READIN

Monday, July 28th, 2003

🦋 Seat height

More work on the window seat tonight, cutting out pieces for the rear half of the frame. I got a little worried when I was cutting the verticals, whether my planned seat height of 16" was adequate. Someone from WoodCentral thought it should be higher; and Bill from CJWA advised me to make the seat level with the window sill -- at 16" it is several inches below the window sill.

I went back upstairs and looked at the space again, and decided to stay with the planned height. Two free-standing chairs that are in the bay window now are 16" high, and it is very comfortable to sit on them. It also simplifies things a great deal not to have to worry about the window sill.

Before dinner, Sylvia was helping me in the wood shop. When I started sawing wood, I offered her to sit on a stool by the bench and watch, but she was not into it. "Can I have a little saw?" caught me a bit off guard -- I generally give her a small, non-dangerous copy of whatever tool I am using; but up till now that has not included tools with sharp edges. Looked around for a bit and then I realized, a mill file is exactly right: it has serrations, makes a rasping noise when you draw it across wood, and is not going to draw blood if you hold it wrong. So I gave it to Sylvia, and she had a good time sawing wood with it until we went up for supper.

posted evening of July 28th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, July 27th, 2003

🦋 Story stick

Finally began work (in at least a nominal sense) on my window seat. I measured and cut two story sticks tonight, one for the front of the frame (about 95", square ends) and one for the back (about 48", mitered ends), and marked the alignment between them. I think in the end, using story sticks is actually aiming for a higher degree of precision than is needed in this project; and certainly higher than I am going to attain. There are all kinds of things to deal with along the lines of, the floor is not level, the walls are not square; so it would probably make more sense to just work direct from the tape measure. OTOH story sticks is a really useful technique, one that I am not yet totally familiar with; and I build few enough projects that it is good to practice techniques that I want to develop, even if they do not fit exactly to the current project

A "story stick" is just a scrap piece of wood cut to a particular dimension of your project; you use this stick to mark the dimension on the relevant pieces rather than measuring it out on each of them. This helps ensure that pieces which are meant to be sized alike really are, and generally guards against error. In addition, you can mark key points on the story stick, such as mortise locations, to be transfered to the work pieces.

The reason the sizes I give above are approximate, is that I marked and cut the sticks from the actual size of the bay window where the seat will be located, rather than with a tape measure.

posted evening of July 27th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, July 26th, 2003

🦋 Projects

Here is an inventory of home improvement projects I want to work on:

• Window seat: which I have, ridiculously, still not begun working on; but today I bought some lumber for it and cleaned up my shop, so I have no excuses left...
• Paths in the front yard: I have the slate, I have the tools to cut it; I am hoping to do these paths in the third week of August, when I will be on vacation.
• Path next to the house: Really the same project as the above, I just don't think I have enough slate right now to do it. I want to see how the first path goes before I schedule the others.
• Backyard patio: Again, waiting to see how difficult this slate laying stuff really is.
• Stone at base of side porch: This is going to be pretty complex and I have not really planned yet how it should look.
• New steps for side porch
• Breakfast nook
• Bookcases for Ellen's office: Ellen is breathing down my neck on this so they may come before the breakfast nook.
• Bookcases for living room: I've had an idea for this since we moved here...
• Dining room table: Again, I've had a very clear picture of this kicking around my head for about nine months now.

posted evening of July 26th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003

🦋 Translation

In regards to the LanguageHat post on translating Wittgenstein -- I posted in his comments a translation of a line of Rilke that I think is pretty good, and maybe better than the previous translations that have been made of that line -- it was not hard, I used what seems like a pretty obvious device that seems, however, not to have occurred to J.B. Leishman, A.J. Poulin, Steven Cohn, or William Gass. And also I had some interesting ideas about the line of Wittgenstein that is quoted. So this is where I get things out of order and say, "Hey, maybe I've finally found my calling! -- I will translate German literature!"

But wait... what I translated was a single line, or half a line, out of the rather large Duino Elegies -- a work which I have not yet been able to make my way through. Perhaps though, some future exists for me as a translator of epigrams.

I have had some fun over the years translating German stories and other stuff, with varying degrees of success. I would like to reproduce here my best effort thus far, coincidentally also a poem by Rilke:

Der Novembertag

Kalter Herbst vermag den Tag zu knebeln,
seine tausend Jubelstimmen schweigen;
hoch vom Domturm wimmern gar so eigen
Sterbeglocken in Novembernebeln.

Auf den nassen Daechern liegt verschlafen
weisses Dunstlicht; und mit kalten Haenden
greift der Sturm in des Kamines Waenden
eines Totenkarmens Schlussoktaven.

The November Day

Cold autumn can muzzle the day,
silence its thousand jubilating voices;
from the high cathedral tower whimper, so peculiar,
from the steeple whimper, so peculiar,
death bells in November's mist.

On the wet rooftops lies sleeping
a white fog; and with cold hands
the storm inside the chimney's walls strikes
a death-karma's closing octaves.

It loses meter and rhyme which are, yes, rather important in the original -- but I think it communicates Rilke's image and feeling quite well. And I'm happy about preserving much of the word order and separation by line of images. By the way: is anyone else reminded very strongly of the end of Prufrock? -- I refer to the catlike fog which curled around the roof and fell asleep, I think is how it goes.

Update: I changed "high cathedral tower" to "steeple" in response to an accurate observation by LanguageHat that the former was too long. The rhythm is a lot better now. Also I took out a "the" in the following line and replaced it with an "'s". LH does not like the inversion in "lies sleeping/ a white fog", but I do, it's staying in there.

Update 2:I realize a potential major problem with this translation is, I have no clear idea what "a death-karma's closing octaves" means. If you have any thoughts in this regard, please let me know.

posted evening of July 23rd, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, July 12th, 2003

🦋 Sensual Pruning

I spent much of this morning and afternoon pruning bushes in our front yard, and came to really enjoy it. This is something that I am doing without investing any research in it, trying to go purely by instinct. (Plus I got a little advice from my father when he was here, and from the tree surgeon who worked on our big maple tree.) Figuring out which branch needs to come away and tracking it back to the appropriate separation point can be quite pleasurable. And trimming the hedges was really fun, like giving someone a haircut.

posted afternoon of July 12th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, July 4th, 2003

🦋 Old Windows

No, I'm not talking about 3.1... Today I rehung the first of the stuck windows in my house; there are about 5 in all, plus several that open and close but with a lot of resistance. Since I could not find actual, step by step instructions anywhere on the web or in any books I looked in¹, I thought I would write them out here. These instructions are only for windows with weights inside the frame; and specifically for windows built just like mine. I'm sure there are many variations on old window design; if you're taking yours apart and run into something different, you're on your own.

The first thing is to remove the sash molding. This is the rounded piece running up and down the side of the window frame, which holds the lower sash in place. ("Sash" is the thing that has glass in it and slides up and down.) The way to take this off is, first run a utility knife along where the molding joins to the window frame, i.e. the middle of the concave curve there; this will score the paint so that it does not chip during the next step. Now drive a chisel into this joint (assuming the molding is nailed on, not screwed) to force the joint apart. Once it is apart, use a crowbar to detach the molding. If the molding is screwed on, you will need to unscrew it first; this will probably be a huge hassle as there will likely be multiple coats of paint on top of the screws. It is a good idea to take both moldings off; being lazy, I only did it on the side where the weight was off, and this worked alright.

Note: William Duffield, of the Woodcentral Hand Tools Forum, recommends using two 1" putty knives, instead of a utility knife and chisel. One of them should be sharpened at the end. You will be able to run the knives along the joint and find the nails, and only pry where there are nails. This should significantly reduce the damage done to the molding.

Now you need to get access to the inside of the window frame. The way this was set up on my window was, underneath the sash molding was a screw holding a segment of the frame in place; once I undid it that piece came away. I have no idea how standard this setup is. Inside the frame will be a weight with a chain attached to it; the other end of this chain is supposed to be attached to the sash.

Remove the chain from the weight -- this should be straightforward -- and thread it through the pulley at the top of the windowframe. Your pulley may be stuck in place by old layers of paint -- mine was -- I do not think this is a big deal, the chain will just slide over the wheel instead of turning the wheel. Thread a nail or paperclip through the end of the chain, so you can leave it alone at the top of the pulley and work with the other end. Go back to the access hole in the frame, and fish out the chain, and reattach it to the weight. Put the weight back inside the frame.

Now you need to put the chain back onto the sash. Examine the other side of the sash (assuming that the weight was only off on one side) to see how it is attached. The way mine was on, was it threaded through a hole in the wood and then hooked on to a spring which was larger than the hole; the spring sat in a mortise in the side of the sash. Once both sides have their chains attached, you can put the sash back in its track, and nail the moldings back on.²

What I did next may be totally unconventional, I really don't know. At this point, the window slid up and down but, like several others in my house, it did not slide easily. This is particularly a problem for Ellen, who can't get some of them to move at all. So I just coated the sash track with bowling alley wax, and slid it up and down until it moved easily. I don't know how long this will last, but if it is still moving easily in a couple of days, I am going to do the same for my other resistant windows. Otherwise I guess I need to try something else...

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¹ -- to tell the truth I found several step by step guides to rehanging a window; but all were extremely non-specific, along the lines of "1. Take off the moldings. 2. Take off the sash. 3. Take off the sash cords. 4. Put it all back together." -- with accompanying full-color pictures that added nothing to the written instructions.

² -- Several books recommended reattaching the moldings with screws, so that it would be easier to do maintenance in the future; this strikes me as ass-backwards thinking. Everywhere in my house where there are screws on an exterior surface, they are covered with many layers of paint and hugely frustrating. (The screws which held the piece of the window frame in place above were underneath the sash molding, so not painted.)

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2003

🦋 Story idea

Woo-hoo! The germ, the very germ of a fiction has come to me while I slept last night! Here it is:

The story concerns two bloggers: a male programmer and a female cartoonist. The two interact for a while at the beginning of the story when he finds her site, is interested by the art, they e-mail back and forth; they add each other's sites to their links. Move forward in time, they have not looked at each other's sites for a while nor communicated, but the links remain. Fast forward a year (say) and he comes to be served with subpoena. She is under investigation by the Justice Dept. for violation of the CIPA -- she had begun a very graphic exploration of her identity as a rape survivor which includes images of her as a child deemed pornographic by Ashcroft's minions; a SWAT team has raided her residence and seized her computer with all blog data; and her referral log shows many visitors have gotten there via his link.

Not sure quite where the story goes from there; -- I am not sure how plausible the whole CIPA thing is and how much of a case they would have against her. I am thinking maybe the investigation will go away after disrupting everyone's life for a while. At which point he examines her site, finds it repellent -- he would not have linked to her if this stuff had been up when he first browsed it -- perhaps due to unresolved issues of his own? Maybe they will have further dialog, I don't know how this experience will affect her and her work, though I think clearly it would radicalize her -- I reckon she would have been kind of radical to begin with.

posted morning of June 25th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, June 21st, 2003

🦋 Window seat

I started taking measurements for the window seat I am planning to build in our sitting room's bay window. I have pretty well in mind what the thing should look like at the end, what I mainly need to do is take the measurements from the space. I have linked to the images as separate files because they are big, and I don't know how to reduce them. Here is a floor plan and front elevation:

The height of the seat (which you can't see because my scanner clipped it off) is 16"; I measured that height from a chair that feels comfortable. That is also good because it is a little over an inch short of the bottoms of the window sill moldings which will be above the seat. (I didn't draw the windows in to this plan but there are three of them, in the places you would expect them to be.) So, good: the length of the seat will be 94", and the width -- oh, now I see my scanner trimmed that off too -- the depth of the bay window is 36", and the depth of the part that is 94" wide is 14"; so I am thinking 32" is a good width for my seat. At 32", the front of the seat will be recessed a bit into the bay.

I want to build the seat as a frame of 2X4's and 4X4's, then cover that with hardwood -- 1/2" thick on the face and 3/4" thick on the seat. I'll use moldings in two key places -- the transition from the seat to the face, and the transition from the seat to the wall. Here is a plan of the frame, with rough dimensions written in:

And here is a plan of what the molding will look like (I have drawn in the window sill molding above the seat here):

I am trying to capture the Victorian style of my house in the profile of the seat. I did not draw the doors which will be in the face, because I have not figured out their dimensions yet; there will be two. I am thinking about cutting gingerbread into the doors to echo the house's eaves but I'm not sure about it -- I don't have a scroll saw and it would be a fair amount of work. The baseboard molding in the room, which will be matched along where the face meets the floor, is about 4" high.

Update: Here are some comments on the design from WoodCentral folks. They have convinced me to go with hinged holes in the seat to access the storage area, rather than doors in the face -- these will be easier to install and to use. I am nixing the idea of scrollwork in the face, too much work.

posted afternoon of June 21st, 2003: Respond

Sunday, June 8th, 2003

🦋 Who protects children and dumb carpenters

I want to tell a story about the work I did today on the shoe rack I had previously built -- and think I should make clear beforehand what I have in mind, so that I don't bog down in details. My basic points here are, that I succeeded in the task I took on largely through dumb luck; and that I ought, when I noticed that my initial design would not be an adequate solution, more thoroughly to have investigated the alternatives available.

The problem was, I wanted to bolt my shoe rack to the wall, since it is tippy and hard to avoid jostling against. However there is an obstacle at floor level which prevents the rack from backing up hard against the wall. Initially I thought this obstacle was the saddle in the door to the left of the rack, and my plan was to cut a square out of the back of the left leg so that it would go around the saddle. But when I took the rack away from the wall, I noticed that there was also a baseboard, which started about where the saddle left off, on the right side of the rack. My immediate thought was, I'll just cut a similar square out of the back of the right leg; I took the rack downstairs and got ready to do it.

But I noticed when I was laying out the cuts, the baseboard is too high; it will butt up against the bottom rail of the rack and keep it from going flush with the wall. More quick thinking; I decided to cut a mortise out of the back of the rail, to fit the baseboard. This is where I think I goofed; if I had been thinking more clearly, I would have just taken the baseboard off the wall. As it was, I made the mortise -- it took only about an hour -- and it is testament to the solidity of my joinery that the rack was able to take all that force without racking or breaking. But it is not an ideal solution -- the rack is now permanently wed to its current location, among other hassles.

posted evening of June 8th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, May 29th, 2003

🦋 Sandbox cont.

Tonight I screwed together one wall of the sandbox and planed it fairly smooth. On the way home I had an idea for how I could avoid needing to worry about the squareness of the through holes (see below); I would re-mark those holes on the bottom of each board and drill from the bottom. As it turned out this seemed like too much work so I just drilled from the marks I made yesterday; and it seemed to work fine.

My idea for planing was that since I am not particularly worried about straightness, I could go straight to the smooth plane. I tried this out and it seemed to work pretty well. The douglas fir planes pretty easily except where there are knots; and my ECE smoother can handle the knots. I got one section of really bad tearout when I was starting out; but it is on the inside of the sandbox toward the bottom (where it will be quite covered with sand), so I am going to leave it and figure noone will ever know.

I will need about 12 cubic feet of sand for this, which it looks like will weigh ½ ton. I am thinking I will get the sand in two trips but I will contact dad to check if that is a necessary precaution.

Update: Yep, Dad thinks it would be a good idea to take two trips.

posted evening of May 29th, 2003: Respond
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