Fixed My Stiks
Less than a month ago I broke down and bought a new coat. This is only significant if you understand that for the past couple years I’ve been wearing a coat that, each time I needed to zip it up, I had to fight with a zipper that was well past its prime. My office chair has an arm that is semi-broken and flops around a bit. My workbench vise racks like crazy and while I’ve been saying that I was going to build a new bench for at least 3 years, I still haven’t done so.
That’s the kind of guy I am. It could be justified if this behavior (or is it a lack thereof?) were driven by thrift but it has little to do with money. Rather, it’ s that I view buying a new coat an annoyance, something that will take me away from something “important”, like maybe drinking coffee or eating a donut. Lazy am me when it comes to this sort of thing.
And so it went, for years and years that I worked with a pair of winding sticks that were only one cut above firewood. They were straight. They did the job. But they were ugh…ly. It was last September that I broke down an made a set of winding sticks that looked good. I thought it was a step forward and nearly broke something patting myself on the back.
So, with good-looking winding sticks, what more is there to talk about when it comes to winding sticks. Well, just as I used ugly winding sticks that worked for several years, I began to use good-looking winding sticks that didn’t work so well. I guess I’m more tolerant of ugly things than I am things that don’t work well as it’s only taken me 5 months to decide that I had to fix my sticks.
The problem was they were simply too thick. At just over 3/4″ thick, when sighting over them it was hard to see a single ‘edge’. I was working over a bunch of cabinet parts yesterday and got frustrated with this problem to the point where I just stopped and shoved the sticks through my thickness planer, taking them down to 1/2″, which seemed a good thickness for my old eyes and yet thick enough that they wouldn’t fall over. While I was at it I lopped off the corners, drilled a hole in each so I could hang them and rejointed the top and bottom edges. It only took a few minutes but what a difference it made.
Then I did something fun with them. Tage Frid describes a finishing method where he applies boiled linseed oil and almost immediately adds some shellac to the surface. This, of course, creates a very sticky surface but if you rub it with a clean cloth, the sticky goes away and you can bypass the time normally required for the BLO to dry. It was actually sort of magical and allowed me to get back to my cabinet pieces. I don’t think I’d like to try it on a large surface but it was great for these sticks. Best of all, I now have winding sticks that not only look good, they work even gooder.
Cheers — Larry
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Isn’t that the truth? We put off doing something for months that winds up taking only minutes to accomplish. I put off buying new things, too, Larry. But it’s definitely due to frugality. ; )
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. And if that’s your story, Kari, stick with it. It’s far better than mine (grin).
Cheers — Larry
I try to not put stuff off. I was instilled with an intense sense of responsibility, which inevitably leads to guilt. If I put stuff off it nibbles at my brain incessantly. I’m not even Catholic!
Nice sticks.
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