A couple of weeks ago I went to London to install a sculptural staircase bannister as part of my day job as a woodworker. While I was in the south-east I took a side trip to Reading and spent a wonderful few hours looking at and measuring hay rakes and rakemaking tools at the Museum of English Rural Life.
During my visit I was given permission to look through their full collection which isn’t open to the public and found this interesting snath from Wales. It looks like a cross between a curved English snath and Eastern European straight snath. Unfortunately there was no blade to go with it to show the fixing method and style of blade.
Does anyone have any more information about this style of scythe?
The week before last I went to London to install the steambent oak staircase bannister with Charlie Whinney. For me this was an important installation. I had made the former which we bent the oak around in the workshop so it was more satisfying than usual when everything fit beautifully into the space. I am the first person that Charlie has trusted to build such an important former.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the Epcot ball origami project? I took my half of the units over to Austria and left them with Christiane to assemble – she’s much more patient with these things that I am. I’m glad I did, it’s even more tricky than it looks. So far she’s put it together and taken it back apart 4 times working on getting the pattern correct. The current plan is to make the two halves separately and try to join them. I’ll let you know when it’s done, can’t wait to see it myself.
You can keep your satellite-guided combine harvesters and robotic milking parlours, according to “1001 Inventions that changed the world” edited by Jack Challoner “The scythe is often ranked among the world’s most significant advances in agricultural implements of the past thousand years.” It allowed workers to stand up, gain a power advantage through leverage and increase daily production from only 0.75 acre to over an acre. Even more than that, by the late 13th century the addition of a cradle doubled grain harvesting productivity and retained it’s position until the arrival of the mechanical reaper in the 1830’s.
For this particular job, we’ve developed a new form of bending compression strap which has made the work a lot easier.
Six pieces of oak are loaded into the steamer at a time which is kept running all day. The steamer features a faceplate with slots for the wood. These keep the boards spaced apart so the steam can circulate and also minimise the amount of steam lost when the door is opened. Many of the pieces were bent in two parts, first around a tight floor mounted former and then free bent around the former. Working like this requires a good team who can see what’s happening, communicate and work together well. The wood is cooling all the time so there is a time factor but it’s important to stay calm and work carefully so as to achieve the right shape and not break wood.
The base of the bannister features four pieces bent in an ‘S’ curve. Since both faces of the timber will now be on the outside of a curve this is a technically more challenging shape. These curves were achieved by steaming first in the steambox for the initial curve and then through use of a steambag, a sleeve of material which covers the area of the second bend and inflated with steam.
I’m just back from my week visiting Christiane in Austria. She lives in a small town in one of the national parks, a beautiful place ringed by majestic snow-capped mountains. As a woodworker, I’m always looking around me at trees and timber which in Austria make a wonderful sight. Almost all the houses are heated by a large tiled woodburner, no village is complete without a firewood merchant and everywhere are neatly stacked lengths of split hardwood. Equally impressive are the sawmills; on my first visit I could hardly believe the size of the timber yards with piles of logs 30ft or more high which took 10, 15 or even 20 seconds to pass by on the train.
All this comes from the well-managed forests, some of which we walked through during my stay. Beech, ash, birch and spruce dominate, all gun barrel straight and enough to make this green wood worker drool: cast your eye to any stand or firewood pile and there’s beautiful material for chairs, bowl carving, rakes, polelathe turning and anything else you can name.
Wonderful as it all sounds, I did feel there was something a little too managed and orderly about the woodland I saw – there was very little diversity of age or species in the stands and hardly any layer structure with smaller, scrub-like cover under the standards or ground flora. In short, not as messy as woodland in the UK; a reflection of our national characters?
As well as being relaxing, folding the small units for origami kusudama is addictive and it’s taken no time at all to fold these 120 pieces for the ‘epcot ball’. There’s still 15 to do but plenty of time when each one now takes just 90 secs.
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