Hi all.
This is a project my dad and I are working on for co-op's Valentine's Day Party. Everyone makes a box (something that holds valentines), and then we vote on the top three and stuff. this year we're making the chest of Davy Jones, and this is the first journal entry I made about it. This is a few weeks old, but I'll post again hopefully very soon after we next work on it (hopefully Saturday).
1.13.07
We started work on the chest today. It was not easy going, and Dad and I were both thoroughly exhausted by the time we finished. The log I had worked so hard to roll from the back turned out to be unusable, as it had a large dip in it and most of the center was rotted, but I didn't mind too much—my main goal was to prove to myself that I could move the thing, which I did. Dad brought a new log from the back in about five minutes' time, which was the only regret I had: that I wasn't able to carry the log, but had to roll it.
The first thing was to mark the shape of the chest on one end of the log. It is about 10 inches deep, 12-13 inches wide and the same distance high from the bottom to the top of the lid. Although I want to do much of the work on this, I let Dad handle the chainsaw, which he used to cut out the shape. We used the natural arc of the log for the top arch shape of the lid. Once the shape was cut out, we used scraper thingymabobber to scrape the bark and part of the outer wood (which was rotting) off. Dad told me that hemlock rots from the bottom of the tree upwards, and because of that we wanted a piece from higher up in the tree. Apparently my original piece was from the bottom, which was one reason it wouldn't work—it was too rotten. Our piece is still pretty good.
Once we had the bark scraped off, we tried a number of methods to separate the lid from the main body of the chest. Dad said that he didn't want to use the chainsaw because it would be too hard to guide, and would go off course, so we sat and stared and thought for awhile. We tried a small handsaw for a few seconds only, but discarded it for two reasons: firstly because it was hardly long enough and of course would take hours to use, and secondly because Dad pointed out to me that it got wider at the top than the bottom by probably ¼ inch at least. This would allow us to get into the wood up to the top of the saw, but then the saw would become wedged in the log. We sat and stared some more. I knew he would come up with the first idea (the first one worth trying anyway) since he knew his tools much better than I did. I was right. The first tool he wanted to try was some sort of saw, but found he didn't have a long enough attachment blade to saw across the depth of the lid. Soon he remembered his Makita saw, and after some searching found just the right attachment for it. We'd planned for him to get it started and then let me take over (under supervision of course), but found it to be harder than expected. Our biggest problem was keeping the log from jumping all over the place, and we had to adjust it several times before finally putting it end-up in the floor, with Dad sawing downwards and me literally standing on the end to keep it down! I said that it felt something like standing on the jack-hammer we used to pound our garage floor down; I never felt such a strange vibrating sensation in my legs!
In about ½ hour we had separated the lid from the chest, and now we were faced with the spot "where the sidewalk ends." We didn't have a plan for hollowing the chest/lid out, so we sat and stared some more. Of course this didn't last very long, because my dad has probably about a hundred and fifty-seven tools in the garage, so he soon pulled some down. We marked 1 ¼ inches in from the outer part of the chest/lid to cut, allowing the extra ¼ inch so that we would still have a fairly thick wall, with no danger of cutting through it. I can't even name all of the tools we used to begin with, but we used a round electric saw thingy to mark the edges and begin with the general depth, and then my brilliant father got a drill and drilled out several holes about 3 inches deep. Then we both used his grandpa's old woodworking tools (which he left to my dad) and a hammer to knock out the wood in between the holes—he on the chest, I on the lid.
This was the slowest part of today's work, and probably will be of the whole chest. The depth of the chest is now good, and that of the lid is nearly enough, but we have to work on getting it all to a common depth, and then getting it all smooth. Unfortunately, Dad's sander won't fit inside the chest/lid, but he says his belt sander at work might, so I think he's going to take it to work this week and give it a shot. Our main asset is that the wood is still fairly wet, so it was easier to work with, and more pliable. We left it open to dry though, so it won't always be so easy. Our main hope is that it won't crack as it dries. Just before we ended we decided to find a couple of hinges and see how well the lid fit the chest. Dad found the hinges, and sent me looking through his bottomless pit (*coughsscrewboxcoughs*) for 12 of the same screws. A nearly impossible feat, ha-ha. I swear that man must have 500 different types of nails and screw jumbled together in no visible order in one flimsy cardboard box: leftovers from building the house, along with about two-hundred and seventy-eight washers! We somehow managed to find them together, and got it screwed on. It fits fairly well, a little rough, but Dad said that he can probably sand that down to a better fit too.
By this time we'd been at work probably about 5 hours, and decided to call it a day and resume again when we could. I'll probably do some more work on the lid this week, since I can do that by myself, and then we'll work on it together next Saturday if we get time. The half of the garage that Dad's Jeep usually occupies is so completely covered in tools, logs and wood shavings that you can't even see the floor! We told Mom not to look.
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