That’s pretty impressive. No, I’m not referring to building a house with a giant toothpaste tube full of mortar. You know, right after building a space village starship dock around the building site, and a giant factory to pre-fab anything that sticks out of the walls. When I said it was impressive, I was referring to anyone willing to move in and try to dust a concrete house with corrugated walls. Or hang a picture or something.
All the problems of construction that involve actual construction were solved decades, if not centuries ago. It’s vanishingly straightforward to build a lot of inexpensive houses quickly.
I’ve had a hand in building everything from a birdhouse to a football stadium. I’ve never had anything in my way but the government, and the occasional boulder in the cellar hole.
A monolithic pour, all concrete house is nothing new, either.
Florida’s full of concrete houses, I gather, built from CMUs (concrete blocks), which the guys in the second video no doubt could also handle just as nimbly. It’s pretty easy and fast for a few guys to build a single story house’s walls out of concrete block, and they don’t need a crane and a Cray computer to do it. I’ve done it for a wood frame house in a day or two, working along with only two other guys. And I could barely pull my weight back then.
You can always spot the “Tell” in these “new method to build a house in a day” schemes. They manage four walls in a day, or maybe two, after twenty weeks of preparation, using enough equipment to build the Hoover Dam. Then they call it “a house.” Four walls is not a house, guys. Well, I guess it’s a house, you know, except for the foundation it sits on and the utilities and the floors and the roof and the finishes and electricals and the plumbing and the HVAC, spangled with 24 building inspections, plus the occasional required bribe or gangster threat if you’re working in a city.
You can’t order a house from Amazon, built by Apple, no matter how hard you wish for it, kids. I suggest that you learn how to bang a few nails, and get busy.
Well, it’s Wuesday everyone. I just invented it. It’s when you have so much to do on Tuesday that you end up doing it on Wednesday.
Now at first, I’ll grant, that inventing a new day might seem extreme, but I’ve been busier than an adult diaper kiosk in a nursing home for the last few days. Besides, if Homer Simpson can discover a meal between breakfast and brunch, I can write eight days a week, can’t I?
Upon reflection, that last sentence might be unwise, and could bring about a big lawsuit from Yoko Ono. Forget it, and proceed to our usual, unusual Wuesday Trash Day roundup. A day late and a dollar short is better’n nothing.
You might remember him from such roles as Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz, but in the years before legendary comic Phil Hartman shaved the second ‘n’ from his name, he was designing album art for some West Coast rock bands.
Funny dude. Died less humorously, IIRC. Lots of actors were waiters before they found a Weinstein soft spot and became household names. Looks like Phil skipped restaurant work altogether, and had additional talents besides getting laughs, although his album design work is pretty funny, too, if you ask me. Take a look at this one:
Every girl in America had one of these on the shelf in her apartment next to her Janis Ian LP and Cat Stevens disc. That makes it instantly familiar to guys who were desperately trying to make time with said girls, while assiduously avoiding mentioning how much you hated America, Janis Ian, and Cat Stevens. You know, lest you find yourself out on the welcome mat with the door against your nose. So you’ll forgive me if I never noticed this before:
America did a cover of “Muskrat Love”? That Muskrat Love? You know, the Capstan and Toenail Muskrat Love? I shudder to think of it. Or maybe it was just a joke by Phil, and nobody noticed. Because I definitely would have noticed, and ended up out in the hallway, holding my clothes, if a girl had put that record on the turntable on side two.
Google Search will stop its continuous scroll user experience where Google loads more results as you scroll past the first page of the search results. Instead, you will see see the classic and old pagination bar at the footer of the Google Search results.
I do believe Google used to call that Mobile Results, because pagination on a cell phone was considered too tough for your fat thumbs to handle. The article struggles to explain the reasoning behind the change, so I will. On searches for important keywords, Google puts four ads at the top of the page, and three more at the bottom. They ram in Maps results, and “people also asked” stuff, too, and other Google litter. So Google has dropped the mask, and the entire front page of Google results will be GOOGLE RESULTS, and that’s that.
There’s an old joke in the search engine optimization industry:
For decades most Western intellectuals with an interest in cinema (generally regarded by academics as an inferior art-form) praised the movies of Eisenstein as daring and innovative , while rejecting the animated work of his near-contemporary Walt Disney as puerile, commercial and superficial. But the Russian director idolised the movies of Disney, whose style and technique can be seen especially clearly in Part Two of Ivan the Terrible, for which Snow White and the Seven Dwarves served as inspiration for some of its imagery.
In the early 1930s when Eisenstein visited Hollywood he became friends with Disney, whose work he continued to admire until his death. Disney, the Russian believed, “achieves absolute perfrection [sic]in what he does.”
I agree with historian Paul Johnson. Walt Disney was the only true genius that Hollywood ever produced. It’s easy to forget that, because the house of mouse is such a shabby wreck these days.
We’ve been operating in San Francisco for years now, deliberately scaling our service over time. With tens of thousands of weekly trips, our Waymo One service provides safe, sustainable, and reliable transportation to locals and visitors to the city alike.
You can imagine the sort of hijinks that the denizens of San Francisco will get up to in the back seat of a car with no driver present to tell them to knock it off, but if I were you, I wouldn’t. Nightmare fuel. Perhaps Waymo can go into a partnership deal with some chemical company that makes those disinfectant wipes. Because you’re going to need them.
Besides, Seinfeld solved the problem of interacting with a driver years ago:
“It will be almost impossible to tell. It will feel like you’re in a simulation. Because everything will look manufactured, everything will look produced. It’s very important that you shift your mindset or attempt to shift your mindset to verify the things that you feel you need through your experience and your intuition.”
Well, since we’re of a traditional frame of mind here at the Cottage, I’ll point out to “Smith Brother” Jack that we’ve felt that way about everything already, even before the first time we saw a pickup truck explode on the news. So we’re good, thanks. Do try to keep up.
In the early 20th century, a unique and mobile form of housing emerged —the so-called wooden homes on wheels.
These structures, colloquially known as mobile homes, offer a captivating glimpse into a bygone era, when flexibility, craftsmanship, and the open road beckoned to a generation yearning for adventure.
Great photos at the link. Make sure you scroll down far enough to see the “Jungle Yachts.” Man, I want a Jungle Yacht!
Half of the sins of humankind, Bertrand Russell wryly quipped, are because of our “fear of boredom.” Russell’s observation holds true: boredom avoidance is causally correlated with things like addiction, overeating, gambling, student misconduct, poor academic performance, and dropping out of school. Boredom avoidance also prompts subtler moral infractions, including half-listening—often as we check our phones—and frittering away time on trivial pursuits.
I can’t work up the enthusiasm to say anything pithy about the article. But I will point out that you can just drink booze to make other people more interesting, and forestall boredom. It works for me.
Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by music and political writers ever written. It’s as if MTV never existed.
Well, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “journalism,” but still, it does seem a shame. Where will future generations go to find out about asymmetrical hairdos?
Well, that’s the Wuesday Trash Day links for today. Er, yesterday. Bah, whatever. Feel free to make fun of them in the comments. I have to paint the porch railing. Ed in Texas told me to.
That quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” is generally attributed to Mark Twain. He’s had more stuff attributed and misattributed to him than Yogi Berra, as well as plenty more pithy stuff he uttered and scribbled that never made it into everyday discourse. I’ll bet even his laundry lists were Rosetta Stones of wit and wisdom.
So I got to thinking about the “kids these days” discussions that permeate the greybeard portions of the internet. These appear far away from the “OK boomer” environs. These twains never meet, except to yell at each other.
People of a certain age often remark that the younger set don’t like to get their hands dirty as much as the generations that preceded them. It’s a fair comment, generally. I have two adult-ish children, and while they’re willing to hold their nose occasionally and help dad bang on our house, they really aren’t into the manual arts like I was at their age. But does that really mean that my generation is hands on, and they’re all hands off? I’m not so sure.
Here’s an example. I made these, because I can. They’re Adirondack chairs:
There are some clues on display in the picture. The various colors of the pieces of wood betray their pedigree. They’re all the same kind of lumberyard pine. The pieces are different colors because they’re made out of little scraps of this and that I had hanging around the workshop. Sunlight has darkened some pieces of them noticeably.
There is a real fetish for making furniture and other items out of wood pallets nowadays. The internet is full of videos about how to this and you can do that to arrive at objets de meh made from pallets. I’ve always found them to be sorta silly. Pallet lumber is mostly pretty nasty, and lumberyard pine is pretty cheap and not full of staples and lord knows what that spilled from the barrels that the pallets once carried. So people my age make Adirondack chairs from scrap lumber and younger folks make coffee tables out of pallets, and history rhymes a bit. Hey, pallet projects are no sillier than the hippie coffee tables made from cable spools that were popular in apartments in the sixties and seventies, or bookshelves made from planks and concrete blocks.
I’ve often encouraged everyone, regardless of age, to take an interest in building or repairing the house they live in. This mostly falls on deaf ears with people much younger than me. To them a house is like an immutable, permanent, plastic unit that they should be able to buy on a Starbucks salary. The idea that maintaining one would be kind of gratifying, interesting, and borderline fun sounds strange to their ears. So instead of This Old House, you get Dexter’s laboratory. This is sort of project that’s popular on these here intertunnels with people whose fresh sale date isn’t bearing down on them so hard:
Integrating your doorbell into your smart home is a very logical step to take. Making your doorbell smart, allows you to do cool things with it, for example:
Turn the chime/bell off after a specific time, when the kids or you went to bed. Also, turn it on again in the morning.
Send out push notifications to your phone/tv/watch/smart speaker, on the doorbell button push.
Take a snapshot from a front door camera, on the doorbell button push.
Stream your front door camera to your TV, on the doorbell button push.
Ring the doorbell continuously in case of an emergency (e.g., smoke detectors triggered).
I’ve done small electronic projects in my yute. None of the instructions in the tutorial is obscure to me. I just don’t give a shiny shite about making my doorbell do any of those things. I’ll go further, and testify without fear of contradiction that if my doorbell did those things, I’d publish a tutorial on how to make it stop doing those things. You know, like this:
But I also subscribe to the worldview of different strokes for different folks. Frenck wanted to fuss around with his doorbell, and I wanted to make some chairs my wife and I can sit on in the afternoon. The urge to tinker, and make something out of materials at hand, is nearly universal. That’s history rhyming, or chiming, or something.
There is danger here, though. Modify things too much, and it’s easy to lose sight of what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. Here’s a picture of my front porch:
It has a doorbell that chimes to alert people inside the house that someone is at the door. I installed it, and it works. But I also have two chairs that allow us to sit next to the doorbell, and greet people before they even get a chance to press it. And the chairs also work fine, even when the power goes out.
So I acknowledge that history rhymes constantly, although most people are too hidebound to notice when it does. This leads to kids these days diatribes or OK boomer derogations at the drop of a hat. But I’d also be remiss, and a disappointment to my generation, if I didn’t point out that the rhyming these days usually adds up to a really shitty poem. With push notifications.
The title Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood sounds like an ambulance-chasing office full of lawyers, but they sure don’t sound like a court date. We love Jon Scofield here at the Cottage. He’s very original. He’s playing an Ibanez guitar, a sort of knock-off of a Gibson ES 335, or maybe a 330. The only difference is the peghead and the small detail that it’s a much better guitar than the Gibson. Back in the day I played an Ibanez solid body guitar that was more or less a poor man’s Les Paul, only with two cutaways instead of one. It’s the nicest guitar I ever owned, or ever will own. It’s kind of a shame that I never learned to play it properly. But I’m nothing special. Most guitars are wasted on their owners. Scofield’s isn’t.
Well, the driveway’s done. Er, I mean the dooryard’s done. It’s not really a driveway, if you ask me. I ordered 10 cubic yards of reclaimed asphalt paving, and there wasn’t a teaspoon left when we were done. But then again, we weren’t a teaspoon short, either.
It took three days. I got off easy on the third day because my neighbor Rich wandered over on the second day and shoveled along with me. Good neighbors like that are hard to find. They’re especially hard to find when you’re shoveling reclaimed asphalt into a wheelbarrow and it’s ninety degrees out. Hide and Go Seek was perfected at such times. But you don’t have to find the very best neighbors. They find you.
The new reclaimed asphalt parking area isn’t perfect. It’s way more solid and put together than a gravel driveway would be. It’s somewhat less put together than a hot asphalt paving job would be. But good enough is good enough, I guess. A good plan now is better than a great plan later, and all that.
We’re broke-ass losers ain’t got no moneys, but we do our best. I coveted a flat, orderly place to park the chariots outside the front door for many moons. That crossbuck railing on the right hand side keeps you from falling to, if not your death, at least the installation of a second set of ankles if you tumbled over into the driveway. It leads down to a paved area out back. When we moved here, that right-hand side looked like this:
As you can spy with your little eye, the old railing lost interest about fifteen feet short of the corner, and the parking surface was a maze of pits and cracked asphalt and busted concrete. We’ve changed a lot of stuff there over the years. The new parking surface is just the last installment. It looks like this now:
So if you’ve got more gumption than sense, and a good neighbor, you too can buy a plate compactor for $350 or so, and get 10 yards of recycled asphalt pavement for about the same price, and have a pretty good driveway. The dump truck driver who delivers the material will shake his head when he shows up, and snicker all the way back to the yard after he sees your wheelbarrow and shovels, but if the world isn’t laughing at you these days, all it proves is that you’re as crazy as everybody else is. I’m not. I’m an entirely different kind of nuts.
Well, it’s a pleasant day here at the Cottage. 86 degrees and sunny, with a bit of a breeze. Noonish. Of course the internet weather thingie says it’s Deathwave Heatstorm Olga or something. It also says, with a straight face, that it’s currently 93 degrees at my house, a temperature that it has never reached as long as I’ve lived here, and doubtless never will.
I had to go to the doctor’s office this morning for their yearly attempt to get me to take copious amounts of drugs I don’t need, and to get things inserted hither and yon into my person, and for them to get their yearly dose of nope. The nurse asked me if it was “brutal” outside. It was 9 AM, and about 73 degrees. The teevee and the intertunnel have had many deleterious effects, but none so prominent in my mind right now than the way they goad their audiences into believing any nice weather is bad news. Yes, it’s warm-ish in Maine in mid-June. Something must be done!
Me, I sit on the porch and survey my new parking kingdom and love it. And of course, wait for Archie to pick up the trash, and the internet to pick up the trash I’m about to leave on the intercurb. Enjoy.
The recent rapid decline in population growth—even pre-COVID—suggests that a population peak prior to 2050 is not outlandish, provided that current drivers continue to apply. Recent declines in fertility rates, together with a flattening age distribution of young folks, combine to set the stage for population peak and decline.
Most Malthusians believe there are too many people. I believe there are way too few useful people. What if we’re both right?
“By 600,000 years ago or so, hominin populations started relying on unusually complex technologies, and we only see rapid increases in complexity after that time as well. Both of those findings match what we expect to see among hominins who rely on cumulative culture,” said Paige, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Missouri and an ASU PhD graduate.
Ooh. Knapped flints lead directly to atomic weapons. Or something.
There, hidden amid the tapirs, jaguars and spectacled bears that call the Yungas home is a remarkable community that has remained largely unrecognised by the outside world for nearly 200 years: the Kingdom of the Afro-Bolivians – the spiritual capital of thousands of Bolivians of African descent and one of the last kingdoms left in the Americas.
It’s a real kingdom. The king grows coca and keeps his crown in a cardboard cookie box. Someday maybe he could upgrade to a Burger King crown.
In a significant breakthrough in sustainable materials science, researchers have developed a plant-based leather alternative using pineapple leaf fiber (PALF) and natural rubber (NR). This eco-friendly material promises to revolutionize the leather industry with its impressive strength and sustainability.
“Sustainable.” Hmm. In some alternate universe than mine, we’re going to be running out of cows soon. Oh well. Say, that sounds swell and all, but will I be able to purchase rich, Corinthian PALF? That’s bound to be the good stuff.
The hyper-competitive EV market has seen several companies, including Proterra, Lordstown and Electric Last Mile Solutions, file for bankruptcy in the past two years as they grappled with weakening demand, fundraising hurdles and operational challenges from global supply chain issues.
Over the winter holidays, we went to visit relatives. They had regular teevee playing in their house the whole time. I hadn’t seen regular teevee, or commercials, for many years. I was mystified to see three or four car company commercials in a row, none of which I’d ever heard of. If I’d stayed away another year, I could have gone my whole life without hearing about any of them, I guess. Maybe they would have been more “sustainable” if they had rich, Corinthian PALF seats.
By now, you probably know that plastic recycling is a scam. If not, this white paper lays out the case in devastating detail. To summarise, amid calls to reduce plastic garbage in the 1970s and ’80s, the petrochemical industry put forth recycling as a red herring to create the appearance of a solution while it continued to make as much plastic as it pleased. Multiple paper trails indicate that industry leaders knew from the start that recycling could never work at scale. And indeed, it hasn’t. Only about nine percent of plastic worldwide gets recycled, and the US manages only about six percent.
Fourteen years ago, I told the intertunnel exactly that, and recycling fans just about came at me with knives. By the way, six percent sounds high to my ears.
Researchers proposed that the same knowledge and skills needed for performing well in a test are also required for accurately evaluating one’s performance. Thus, when people lack knowledge about a topic they are tested on, they perform poorly and do not know they did so.
In the distant past, I’ve called a person into my office to fire them for cause, and they came in and asked me for a raise before I could say anything. So, yeah.
Have a good Trash Tuesday, everyone. And don’t forget to recycle! I’ve been assured it’s sustainable.
That’s not really a driveway. Here in Maine, we call that a dooryard. Maine has different terms for many everyday things. Then again, not many other places pave their front yards and park on them, and save the garage for socializing and working on motorcycles and snowmobiles. Our dooryard was a patchwork quilt of ad-hoc pavement, concrete, and dirt, seasoned with moss and dandelions. The pavement was just dumped on the earth many moons ago, and then subsided a lot. When you pulled in, your front tires would eventually drop into a gully, and your bumper would flirt with the spidered pavement in front of the trench. We decided to finally do something about it.
Pavement has a hard time here in Maine. “Frost heaves” doesn’t refer to indigestion after you eat a banana popsicle. In the winter, the ground freezes very hard and very deep. The moisture in the soil under the pavement expands, and it pushes up the pavement, at least until the spring rolls around and the pavement can collapse back into a proper pothole. These frost heaves get very large indeed, like impromptu speed bumps. They are generally ministered to by crack road crews who scramble out as soon as a frost heave is reported, and put up a sign placed just after it to warn you about the frost heave you just went airborne over.
So here at the Cottage we’re the usual amount of broke and can’t afford to hire a paving contractor to come and install next year’s frost heaves in our dooryard. We’re going to have to rely on our wits and mettle to end up with a blackish patch out front. We’re going to start with Plan B, and work down from there.
We bought a plate compactor. It’s a gas-powered sledge with a heavy steel slab for a base. It vibrates, and compacts soil, or pavement, or paving bricks, or your foot if you’re not paying attention. We bought it at the Orange Place and had it shipped to us. The FredEx driver showed up and informed me that plate compactors are heavy, so stand back, let a girl that knows how to lift heavy things handle this. She tried and failed to budge it, and then dropped it out the door onto the sidewalk. I was grateful that I didn’t have to drop it myself. Luckily, it’s not possible to break a plate compactor. Bang on it all you like, but it’s like trying to break a panzer tank with an upholstery hammer.
We called the semi-local materials dudes and ordered 10 cubic yards of recycled pavement, which people call RAP around here. When you see those huge grinders peeling up (scarifying) roads, it all gets reused. Some recycled pavement gets mixed back into new, hot asphalt pavement. Stuff like we bought gets crushed and mixed with sand and maybe some aggregate, and sold as RAP. Most people just use it for a sub base under hot asphalt paving, but you can spread it and compact it, and get a fairly durable almost-pavement. They use lots of eco-type adjectives to make you feel better about avoiding tarring Gaia with your driveway, and perhaps feathering it, too, if you don’t shoo the pigeons away first. I’ve never gone in much for that sort of foolishness. The stuff is just cheap and effective and available. Funny, that would probably make a better sales pitch, but it’s never been tried, so there’s no way to know.
I love the local folks. I had to give directions to my house, and they instructed me to institute a fail-safe, foolproof method to locate the property for the driver. Google Maps? No. Satellite location? hardly. They asked me what color my house was, and told me to put a bucket out front.
That’s 10 cubic yards. If you’re unfamiliar with material estimating, it’s either way too much or not nearly enough for the job. You can’t order extra, because what the hell are you going to do with it if you’re done and there’s still a heap of it? Halloween isn’t for months, and filling up baggies with it and handing them out is a lot of work, anyway. And missing on the low side is deadly. The materials yard has a 16-yard minimum, and I had to talk pretty fast to get them to bring me only 10. Asking them to bring me 2 more would have resulted in a request for me to memorize their phone number, and then throw away my head.
I estimated the amount by tying a string to a couple of bricks, pulling it taut, and measuring the gap between the string and the slumpy dooryard it was supposed to fill in. The shallowest measurement was 2″, and the deepest was 6″, so I averaged it out to 4″. Multiply the length in feet by the width in feet by 1/3 of a foot for depth, and then divide by 27, which is how you speak cubic yards. Then check your math because grammar school was a long time ago.
So sane people rent a bobcat (skidsteer), a sort of miniature front end loader, They spread the stuff around and backblade (drag the bucket while going in reverse) it to the proper grade. Then they rake it out a little, and get a big roller and ride up and down to flatten and compact the RAP. However, I don’t know many sane people, and don’t count myself among them. I’ve got a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a gravel rake. It’s only like 12 or 14 tons of shoveling. I’m not sure what that works out to in snowstorms, but I think it’s only approximately half the weight of Rhode Island, so, no biggie.
I spread some out and revved up the compactor. Those wily Chinese like to play tricks on gweilus like me. After assembling the compactor and running it back and forth for a minute, a big, shiny nut appeared on the pavement. I spent ten minutes trying to find out which bolt had let go, cursing myself under my breath for not tightening them properly, before I realized it was just a spare nut someone had dropped in the factory between the bottom plate and the engine. Good one, Won.
You spoon the mix into the wheelbarrow, spread in in little heaps where your driveway is supposed to be, but isn’t quite, rake it flat, and then run the plate compactor over it.
The plate compactor is pretty lightweight, despite the FredEx driver’s lament, so you have to put the deepest parts in using “lifts.” That’s excavator lingo for thinner layers that you build up. The shoveling and raking is demanding work, but if you’ve ever worked the Irish banjo before, you learn how to move material without expending more effort than you need to. And walking behind the compactor is restful after shoveling for a while. You always wear ear protection. It muffles the sound of your neighbors complaining about the compactor noise.
So how far can one man get in a day? Well, about 2/3 of the pile is gone, and wonder of wonders, you can park a car next to the house again. Not bad. Alas, I won’t be able to finish tomorrow. I have to go to the mental hospital, to ask for an estimate. Maybe Wednesday, if they let me out.
I made some tables. I have no idea why. I guess because I can. There was no crying need for them just now.
They are a form of tree fort for me. I didn’t fuss over them. I banged them together a few minutes here, a few minutes there, while I did other stuff like roofing and painting the outside of the house. They’re made from odds and ends that were stacked on shelves in the workroom, slumbering snugly under a blanket of dust. The matching end table parts had the same sort of half-life as uranium. They’ve been kicking around forever and a day. Their tabletops were a single piano bench top I was making for a reason lost in the mists of time and liquor store receipts. The sides and fronts and legs of the tables are leftover pieces from console tables I used to make and sell. A console table is meant to go up against a wall, so it’s generally wide but not very deep, like my education. I cut the parts for a single console table in half, and they were the correct width for a pair of end table fronts. The legs are tapered until they reach the aprons of the table, and then they’re square the rest of the way. I somehow had eight tapered legs hanging around. No idea why.
The wood is soft tiger maple. Soft maple isn’t soft. It’s sort of like “jumbo shrimp” in the nomenclature department. However, if you’ve ever worked with rock maple, you know why they call it that, and why they call soft maple soft maple. Everything is relative in this world, ain’t it? Tiger maple wood is great for teasing chatoyance out of it. Spell check doesn’t know what chatoyance is, but I do. My life is mostly like that.
I know “Chatoyance” sounds like the name of a disco band that plays at weddings in Provincetown, but it ain’t. Chatoyancy is sometimes called the cat eye effect. When you move past the table, the stripes appear to be three-dimensional, and shift from light to dark and back again. The wood kinda shimmers, and looks lively, even though it isn’t really doing anything. You know, like Marilyn Monroe.
I’ll tell you how to achieve chatoyance on tiger maple, for absolutely no reason. No one asked. No one cares. Hell, I don’t care all that much anymore.
First, get yourself some tiger maple. It’s not dreadfully expensive or hard to find, as long as you don’t go looking for it at the Orange Place, or the Blue Orange Place. You have to buy a lot of it to get the price down and make the delivery cost worthwhile. It gets delivered on a pallet by motor freight, generally. You will be required to run the boards through a planer, because they come rough as a rule. Specialty yards will run it through a planer for you before they ship it, if you pay them. You should, it’s a thankless task. They mostly deliver it S3S if they plane it. That means three edges (Surfaced 3 Sides) will be planed more or less smooth — the two wide faces, and one edge. If you buy 1″ thick rough lumber, you can get it planed to 7/8″ and then sand or plane it some more yourself to end up with 3/4″ thick finished work.
You have to pay a substantial premium to get tiger maple more than 1″ thick. The table legs end up about 1-1/4″ square, so you have to start out with a piece of wood at least 1-1/2″ thick, so pony up. Gluing up legs out of thin lumber is a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
You glue up tabletops by rough cutting the lengths, running the edges through a jointer, and gluing them together with pipe clamps. Regular aliphatic glue is fine. It’s just called “wood glue” most places. The spell check gagged on “aliphatic,” too. My life is like that a lot. Lots of knuckleheads on the internet will tell you that you need splines or biscuits or domino tenons between the pieces, but no one on the internet knows what they’re talking about, generally. And this essay is on the internet, so look out. Done correctly, the glue joint is stronger than the wood fibers it attaches.
You’ll have to flatten the tabletops when they come out of the clamps. I use a portable drum sander that’s 16″ wide. You can flip the table top around and push it back through to sand something up to 32″ wide. You won’t be making anything more than 32″ wide, so don’t worry about buying a bigger one, Norm.
People think sandpaper makes things smooth. It doesn’t. Sandpaper makes things uniformly rough. So you have to sand the wood with increasingly fine sandpaper, 100#, 120#, 150# grit. I use a random orbit sander. It has a bigger surface, 6″ in diameter, than the average sander. Saves time. It’s got a dust collection cowling that you hook up to a screaming shop vac. So you sand for hours with earmuffs on, dragging the same tool back and forth hundreds of times. It allows you time to meditate, or to picture what being a very bored deaf-mute is like. Take your pick.
So now you’re pretty smooth. What’s next? You wreck it, of course. You mix aniline dye in water, a dark color, walnut maybe, and you pay it onto the surfaces with a foam pad and the whole thing turns an awful brown. The grain gets raised by the water, the wood is rough again, and you have to start all over. Once it’s dry you sand it with the orbital sander through all the grits, and add 220# grit at the end. The dark dye sticks in the end grains, and is completely removed on the flat grains. Tiger stripes are the end grains billowing though the wood fibers, so the tiger stripes are revealed.
Then you mix dye in water again. This one has to be the correct color. I think these tables are a mixture of dark vintage maple, golden brown, and red mahogany aniline dye. I concocted that combo many years ago in someone’s kitchen, a happy accident, like the Three Stooges mixing everything in a rubber boot in a pharmacy. Everyone has always loved the way it looks. Me too.
The funny thing is, the water doesn’t raise the grain the second time. Once you sand down the first, nasty brown dye job, the wood isn’t impressed by a second go round with water. You can spread the dye on with a foam brush again, and if you work fast and don’t let it drool over the edges or dry while you’re working, it just soaks in the right amount and you don’t have to rub it or wipe it or anything. You let it dry overnight, and it looks kind of blah.
Then you put shellac on it. I spray it on with an HVLP machine (high volume low pressure). You have to use dewaxed shellac. Regular shellac has a waxy element in it that will repel the final finish. They call dewaxed shellac “sanding sealer” sometimes. It’s kind of hard to find these days at the usual orange and blue places. But it’s worth looking around for it. The moment you spray it on, all the tiger stripes pop right out of the wood.
It dries pretty quick. Shellac has a denatured alcohol base, which is very volatile. I sand it lightly to smooth out any “orange peel” or bugs or whatnot that gets in the finish. Just 220# grit by hand, generally. The next day, I spray on water borne acrylic satin finish. You can put on all the coatings with disposable foam brushes if you don’t have a sprayer, or you’re only working on a single table and cleaning the machine is more work than it’s worth. I sometimes spray the whole table after it’s assembled, and sometimes I finish the pieces first and then assemble them. I use loose tenons to put the pieces together.
And when you’re done, you have chatoyance.
See? It’s easy. What’s really hard is sweeping the pollen off the porch before taking the pictures. I haven’t mastered that yet.
If you’re new around here, those are my kids. They’re not really kids anymore, of course. I think the drummer was twelve and the singer/guitarist was nineteen when they made that video.
The older one is out in the world making his way. He’s performing music again, as a solo act, although I’ve never seen him do it. He doesn’t need dad to carry the amplifiers anymore, or drive him to the jobs, I guess.
Our younger son makes electronic music. Vaporwave, mostly:
Time marches on. You can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The past is another county. Whatever. But I’m sure glad I didn’t forget to have kids in the first place.
I love the title overlay: The Weirdest Composer. Well, there’s plenty of competition for that title, but Erik Satie is certainly in the running.
No matter how hard you study, and practice, and tinker around, you have to be somewhat nuts to come up with anything really original. This piece of music still sounds profoundly beautiful and strange over a hundred years after it was written. It must have sounded like it was from Saturn when he first tried it out.
He got thrown out of music school for being lazy. When he tried again later, his teacher had this to say about him:
“Insignificant and laborious” and Satie himself “Worthless. Three months just to learn the piece. Cannot sight-read properly”
Outsiders are always like that. Like Themistocles once said: “I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great state from a little city.”
Month: June 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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