in the shop and in the woods...

I am ready today to begin some materials preparation for making box guitars. The new book will be broken down in chapters the way a car is broken down for parts. Instead of making box guitars one at a time and leading the reader through steps over and over on each guitar, I'll make sides in a variety of forms, take varying approaches to the making of necks. I'll put frets in some and not others, and some will be electrified, others not. So today I'll resaw and plane tight grained cedar for tops but also offer the reader the option of Baltic Birch.

My readers might be interested in an article in Mother Earth News about The Science of Stacking Firewood. It even goes so far as to suggest there is something for the spirit in it as follows:

Uncle Will spent most winter forenoons working up next year's wood. This meant hauling logs out of the snow-filled woods with Gawd 'n' Dammit, the team of geriatric Belgian draft horses that he treated like house pets but worked hard enough that all three of them stayed trim and hard-muscled into a robust old age. He was more than content to leave the family and kids snug in a house heated with fuel he'd felled, bucked, split, and stacked with his own hands.

Few of us moderns have so tangible a reason to feel good about ourselves. This is why I prescribe a bucksaw, a maul, and set of splitting wedges along with a really big woodpile as therapy for the twitches, gout, flabby midsection, jangled nerves, or deep-seated feelings of alienation, powerlessness, inadequacy, and most other ills of modern society. A heap of fresh cordwood begging to be sawed, split, and stacked beats Valium any day.– Mother Earth News Oct/Nov 1994

I, too, have a jumble of firewood cut last summer that awaits the mall. I have the choice of renting a noisy gas driven hydraulic splitter and going through a back breaking day of grinding labor, or I can grab the monster maul and whack for an hour each day until done. Which would do my spirit the most good? With Valium the doctor would never suggest that you take the whole bottle at once.

Make, fix, create and offer to others the joy of learning likewise.