Also, I love those clamps. They’re essentially indestructible, so much so that they’ve survived three generations of constant use since my grandpa bought them. (They’re also great for weathering wooden props. Just drop ‘em on the piece and they leave six or seven different marks at once.)
So this is where my time has gone for a little while. The piece on top is a sizing and style demo for the boards underneath it. My giant old TV is too heavy for the wall (or most TV stands for that matter) so I needed something incredibly sturdy to hold it up. The living room is designed to feel like a museum of the weird/cryptozoology exhibit, so what better to add than an old and beaten up shipping crate? (see also: the warehouse from the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark.)
I suppose a first post must start somewhere near the beginning. As far as this blog is concerned, Saor fits the bill fairly well. Its a pound-and-a-half head on a 14 inch hickory handle. I shaped the haft so that it fits incredibly well for lefties such as myself, but just fits awkwardly in the right hand. Because turnabout is fair play, assholes. The name means, fittingly, “carpenter.” Saor sees use primarily for rough shaping of workpieces pieces, carving large details, and cutting scars into new and exciting parts of my hands when I’m being clumsy.
If you’re interested in a bit more detail on how and why I ended up putting Saor together, a short history lies beneath the cut.
For Jo’s birthday this year I wanted to assemble a set of vampire hunting equipment. Much to my shame this project still isn’t finished, primarily because I started assembling the tools I needed to make the pieces to go in the klt and got carried away. (For want of a nail, the present was lost.)
As example, I needed a way to carve stakes. Sure, I could use wood chisels, or a knife, but those weren’t giving quite the cut I was looking for. So I borrowed my dad’s lathing hatchet, and it worked beautifully. (As beautifully as a dull hatchet from a basement drawer can perform, but it got the job done.) Borrowing his things only works about once a year, however, so I decided to pick up my own. One quick round of ebaying later, two rusted hatchet heads were on their way to me. I figured one would be a practical tool, and the other would go into Jo’s kit. A good hunting axe seems a useful tool in clobbering the undead, after all. I picked up a straight handle from Ace (my preference over the traditional hatchet shape, even for axes without the hammer end) a few kobalt files from work, and went to town. Sadly, I didn’t have my camera at the time, as we were living in a friend’s spare room with only a few of our things available, but thats the way things go.
My dad has been an obsessive tinkerer all his life, and worked in construction for years as a summer job. His father was a carpenter, and so was his. I grew up being shushed out of dad’s work room in the basement so that I wouldn’t get my fingers cut off by a buzzsaw (which was for the best, given the number of finger related injuries and scars I’ve accumulated in the last year) so I’m no stranger to the basics of woodworking. I mean, there’s a reason I applied to work at a hardware store in the first place. But in many ways, this was my first real project. I’d never shaped with a file before, nor hung an axe, nor cleaned rust from a chunk of steel that used to be a tool. I’d never mixed my own stain colors, nor used polyurethane, nor spent hours waiting for pieces to dry just to get to that next important step. It was a learning experience, as everything is, and I did a lot of screwing up.
As an example of a lesson learned, I now know that (barring pieces meant exclusively for show) I won’t be using poly as a clearcoat on tools again. I don’t mind the slick feeling it gives, unlike some folk. The look is nice, and I used wipe-on poly so the coat isn’t overbearingly thick, but it scratches off when chopping no matter how well it cures, and recoating the haft after every use is unbearably annoying. The fit of the eye is also sort of absolute crap since I didn’t know how to approach it, and the wedge tends to come loose every once in a while (you can see it poking out in the photo above.)
I’m incredibly pleased with the final result, however. I tend to worry when doing something new that I’ll screw up and ruin the whole thing, rushing through processes I’ve never tried and turning my expensive base materials into garbage. This is in no way derived from past experiences, and I feel no shame when I think of the time I tried to make a creepy mask for a film project and ended up with a gas mask covered in loose packaging tape and cut up bike tires. No shame at all. Not a bit. Please never let a photo of that thing surface on the internet.
Anyway, holding an axe that I’d brought back to life made me lightheaded with excitement. I hadn’t failed miserably. I hadn’t given up, or been bored. Maybe, just maybe, I could keep doing things like this. And so I have. The contents of this blog stem from that moment, when I found a new form of art to explore.
