BobSmalser

Wonderful gift and nice job, Jake.

http://www.woodweb.com/KnowledgeBase/WDKBWoodDoctor.html

My wife is left-handed and had zero trouble living over there for the better part of a decade. Allah is very understanding.

The Gulfies still build them in traditional yards all up and down the coast. The yard in Kuwait was out my back door and we made friends over there among the Kuwaiti, Indian and Iranian shipwrights, who all still used traditional tools...including bow drills. Teak carvel planks on teak and mango frames from India caulked with coir from coconut husks, payed with a shark oil and whiting slurry also used in a thinner mix to coat the hull below the waterline where it is not coppered. These boats have dead flat timber keels and carry stabilizing poles aboard to ground out at low tide where the hull needs regular maintenance in those warm, worm-infested waters. You can see the whiting resdiue on the hulls below and also bituminous tar which is a later development used pretty much interchangeably. The brown seam compound you see is fresh coir caulking....not compound. They had a 26-foot hull that was commissioned but never rigged or delivered as GWI intervened. I wanted to bring back home and coulda got it for a song but then me and the engineers did a good measurement and weight estimate...those 2"-thick teak planks and 6" X 6" teak frames were a bit heavy for my household goods allowance. I'da had to have done a container shipment...5 grand to New York then another couple grand to haul it west...too spendy. See the square box under the stern deck extension on the port side? That's the traditional head. http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/Front_Page_Photos/December/12_20_03_hires.jpg

Thanks. Yes, they do..."dhow" is a western corruption lumping dozens of traditional individual designs into one category. But the pic I posted from the roundabout next to the Indian Ocean south of Muscat is indeed the vessel of which you speak and my friend crewed.

At the end of each year's Dubai-Muscat yacht race, the Sultan of Oman's finish line celebration includes a traditional Dhow race. http://www.bboman.com/marina/regatta/2002results.htm The years I did it he made it amusing by asking for three crews...one American, one British, and one Omani. Each crew had two weeks to repair, rig and sail the 35' "Barkas" out of the naval museum's yard. Problem...you can imagine how dried out those thick teak planks were from 11 mo, 2 weeks in the Gulf sun, eh? Usually we could only get two of the boats functional in time to race, and two crews would combine. As the sail had to be lashed to the yard with traditional braided coir, fids and mallets...a 3-5 hour job...we would also extend the yard if necessary with poles and lashings...one had to guess the wind the day before...sometimes with disastrous results. Between sinking a boat from a sprung plank in 5 fathoms and recovering it....the resident Australian marine archaeologist separating his shoulder from a crashing yard during a dismasting...to having the strongest crewman dedicated to the one manual and traditionally-constructed pump...to caulking 2" thick carvel planks of flint-hard teak with additional coir side by side with a seafaring Omani who's grandfather had been a real pirate...it was a rich experience. The pirate's grandson...a greybeard naval warrant who crewed Oman's national Dhow on it's motorless China voyage in his youth...was the crew captain and helmsman the year the American and Omani crews had to combine. My usual position was yard man because of relative size and strength...the yard has a lanyard used to pull up to 200lbs of sail and yard down from the short end to reverse the yard and invert the sail during tacks and jibes. The British boat, crewed not by residents familiar with that part of the world but by a visiting warship crew of young sailors, made a better sail choice the day before and was a boat length ahead...as our tacks crossed my Omani captain ordered we ram the British boat, hailed them with his intentions and stated we would board, kill and eat them....I knew he was joking...and we missed in our attempt to ram (yes, he really tried to hit them)... (There was precedent for the threat that all concerned were well aware of...in 1905 or so a British vessel full of colonials shipwrecked on Masirah Island where the locals did kill and eat them...musta been a bad year for fishing...and the Sultan then banished Masirah inhabitants from any improvements done to their way of life. When I left there in 1998, Masirah remained a very primitive place...and a large stone monument remains commemorating Britain's casualties.) ...but the British youngsters strangely kept their distance from us later at the firelight feast of baby goat, baby camel and saffron rice. Couldn't find a Barka...this is the dhow that sailed to China: PS. Baby camel tastes a bit like veal...and baby goat like lamb with a lighter flavor. A traditional feast is a pit roast of baby camel with a baby goat inside...it with a chicken inside...the chicken with an egg inside....done for 24 hours in a sand pit covered with tarps and seaweed or more sand. The seaweed makes for a great clambake taste. The meat laid out on a bed of saffron bismante rice on a 4'X 3' platter, messmates sitting crosslegged around the platter eating with only your right hand. Large fingerbowls and towels before and after eating, the entry courses often being fresh dates (more like coconut than dried dates), green salad and sometimes poached fish. Meal finished off with a flan made from camel's milk for desert and gahwah coffee roasted in a copper pan over the fire, ground in a mortar and pestle, and brewed in a copper pot with moss used as a filter as it is poured. A great time once your train your knees to sit like that for the two hours this all takes. PPS...and the honored guests get to eat the eyeballs of the critters...raw. An Omani friend of mine was commander of their Air Force and a city boy not from the sticks where this is routinely done. He would delight in presenting the chilled eyeball tray to visiting dignitaries...taking one first and popping it into his mouth with delight...then watching his guests squirm as they chewed uncomfortably for several minutes on their (tough) eyeballs....what his guests never knew... ....was that Muhammed Mafoud's "eyeball" he ate with so much relish was actually a peeled grape.

Drove the household over the mountain today eight miles to Belfair Valley to join other family, friends and neighbors in saying farewell to a dear family friend. Toni died unexpectedly, prematurely, and instantly of a heart attack after her daily morning walk early last week. She was 57

Silva's obviously the boss...the brains of the outfit who can do anything well. Norm is a set-in-his-ways finish carpenter...a good one...trim, kitchen cabinets and other face-frame builtins done at a commercial pace...trying to adapt fine furniture joinery to finish-carpenter techniques. The results are amusing...especially when the airnailer gets fired up to drive 6 brads (usually where screws woulda been more appropriate). I get the impression Norm never really learned how to cut joints and is uncomfortable with it.

Not exactly the plane iron, but I strop them on the 8" wheel with KnifeMaker's Green Rouge Note the hair above the edge bevel:

:wink: This all got started here: http://www.forums.woodnet.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=handtools&Number=722851&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1 and here: http://www.forums.woodnet.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB8&Number=730143&Forum=All_Forums&Words=flatten%20sole&Match=And&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=729856&Search=true#Post730143 Common themes today on all the woodworking sites I'm new to where newbies are being shilled by the Norms of the world to buy 200-dollar block planes they don't need or doodads counterproductive to what they are trying to do. This appears what my craft has come to since I stopped taking Fine Woodworking 10 years ago... old FWW these days is no different than Norm now, either. Things don't change much...the typical beginning woodworker today is a 30-year-old with new family and the nesting instinct who needs some furniture...often a cradle for the first baby....and has no dough at all to waste. That young family does not need pockethole jigs, 300-dollar fancy tablesaw fences, 150-dollar scrub planes, 200-dollar circular waterstone sharpening mills, biscuit joiners, mortising machines or all the other gizmos either frivolous or designed for production work making kitchen cabinets that will be torn out and discarded in 30 years. Since my shock at the blatant consumerist thrust of these "Fine Woodworking" forums of a month or so ago I've made myself a mental note that I can set a kid up from scratch in a shop sufficient to win juried furniture shows for under a thousand five hundred bucks...buying a mix of Ebay for rehab, used Delta and the odd new Grizzly piece. Not that Norm and I wouldn't be great friends if we were next-door neighbors...but on rainy days this winter I'll spend some time as... ...Bob The Anti-Norm After all....when the kids are bigger and their wallets are fatter...they will often turn to boatbuilding...hopefully after I help teach them to learn to cut enuf joints to get by and use drywall screws for drywall, where they belong.

You can get a headstart, Bill...lotsa material out there....but little of it geared to the newbie 30-year-old with new family who needs furniture and is subject to listen to heros on TV and in magazines whose real purpose in life is to sell tools and books...most of those tools that kid'd be much better off without. That may not be you, but that's my target...and my message is a bit different. http://www.woodcentral.com/cgi-bin/readarticle.pl?dir=handtools&file=articles_117.shtml http://www.sover.net/~nichael/nlc-wood/stanref-num.html http://www.woodcentral.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl http://www.hyperkitten.com/tools/stanley_bench_plane/ http://users.ev1.net/~gmuster/tool_restoration.htm http://www.vintagesaws.com/cgi-bin/frameset.cgi?left=main&right=/library/library.html

Here's a preview of two articles I'll write soon...one on plane rehabs without fancy tools...and one on the same with those two old framing chisels in the pic below. Note the two smoothers in the bottom pic...a 3 and a 4...each set for a different depth of cut...both looked worse than the 19-dollar Stanley 5 Type 16 above I'm doing the article on.

My pleasure, Frank...any time. And it's a wonderful thought of Oyster's that these skills are passed from father to son....my boys are certainly getting more than they want of it... ...but also remember that some of us older guys had parents who were young adults at the beginning of The Depression. Little or even no education...and although that was hardly their fault, they were somewhat ashamed of that, and denigrated their skills as "working with their hands" instead of with their head. So my farmer Dad and Grandad...and three childless Uncles, one a boatbuilder, one a homebuilder and one a greenhouse grower...all had nothing but college in mind for me. What I thought about it was never a subject for discussion. I guess they could see how much I loved what they did, so they would only teach enuf for me to perform the tasks required of me. So I was the kid in the back of the shop sharpening saws, chisels, planes and slicks...and doing the grunt work like offbearing the mill or splitting shakes. I considered it a treat to get to hold up one end of transom or plank, or to gang-cut a dozen birdsmouths in rafters....these gentlemen actually sold off or broke up their businesses rather than see me take one of them over, which I would have been delighted to do. I watched two Uncles cut dovetails by the dozens...and they probably never even saw a router back then...I never got to cut one until I left home and needed some furniture. Their legacy and those memories are treasures to me...not any doing of theirs, but they never realized that one could do both education and craft...and do both well. It wasn't until the Great Craft Revival in the back-to-the-land '60's and '70's that those of their generation who were still alive...the John Gardners and Tage Frid's...by collecting and documenting not only their skills, but the skills of those peers who couldn't write...helped to give craft the recognition it has always deserved. So one of my major lessons of childhood is to pass on freely whatever meager skills I've acquired to benefit the craft. Let there never be another "lost" generation of skills.

Milling and maintaining the mill is no more difficult than maintaining a lawn-mower and mowing your lawn....that's for these and band mills, tho...an old Foley Belsaw Carriage Mill is a different, more difficult and more dangerous critter. Don't get one...they cut rough and you'll need both a helper and a big planer. I was doing a horizontal cut in a small 500lb log with the Lucas during our last major earthquake...all the shaking did was bog the motor and warp a blade. Had that been a 48" circle-insert blade all the way thru that log dogged to a carriage, and that shaking most likely woulda thrown that log into my face. The question would be how long will it take to amortize your investment? Stateside folks can pick up a good used mill for 2/3 the price of a new one: http://www.sawmill-exchange.com/index.htm In W. Australia, I dunno...except Lucas and Pederson swing-blade mills are common there. This is big woods country here...I get all the "studwood" grade logs I want usually for the trouble of picking them up from the neighbors...and sometimes, like above, I mill them on shares. I also have 33 acres of my own mature forest. Without those assets, I would buy logs from arborists...and I do occasionally for something special...the Bigleaf (hard) Maple in the bolle stack above I paid $.45 a BF for because it is highly figured...the mill returned 200pct of the scaled BF, so my net cost was slightly over $.20 a BF. That wood's value milled the way it is, however, is between $2.00 and $8.00 a BF, with some of the best flitches worth severalfold that as "music wood" for luthiers....maybe a dozen of those in the tree. So if you are interested, you need to research where and at what price you will obtain your logs, how much added value you can apply...and how long it will take to amortize equipment costs against the value obtained. But the mill alone never suffices...you need a way to move the logs...the above example was only done as a favor for my friends and for an exceptional log...I otherwise wouldn't touch a job I couldn't get my big backhoe into to load the mill. But you can do that relatively inexpensively, too, with some mechanical skills...these old farm tractors run $1-3 grand, and can be fitted with a fabricated "arch" like the one below to skid logs to ramps where they can be winched into the mill. Not as easy as the backhoe front forks, but a heck of a lot easier than peaveys and farm jacks.

Continued from Milling Earl

Continued from Milling Earl

Earl Johnson is 85 and a retired shipwright out of the Bremerton Naval Shipyard

See if you can match up your symptoms with what's in these...may be a disease...may just be browning because of some soil deficiency...try some treespike fertilizer spikes next spring and in following springs and decide in a couple years if there's no improvement or adjacent trees become infected. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/newsletter_pdfs/newsletter_fall2001.pdf http://cekern.ucdavis.edu/Master_Gardener/Browning_of_Redwood_Trees_in_Kern_County.htm http://dmoz.org/Science/Agriculture/Forestry/Pests_and_Diseases/ http://www.rense.com/general29/dosp.htm If it is a disease, your chances of curing it are pretty small...then the course of action is to take it down while it's still sound.

I'm the biologist...Joe's the arborist...although I know a little bit about silviculture and converting wood to lumber. We don't have any natural redwoods here but I'll give it a stab.

Joe Emel. 47. From an old logging and pioneer family here

Well, Simon...the plans from Gardner's "Building Classic Small Craft Vol I" are copyrighted, but drop me an email and I'll be glad to attach a jpeg of my construction notes...you can use the "zoom" feature to blow up and print them off in sections so they'll be easily read. It's just a simple and heavy work boat tho...we chose it because we use them to recover old-growth logs from stump-filled beaver ponds where conventional boats get high-centered. This design is more buoyant in bow than stern so when hung up, you merely move to the rear thwart and rowlocks and row off. Lives year-round in the water except for the odd week of ice, is equipped with a bilge pump for rain water and works better than anything I've used. Fred Dion 12' Work Punt drawn by John Gardner and built exactly to the drawing. 7/8" old-growth WRC laid-up sides, bottom crossplanking and thwarts. Generously fastened with #10, 12, 14 galvanized screws. Old-growth DF framing, risers, rub strips, transom and knees...size of thwart knees reduced slightly to sit two loggers across one thwart. Lumber was airdried and left unplaned and the project took about 180 manhours. You'll need greenish wood for the 1 1/2 X 1 1/2 DF chines...that's a sharper bend than it appears up the bow....and once mounted to the sides and the sides finished it'll help to have a steambox wide and deep enuf for both entire sides because bending that stiff, thick fir a second time at right angles to the first bend without damaging the softer cedar is a bit of a challenge. While I love the design for my purpose...one change that will be made the next time it comes out of the water is adding two more inches to the bottom of the skeg...it does not scull well with that flat bottom, and sculling is important in the tight quarters we work it in.