There are no holidays

I remember while I was working full-time talking to my uncle about retirement. He said when you’re retired there are no holidays. At the time I thought he was nuts. As far as I could see, once you retired you had nothing but holidays. Today I understand what he was getting at. Don’t get me wrong, being retired is great and I wouldn’t go back to teaching for any amount of money. There is a weird thing that happens though. When I was teaching there were days, weeks, months that I looked forward to with unbridled excitement. The weekend for example.  At various times during my career I could hardly wait for the weekend so I could go cross-country skiing, hiking, cycling, canoeing, camping or running. It didn’t matter that I would show up Monday morning exhausted and drag my sorry butt through the rest of the week before being ready to do it all again. I do very few of those things anymore and, if I did, I could do them pretty much any day of the week.

There is a great deal of freedom to that and there is also an ordinariness that becomes pervasive. Weekends become another part of the routine and thereby, nothing special. I enjoy the traveling we are able to do now, but I don’t look forward to it the way I did when it meant a complete break with from the intensity of my work life. Part of the fun of travel when I was working was doing the detailed planning for months in advance, pouring over topo maps for cycling trips and imagining what the holiday would be like. The planning itself was a temporary escape, a mini-holiday. Today we tend to like others to do the organizing.  We show up and they take care of the rest. People often ask me where we are going or if we are going to visit a particular place. Usually I can’t answer that because having read over the itinerary, I put it on the back burner until we are a few days from leaving. I wonder if I’m getting jaded and lazy because I don’t look forward to anything with the enthusiasm I did when I was teaching.

Perhaps it’s a lack of contrast that makes the difference. I’m not usually exhausted so I don’t look forward as much to catching up on sleep. I have a lot more freedom to do what I want so I don’t look forward as much to doing what I want. I still have commitments and groceries need to be bought and laundry needs to get done but when I was working, I had to do those things in addition to meeting the demands of teaching. Now there is nothing particularly special about spending an hour or so watching YouTube videos. There are more productive things I could be doing but whether something gets done today or tomorrow is not usually a matter of consequence.

On my way home from an appointment today I stopped in at MEC.  I didn’t need anything, but I hadn’t been for a while and I thought it would be amusing to look around. What I thought about as I looked at the cycling, hiking, canoeing and camping gear was the sense of anticipation looking at gear used to bring me. It’s not about the latest piece of gear.  It’s about the exciting possibilities represented by the gear. It’s tempting to buy just one more little thing. I mostly resisted temptation. I did come home with a couple of closed-cell foam pads that we can use to sit on the front steps when we want to drink coffee and tea outside in the evening. We’ve used them twice today.  They are much more comfortable than the concrete steps and we can also use them on picnic tables when we travel in the van. Pretty tame stuff in comparison to what we used to do for fun.

I wouldn’t go back in time to when I worked full-time and along with that is the occasional nostalgic retreat to the days when there were so many exciting adventures waiting just over the horizon. Interesting how, as we age, the world around us changes and the way we see that world changes even more.

This is not a ukulele post

Spoon butter cooling

Since I retired I've been participating in the Calgary Retired Teachers' Art Show. It's not a way to make a ton of cash but it's nice spend a day chatting with like-minded folks. There are always lots of great paintings and sometimes there are ceramics and jewelry as well as my offerings of wooden objects.

For a number of years I've brought wooden boxes and they haven't sold terribly well. The problem with an art show by retired teachers is that our friends are pretty much the same age as we are and, while they come to support us, many of them are trying to downsize rather than acquire more stuff. I don't go with the idea of making money and there's no fee for a table or easel. The Calgary Retired Teachers' Association takes a reasonable cut of what we sell. If I don't sell anything, I don't pay anything.

This year I decided not to take any boxes. Instead, I branched out with some photographs printed on metal and some photo cards. In terms of woodwork, I offered only kitchen tools, spoons of different sizes and shapes and kitchen multi-tools. To my great delight I sold three photographs, eleven kitchen tools and a few photo cards.

One of the most frequent questions I get when I sell kitchen tools is how to take care of them. My usual answer is to hand wash them; don't soak them, and give them a rub with mineral oil every once in a while. Even though mineral oil can be found in just about any pharmacy and it's relatively inexpensive, people seem reluctant to use it. I know many prefer to use olive oil and have had no problem with it although I understand it can go rancid. After answering the question a number of times on the weekend and getting the now familiar hesitation, I decided it was time to get off my butt and make my own wood conditioner. It's not difficult and all the recipes on the net are about the same. Mineral oil is easy to find and I turned to Amazon for bees wax and two ounce jars. One recipe I read also suggested adding a few drops of lemon oil to make it smell nice.

Richard filling the jars

Tonight I undertook the project. I found a jar with a wide mouth that I've been saving for something, I don't know what but it was perfect for this project. I poured bees wax and mineral oil into the jar and heated it in a pot of water regulating the heat and stirring it with a chopstick, wooden of course. I didn't keep track of how long it took but it wasn't a huge job. When the ingredients were all nicely melted together I took it off the heat. At that point Richard came into the kitchen and offered to help so he filled the jars using a soup ladle. It wasn't a particularly messy process and the ladle wiped clean with a paper towel. We wiped as much as we could out of the big jar with our fingers and put it on various cutting boards and utensils. The big jar will be reserved for making spoon butter so we didn't need to clean all the butter out of it. We'll let the boards and saute tools sit over night and I'll buff them in the morning.

Cooled spoon butter and a couple of happy kitchen tools

I'll do some tweaking to the next batch. This first one doesn't have much scent. The beeswax I bought seems to have no smell and I didn't add enough lemon oil to give it that hint of citrus. Despite that, I think it will work very well and I intend to keep a jar in the kitchen so that whenever the tools start to look a little dull I can give them a treatment. Because it's the consistency of Greek yogurt, it's easier to apply than liquid mineral oil. As a bonus, my rough, scratchy hands feel fairly smooth tonight.

The next time someone asks me how to take care of a newly-purchased kitchen tool I can tell them that I have the very thing for them at a nominal cost.

More rosette screw-ups, or rather, learning opportunities

Top #1 before I sanded through the abalone

Well if it seems these days I'm obsessed with ukulele building I am. I've semi-abandoned the original top I was working on for the concert. Last week I built another rosette and glued the plates together for the new top. We talked about what I could do with the top #1. Options range from continuing to putter away at it at a pace that doesn't affect the rest of the build, to making a box from it, to saving the rosette and using the rest of the top for bridge plates. Top #1 still sounds really good so I'm loathe to give up on it just yet. I may have to eventually but for now I'm continuing to work on it - in my spare time.

One possibility is to fill the gaps with black epoxy. I did that. I'm not the neatest person when using epoxy. No, let's rephrase that: every time I mix up epoxy I make one hell of a mess, sometimes of myself, sometimes of what I'm gluing and sometimes of both. When I used the black epoxy I discovered that some of the walls of the channel for the rosette weren't as clean as they could have been and the black seeped into the end grain leaving splotches. Okay, I can fix that. Cut another circle to go inside the original one and inlay that. Make a pattern on the outside and inlay pieces to cover up the splotches there. It took a while and I got both of those things done. I thought it looked pretty good.

Ready to replace a piece of abalone @ 2:00
Pieces @ 7:00, 9:00 and 11:00 need replacing

The next step is to sand it flat. Oops. It's now flat but I've sanded right through some of the abalone and the veneer substrate is showing. Okay, I can fix that. Use a very small chisel to dig out the abalone where it's too thin. Cut new pieces and replace them. Got one section done and glued in and guess what? It's too low so I won't be able to sand down to it. I could take those pieces out and try again, first putting down some epoxy to raise the bottom of the channel. I think that would work. Since I have four other sections to replace, I'll hold off on that decision. While I'm at it I might as well replace the wooden ring I put on the inside because it is too thin and I've sanded down to the black splotches I was trying to cover up. I'll use thicker wood and I think it would look better if I used the same wood for the inside ring as I did for the outside detail.

There's actually quite a bit of good news in all of this. I haven't gone all the way through the top. Knock wood. Also I'm getting much more accurate with the fine chisels, knives and the jeweller's saw. The other woodworking I've been doing is great training for sneaking up on a fit although I have to adapt to different tools to do it. I know, for many of you, this will only confirm that I need my head read but I'm enjoying the challenge of trying to salvage this top. If I can salvage it I guess I'll have to build a ukulele around it and if I can't it will become a box, sound hole doughnuts or bridge plates. Or, maybe I'll just hang it up with the other failed top I have to remind me of how far I've come and how far I have yet to go.

Rosette for top #2

Tools of the trade, pencil for scale

The other rosette for top #2 looks really messy but it's flat on the back and I'm not going to clean up any of the goop on the front until I get it inlaid into the top. I hope when I come to sand that one flush with the top I'll have enough material so I don't go right through the abalone. If I do I get to practice some more.

Stay tuned.

A quick update on rosettes

Abalone and ebony rosette for Richard's ukulele

It's downright weird what I remember from science courses in high school. I always liked chemistry better than physics (too much math involved in physics.) One of the things that has stuck in my brain is the idea of a rate-determining step in a chemical reaction. As I understand it, the reaction can't go faster than the slowest bit of it. In terms of where I am in the ukulele building process the rosette is my rate-determining step. I need to get the rosette inlaid into the top before I can put the top on the building form and start bracing it. Once the braces are in then I can bend the sides and attach the sides to the top.

The top is pretty thin around 2mm. The reason I know that is that I measured it with my digital calliper which happened to be set to metric and I saw no need to change the units to imperial although that's what I normally use. With the same handy device I measured the rosette at its thinnest point .97mm. That means I have very little room for error or I'm going to have a hole in the top other than the sound hole which is supposed to be there. It's a good thing I like to putter along because this particular exercise has required quite a lot of puttering. I started Tuesday by drawing around the rosette with an X-acto knife and then deepening the line. When I first took the rosette off the top I could hardly see the line. Not deep enough so I carefully put the rosette back in place. Jake gave me the tip of putting 4 tiny dabs of glue on the rosette so it wouldn't move around while I was trying to scribe a line around it. That worked well and I was able to get the glue off when I picked up the rosette and I was also able to get the rosette back in exactly the same place with 4 more tiny dabs of glue for the second round of scribing. Then I removed the rosette and went at it again, this time using the cut lines to guide the knife going slowly and gently. Many light passes later I had a pretty good outline. Then I began to remove a bit of the waste up to the cut lines with a chisels.

Router plane, chisels, X-acto knife, digital calliper

I'm not sure how long that took me but I was pretty much cross-eyed by the time I was ready to come home. I carried on with that process yesterday and, once I had the shoulders delineated, I began to remove wood from the middle of the channel. I still had to be careful because it would have been easy enough to push a little too hard and tear the grain. That did happen in one spot but I think I know
how to fix it. I used both my chisels and my router plane for this job. To get the depth of the cut I wanted with the router plane I used feeler gauges, thin bits of metal graduated in thousands of an inch. I didn't need to worry about what the numbers said because I put combinations of the metal leaves beside the top until they were about half way up and then set the cutter accordingly.

When I'm doing work like this and it's going well I'm amazed by the effectiveness of some of the tools I use and I feel a real fondness for them. I experienced that as I worked with the router plane. How many people before me have used a tool like this to build instruments and furniture? How many people has it taken over the years to perfect the design? And, how many people in this age of CNC routers are turning back to hand tools simply for the delight of creating something with only hands and a sharp blade? I know it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done. The downside is that I find it pretty hard on my arthritic thumbs.

Not deep enough yet

Every once in a while I checked to see how thin I was making the top and whether or not the rosette fit into the cavity. I got the outline done pretty well and the rosette slipped in without too much trouble. Force it in an it's likely to break ... again. I think the number of times I've broken it, either on purpose to fix or redo something or accidentally stands at about 7. There was too much of it sticking up though. In woodwork-speak it was too 'proud.' The only choice was to do some more careful excavating, check the fit and repeat. The hardest part was trying to keep the walls of the cavity perpendicular and smooth. I resorted to using the chisel to pare down the walls because the chisel, unlike the knife has a flat back so it will go straight down the wall as long as I hold it straight. The knife has a V point so you get a sloped wall.

Lampshade anyone?

I thought it might be interesting to hold the top up to the light so see how thin it was getting. In one spot it was really thin and I put an X in pencil there I wouldn't take off any more material. Bit by bit I lowered the floor of the channel until I completely lost my nerve. There are no holes in the top but it sure is thin and I'm not prepared to try to get it any thinner. The rosette is still proud and I hope there is enough thickness to it that when I sand it down to make it level with the top I won't sand through it. The process can be a nerve-wracking and I didn't exactly pick an easy rosette to start on. Nonetheless, it's absolutely engaging work and, outside of the nervous-making quality of it, I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. Today I glue the rosette into the top. I can already think of a number of other possible rosette designs and I can't wait to try some of them out. I guess I'll just have to keep building instruments so I have an excuse to make rosettes. In the meantime I can get on with the next steps in building the two instruments I already have on the go. Stay tuned.