Loading Up

Loading Them Up

Sorry for the length of time in between blog posts. We have been hugely busy, with a lot of big orders, and with figuring out the logistics of crating and shipping big beams. Here are some pics of us loading up our order to Dallas last week. We crated up a bunch of gigantic beams, the longest was 25 feet long! 

25 foot beam in a 26 foot crate

Richard working the forklift

7 big crates, 3 of which had beams tucked into beams...10 beams total

Y'all have a good week.

Shipping Beams

Shipping Beams

We got our first cross-country order in. We made two beams and are getting ready to ship them now. Here are a few pics of the crate we built to ship the beams in:

we put the small beam in the big beam

I had a dream about a beam within a beam

loading her up

So we are ready to ship! An unexpected benefit we found when planning to ship our beams is that since they are hollow, we can save a lot of space by putting small beams into big beams and then putting the big beam in the crate.

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.

2014 Habitat Home Expo Show

We at Ourso Designs and The Olde Mill were excited to participate in 2014's Habitat Home and Garden Show in Baton Rouge last weekend.

We were honored to win Habitat Home and Gardens 2014's Best in Show for Double Booth. We made a booth to showcase our two companies, Ourso Designs (kitchen and bath design), and The Olde Mill (wood shop producing custom hollow ceiling beams, tables, mantels, and more from antique wood). Our booth was actually made from our hollow box beams, and showcased our design and wood products.

practicing setting up the booth in the shop

the booth in action

Habitat Home Expo award

Thanks to everyone who worked to make the event a success, and thanks to everyone who came and saw us. See y'all there in 2015.

Blade Folding

Easier said, than done

These are the blades that we use on our Timberking 1600, a pretty great sawmill that we are still learning all the tricks to:

 We got in some more Long Leaf pine posts that we re-milled into veneers to make our hollow reclaimed wood ceiling beams. Last Saturday, we had some bad luck with blades that we thought were still sharp, but were just gunked up with sawdust and pitch from the pine we are cutting. So last week I soaked one blade in mineral spirits each night, and cleaned it off in the morning. But we just couldn’t get a straight cut with these blades, so we sent them out for resharpening, which requires you to fold the blade up and secure it with a zip tie or wire for shipping. If you, like me, have never really messed with replaceable sawmill blades, then this will help you when you find yourself folding a 14 foot saw blade.

Today I learned that folding a blade, if you don’t know the right technique, can be pretty tricky. I tried to hold the blade down on the ground with my foot, and then sort of wrestle it into the tri-folded shape. This worked some of the time, but more often I ended up with a blade pretzel that would whip me across the arms. After snapping myself on the arm a couple of times, I watched the video on folding blades on the DVD that came with our Timberking sawmill. Like everything in a woodshop, blade folding is almost impossible if you don’t know the right technique. If you guess, you will probably guess wrong.

 

Trying to wrestle the blade into shape.

 

Here is how you fold a 14 foot sawmill blade (wear gloves!)

1. Hold blade out horizontally, with your palms facing outwards:
2.  Turn your wrists in:                          
3. And catch the end of the blade folding towards you and finish the fold:
4. Then secure the blades with a zip tie:  
5. And you are ready to store or ship your blades.