Guitars

Stupid mac stopped loading pictures for some weird reason, so it's been a while without updates.

Stuff has been going on here, we have a communal workshop going on, three guys into guitar making and one into cajones peruanos and just playing around. Feels cool.

Beatnik woodworkers if you fancy.

So here a small review of what's been going on the last weeks here, it's just pictures since my mind is busy trying to conceptualise what's going on here on valparaiso. As america sinks into a nightmare worse than neoliberalism, we dance to live music in small bars, talk till early in the morning and drink life like if it were sangria, and we vote for a leftwing mayor of 31 years old while making guitars by hand with tools made by hand and eat food made by hand:

That was yesterday night. Before rice and saturday's short night.

The woods I want for my first acoustic guitar. 

Japanese style clamping. Spanish cedar for the neck, I have a mahogany too on the making, perhaps for a steel string guitar.

 That's the black locust bridge pitu ate the other night. Will try to get rosewood for the next one.

Japanese tools, english tools, chilean tools and tea. The body was made and routed by Juan Manuel, I'm refinishing the sides to smooth things out and give a better flow to the curves

that's Antoine, french like the beginning of the world that finally found it's place in the centre of the workshop. Some people like mao in their workshops, I rather grab 'em by the pussy.

That's the neck taking shape. Ca. 2 hours job to shape it with a paring chisel, a gouge and a knife. Really really loved the experience.

And the last one for today. That lamp was brought by Diego, our in house musician and luthier apprentice. As you can see, the workshop has changed a bit. More people require more space and I had to re-organise for ease of work. It's flowing quite well and the workshop is usually cleaner now that I have to share it.

We are building a roubo bench for Juan Manuel soonish that will go there on the left, perhaps we move the bandsaw and lathes to the next room to have more working space for people.

I was reading some time ago pedagogy of the oppressed, I like to think we implement that here as we are teaching each other to build something. I also like to think of power as the experience of being able to do something, as its etymology implies. Being able to make your own guitars, to play them in your own parties, dance to your own music in bars with people you don't really know but see more often than your own family. And that experience of sovereignty, which is overall a sovereignty of the experience, which starts by the mere technique but touches us as humans in contact with each other is what creates the conditions of possibility for a leftwing kid to take power at the local level in this crazy but beautiful city. And perhaps that is what's lacking in the north to fight against populism, hatred and stupidity.

The shit is starting to look real.

Why I need a mill

Today visited the workshop of the university.

Ricardo, the workshop maister, asked me why I didn't study mechanics. Cause I didn't know I liked so much this shit till my third year in physics.

I needed to groove my blade so I could use the adjuster to move the blade, it worked perfectly:

there were also some random pieces that took home with me.

A small little future anvil, and a 1/2" chisel.

and this is why I need a mill. Doing this by hand is a bit beyond me.

We didn't have a T-slot bit so had to improvise, that's why the groove is so wide, at least wider than the original.

Blade upgrade

A quick one. 

The end result:

 As you can see the edge is a bit slanted. I didn't want to grind too much of the steel since still need to make the ura nice and flat I rather have some room to spare.

The small contraption for thicknessing filing. Tape helps to keep the bastard in place. On the background is another handle model, just wax and oil tho, larger than the previous but still a tad too small for that monstrous file. The best was to draw file it to get a nice even texture on teh back:

There you can see the slant. And the lamination, and the wrought iron.

Before you scream for me butchering a japanese blade into fitting a lie nielsen, let me show you the mirror side. (Still need to work a bit on it, but will be done in subsequent sharpenings.)

I had to grind pretty much 5mm on each side of the blade, it was left on the body and rust ate all the hagane where it was making contact with the wood, and on other places, still didn't manage to take away all the pit. The good thing of working with a japanese blade is that you can grind only the hagane holding the blade at 45 degrees from the stone and then simply file or saw the wrought iron, making for a faster job. 

I still need to make the groove where the adjuster fits, but I'm thinking that maybe that's a job for a milling machine. At the moment I just retreat the adjuster and push the blade if I need to. This is plane that mostly works in one setting only though.

That's it. 5 usd rusty blade turned into state of the art upgrade for western planes. (You may wonder why I own a brass plane? Well, small japanese planes are a tad too light for my taste, so in contrast to bench planes, here I do want metal in the body.)

 

Far too long

The drawback of being mildly active in Instagram is that I feel like I posted something when in fact the only thing I'm doing is to take pictures. The whole meat of thinking, critical philosophy and bacon are missing from there.

So I will try to take this again as the favored means of expression for all things wood.

So, first things first, my new handles:

I'm getting more and more friend of french polish. Very thin shellac, a rag and patience is all you need. And sand a bit if you want at the end. Micromesh is your friend if you want mirror finish.

(That's how far 10usd will take you in files in a Chilean flea market. Old Nicholson, Erizo and a Swedish one. )

The handles... I've spent quite a long time thinking about them. Or rather thinking on them, as Roubo would say. The sharpness of the lines doesn't come that easy. You need to gouge carefully and make scrapers that fit nicely on the curves. The one on the right is my favourite atm.

On the japanese department I rehandled a chisel and re-ura it on the grinder.

Making the ura was simpler than what I thought on the electric grinder but not as reliable as to do it with all my chisels. I'm thinking of a jig to help with this. I like skinny uras. Ideally though on should have different grinding wheels for different chisels. My wheel is 8" and anything larger than 15mm is not possible to make in one pass.

So, why did I end up handling my chisels? I was making a new blade for my small brass lie nielsen plane with A2 steel. What a piece of crap is the steel. It's like eating european meat when you have lived all your life in chile. A hard rubber without taste, it takes ages to sharpen and scratches super easy.

What else? Got kidney stones. First time in July for my birthday and then last week again. Not fun. That got me into bed for longer I'd like and implied that I had to spend more time working in front of the computer to catch up after that. But now summer is around the corner and we need to prepare for the summer school 2017, where we will finish the roof of the Kincho in puerto varas.

one for monsieur du Bois

After seeing that I decided to make this

I have a glass in my room that gives to the kitchen, and haven't finished it yet (what a surprise) since I wanted to make a moulding but didn't really know how, or what to put. Inspiration grows slow on me. The other problem was that I didn't have any cheap wood to use. (I'm repairing the house only with wood I've found on the streets of valparaiso, don't like to spend money on a house I'll leave sooner than later, and it's more fun also to tell people this piece comes from there, this one Keiran found, etc.)

So, my plan was to save enough wood to make a laminate and then mould it. Too many steps to accomplish it though. After seeing the video I found a 2"x3" piece of poplar that I had laying around and since poplar is the cheapest wood in chile, I just gave it a try. I liked the round and hollow mix and on the bottom used a 3/8th beading plane I got from UK before brexit.

I ploughed two channels where the flats are. Since I only have a small record plough plane I needed to make a big rebate before making the second channel. Then a lot of jack work to finally use the japanese round plane. I found that using them on a horizontal surface was easier than at 45 degrees, you only turn the plane on the final passes. It took like an hour for the 1m piece I was working on.

It's surprisingly accurate considering that everything was free-handed save the plough plane. That gives you the only references you need. The finish is straight from the plane, and I love to see those little flames of the poplar running through the moulding while in bed.

The profile was just sketched on the endgrain but I let the planes decided where they wanted to be. It's funny to see, how the proportions start to look right, just like the finish on the wood, it becomes a second nature, a way of living in the world. It starts to become difficult for me to leave a less shiny surface because my planes are well set and ready to use, and pretty much any one I take will work fine. The thing, then, is just a mere reflection of a deeper order, of a way of organising life, of what and who you are. I guess that's what really turns me on.

Impossible joint and instagram

I'm still alive.

I got sucked into the sub-world of instagram to connect with fellow chilean woodworkers and that made me lazy to write and gave me lots of input to practice. I see a joint I haven't tried, and go to the bench to make one similar.

Today saw the "impossible" joint in the column and could not figure out the drawing, so went ahead and cut a test joint:

This is the drawing:

I cannot see the numbers. After lots of thought and the aforementioned fucked up test cut, I discovered the numbers. The dovetails  on the big side have sizes of 240-188 and 188-134. The slope of the dovetails are not the same (as I was expecting since the mitres are at 45 degrees), one is 52/200 and the other 54/200. I guess that's allowance so they can slip into each other.

The test I made had the upper dovetail going inwards instead of outwards, so it doesn't work. But I think I know how it works so I will try it again tomorrow or the day after.

Furthermore, I've came to realise that working only with handtools is a lot of physical work. I'm making a "small" 1.5 meters box for julia for 2 months already, and I doubt it will be finished any time soon. The thing is too heavy and the wood is to hard to handplane it to thickness.

So I've been doing more smallish stuff.

I brought some bows with me last time I came from Germany, and I've started to play with them. Broke the head of one while trying to re-camber it, and I'm working on a frog of Curupay since don't have ebony at the moment. I'm practicing the movements, procedures and tools you need to make the bow hoping that I can spend some time at a bow maker next year if I go to europe for summer.

I've also done some work in Cumala, something like mahogany but softer and oily, a pleasure to work with. Here is a poorly designed stool that falls of you touch it on the wrong place. Should have kept the 3/10 slope of the japanese.

The tools for violin making are slowly arriving, have new small planes and japanese scroll gouges. The cheap chinese planes are kind of nice, if you like to file your tools before use. These are the ebay ones, thing of them as rough casting and you won't be too disappointed.

The pin on the left one was bent, so I complained and they sent another pair of planes.  Still waiting for those though. For 15usd each you cannot complain.

Got also a new kiridashi real thin and fragile, perfect for f-holes

and that's pretty much it, the things in Chile with the woodworking community are moving albeit slowly, but have met a few really nice people interested in learning the dark arts.

Finally, I think the next course will be a week long class making a small stool, sharpening and eating. People have complained about not having enough time and doing only exercises without a final result. my idea was that people didn't want to pay for repeating the same joint several times in a project but seems that the joints in abstracto are not so interesting as for me. This class will be far more expensive than previous ones and will require a basic toolset and sharpening gear. I will provide dimensioned wood for the project. Lunch will still be a community thing.

a map for the territory

When I came to chile last year I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I had applied for the postdoc a few days before and had to wait still 6 more months to know anything for certain.

I visited one of my best friends who lives in Valdivia, one of the cities I was tempted to move to but I found out it's far too polluted. Too many humans already, and they all want to be warm but don't want to wait for their wood to get dry. Anyway.

He's a Reichian psychologist, and gives lectures on Reich here in Santiago twice a month. I asked him back then how do you teach people, and his answer was quite straightforward: you just go and do it. "Go and do it?" I said. He nodded.

Then and there I made the ad for the carpentry classes I was going to give in June to Keiran and Jose. And the other that came. And then more.

Today, I don't have Gaspar to ask him how do I make a school. But I bet he would say you just go and do it. So that's what I'm doing.

Now, what's a school? A way to organise a person's time according to certain principles, ideas and expectations, in order to effect a transformation in the person such that they become another. So why people go to school? to be enslaved to other people's will and move their body according to some else's ideas.

In a very lacanian situation, the students submits themselves to the will of the master since he knows what the student doesn't. However, the truth that Socrates already showed is that the master doesn't have what the slave wants, and nevertheless they get it. They will even pay for it, and be in debt for the rest of their lives to pay for this slavement.

That's, of course, not my idea of a school.

Let's go back a bit on time and take a look at my own random walk through the gardens of woodworking. Or not, if you are long enough here you already know me and if not you can use the index on the side. But let's say that I've been mapping the territory. The sloppy lands of handrailing, the mountains of saw sharpening, the valleys of violin tops and the nothingness of what sharp is. What for? my mother would ask if she would be alive. Where are the cabinets, the drawers, the tables? Where is the money? my brother would add.

Well, I would answer them, what's the point of making a few tables, a bed, and three cutting boards when the whole world is going to hell real fast? What I want is to live in a beautiful world, and for that I need people. I need hundred, if not thousands, of carpenters working on their neat workshops and having fun. Earning a fair salary. Eating good food and drinking good wine. So I better be off thinking how to teach people and doing it fast, I'm not gonna be forever here.

And today I saw it. To make a school you just make a program. You choose some principles. You dream of a future where the students of today will be necessary. Then you keep track of peoples' advance and make them spend time at it. You establish traditions that will help constructing a certain world. You are hopefully smart enough to not perpetuate exploitation, racism and stupidity. Meaning, if you go to the university of Chicago is quite difficult you leave without being a neoliberal wanker, or if you go to Standford not to be a rapist. Fascism is in its fabric, in its being. Like colonialism is in what we understand as university nowadays. So you cook for each other, you care for each other, you help each other (and help others too), till you get used to it and it becomes natural. All this while learning to cut tenons, shape handrails and make hoppers.

...

And some days passed by.

I keep on thinking about the program, and see examples online and most of them are project based classes. But I don't really like this. For example, Opa always says that you need 3 years to learn violin making, and he teaches his students to make violins by making violins. This is very slow as you are generally bad at making violins at the beginning, mostly because you are bad at planing, cutting, chiseling and mostly sharpening. You can learn to make a neck with rasps and chisels, and they are not trivial to use either, but with only a knife is quite slower. But the latter teaches you more about the grain of the wood than the former, and thus is better. This way learning about knives and wood teaches you the basic to undertake the construction of a violin.

By isolating the techniques that show you principles instead of learning by doing projects I think you get more bang for your money.

But by making projects you give a complete new sense to what the student is making, a different kind of joy. The joy of poiesis, of giving being to something that didn't have it before.

...

And more days passed.

I see a white room with large windows, in a falling-into-pieces-old building. We have just moved in and there are only a few benches, so the first task of the new students is to make some more. Japanese planes decor one of the walls but seem overwhelmed by the emptiness of the place. There is an open kitchen and couches, and water steaming ready for tea and hide-glue. Maybe someone is playing a new guitar, the last french polish job we did at the workshop. Tap tap, brass hits metal and then the sweet sound of shavings flying. You are there.

Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space -- space even more than time.