Clamps, Time, and Pressure

Like a Fine Wine

Time plus pressure is part of the equation for the creation of most things: put carbon under pressure for long enough and you get a diamond; squeeze grapes and let the juice ferment and you make wine; apply glue to wood and apply pressure with clamps and let it dry overnight and the glue will adhere stronger than the wood itself.

diamond in the rough

stomping grapes

Clamping
Pretty much everything we do at The Olde Mill is done by hand. We miter the sides of our hollow ceiling beams into interlocking male and female joints, apply glue, and clamp them together.

beam clamped up

the abyss gazes back

Make Haste Slowly
Like most things worth doing (woodwork, making wine, waiting for diamonds to form), our beams take time (and pressure, and possibly some heat). Thinking about it takes me back to high school Latin, and the phrase "festina lente", or "make haste slowly". Not a bad motto to reflect on during your day; it makes me think about the steady, but not rushed, approach it takes to work in a wood shop. If you rush things, you will make critical mistakes that add up to a poor creation; you take too long and you'll produce so slowly that you won't make a profit. I've been guilty of both: like most things it takes a tenuous balancing act.

Y'all have a good week. Make haste slowly.

Tree Ring Science

What do the trees tell you?

There is a secret history of the Earth, hidden inside of trees. Did you know that tree rings are as accurate as a calendar? That tree rings are better than a calender at tracing the weather patterns and climate changes of the past, based on how they affected the tree rings growth? We knew, in the back of our heads, that tree rings represented the age of tress, but that was about as far as our knowledge went, so we turned to Google.

How do scientists use tree rings to create accurate maps of history? Dendrochronology . We think it is fascinating to think about the fact that you can accurately date a tree based on the number of rings inside of it. You can tell how high or low a nearby river was year to year based on the rings characteristics. If there was a specific climatological event one year (say a drought, a flood, a fire), every tree that got through it will have a ring that shows that event.

Where are the 80's?

What is it good for?

Tree rings can be used to reliably date pieces of art from antiquity. Lots of old paintings were either painted on wood or at least the canvas was attached to a wooden frame. If either of those are the case, then dendrochronologists can x-ray the wood and study it to determine its age (this can also determine whether or not an art piece is a fake or not; if it dates to too early or late, then it may be an imposter).

Stradivarius violins are the most treasured violins in the world:

Stradivarius

Antonio Stradivari, an Italian instrument maker, was born in 1644 and died in 1737. His violins are famous as being THE violin to play, and so, countless imitations have been made by instrument makers wanting to capitalize on the Stradivarius name, some going as far as marking the imitation violins as Stradivarius. Dendochronology is one of the best ways to determine the authenticity of a Stradivarius. The tree rings can date and place the location of the wood used to make the violin.
  

The implications

Realizing that an exact year is so accurately measured by a tree growing in nature seems crazy at first, considering how chaotic we tend to think nature is (storms, drought, random dispersal of plants and animals), but if you really think about it, we get our idea and measurement of a year based on patterns we observe in nature: the planets travel around the sun, night and day, the growing and harvesting of plants, the change of the seasons, etc. So our concept of time (years, calenders, etc.) is literally a map of the change and passing of objects in space, and of the life cycle of birth, growth, and death. Like tree rings. The universe spins like a clock, life is born and dies as it should, dendrochronologists count the rings in trees. 

this is actually a guy's kickstarter project

 

The New Olde Mill

The Olde Mill

Nobody makes custom hollow ceiling beams and fireplace mantels like we do at The Olde Mill, a new wood shop working out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Olde Mill offers hollow, lightweight alternatives to solid wooden ceiling beams and fireplace mantels, created with a custom technique unreplicated anywhere else.

the mantel stained

the mantel raw

Our fireplace mantel is lightweight (one person can lift one up alone, and install one by themselves in five minutes), but ease of installation isn't the only benefit. Our whole crafting process is done by hand with a meticulous attention to detail. Most hollow beams and mantels are made with two mistakes:

1) they leave an unsightly seem where the sides meet, and

2) they don't use real end caps to make the two end sides.

Most hollow beams just use the same grain as the long sides, and so you end up with a product that looks fake. Our beam sides are miter locked together in order to craft seamless edges, and our end caps are cut right off of the same logs we cut the sides of your beam or mantel from.  As far as we know, nobody in the country makes and sells hollow mantels with real end grain end caps or hollow ceiling beams made out of real antique wood with no seems.

And because our beams and mantels are lightweight, they are ideal for retrofitting. If you want to add ceiling beams to any room in your house, you can do so without having to do major reconstruction to support the weight of solid beams.

our beams and mantel in action

These pictures are from one of our first completed orders; they recently finished their new renovation, which turned out great. We are going to go to their house for more photos soon.