see what the recommended way to clean them up was. I headed for the shop sink, magic eraser, toothbrush, and dish soap in hand. The black ones looked pretty good after just a wash and a brush. The blue ones took a bit more elbow grease. There was also a recommendation to use baking soda but I couldn’t be bothered with that. I remember the last time I cleaned them I gave them a coat of Armor All. While I was smart enough not to do the soles, I did do the insides and made a mental note not to do that again. It’s better to have your feet more or less stay put in your shoes than doing their own private version of sliding around a curling rink.

Both pairs of Crocs are now ready for action once again. I don’t know how much longer the blue ones will last. They have several cuts and abrasions and I had to replace one of the side buttons last year. Rather than consign them to the landfill though, I think I can cut them up and use them to pad various parts of ukuleles during construction. I’ll probably get another year or so out of them before that.

In the meantime the black ones will definitely come on holidays with me this year.

Impermanence

Yesterday was a day of mixed emotions. I found out about the death of someone I have known for over 40 years. She has been ill for a long time and her husband has cared for her unflinchingly. They both approached the end of her life with grace. Although life is finite, seeing a marriage of many happy decades broken by death is always sad.

Practice grooves and tools on my chaotic bench

I did what I often do when I’m in a pensive mood: I went into the shop. I have work to do on the ukulele this week but I didn’t do that. Instead I pursued my latest crazy idea. I want to build a ukulele using mostly hand tools. If you’re tired of me banging on, as the Brits say, about hand tools, you can stop reading and I won’t be offended. There are a whole bunch of reasons why I’m drawn increasingly to hand tool woodwork. It’s quiet. It’s simple. It’s meditative. It requires a specific set of skills and, in a strange way, it connects me to those woodworkers who have gone before me. I love to pick up a saw and know that my father-in-law used it, or that a delicate little spokeshave once rested in my grandfather’s hands. I have the ruler that my dad often used. I have tools from my uncles as well.

I’ve always been a slow worker. I was the kid in school who was never finished when the teacher told us to move onto something else. When a recipe says it will take half an hour to make it usually takes me an hour. What I like most about retirement is that I seldom have to rush anymore and most of the deadlines are of my own making.

In the shop yesterday I worked on figuring out how to get a flat bottom on a groove that doesn’t go all the way along a piece of wood. I need to do this to hold the ukulele’s saddle. The saddle is the piece of bone that sits in the bridge and helps transfer sound from the strings to the body of the instrument.

The white bit is the saddle

If the groove isn't flat on the bottom the saddle doesn’t touch the wood uniformly and sound won’t transfer well. It’s easy to set up a router table or a drill press to cut the groove to the proper depth and you can be done with it in a matter of seconds. However, routers make me nervous. The spinny bits go really fast and they are really sharp. I prefer to take my time with a ⅛ inch chisel and a wooden mallet. 

I did 6 practice grooves yesterday. By the time I cut the last one I was grinning like an idiot because I was having fun and getting better results each time. To get the bottom flat I tried a couple of different tools before I settled on a beading tool. I haven’t used it much and it is perfect for cleaning up the bottom of the grooves. I can set the depth, remove most of the waste with a chisel, and then clean up the bottom with the beading tool. If my stock is flat to start with, then the bottom of the groove ends up flat so the saddle makes contact all the way along. I’m pretty confident now that I can make the bridge for the current build using hand tools. It won’t be better than if I used machines but I will enjoy the process much more and the sense of satisfaction I get at the end will be greater.

There are still a number of things that I haven’t figured out how to do with hand tools and I’ll work on those one at a time. Sometimes I wish I had come upon woodworking earlier in my life, but now I have time and I don’t have to worry about making an income from woodworking. If you need to make a living from your craft, machines make sense. Once you set up a machine properly the results will be the same each time and the work goes much more quickly. Why not give repetitive jobs to a machine? No reason unless hand tools are more fun and less stressful. I know how fortunate I am to be able to make that choice. And, if I never manage an entire instrument with hand tools, that’s okay too. As long as it’s mostly fun and my skills keep improving I'll be happy.

Beading tool with 1/8" cutter