 to the Main Charitable Mechanics Association to the library. This is really one of the best rooms in Portland, I think. If for anyone who doesn't already know, I want to be sure and point out that it's an active card catalog. So if you're nostalgic, try looking stuff up and actually want it to work. This is a great place for that. Use of the library lending is one of the privileges of membership. If people are members already, this becomes free if you are a member of the programming that you do. Also it's free and a part of the deal. The Main Charitable Mechanics Association is a neat place. It's been here since 1815. This building was built by members of the association in 1857. Yes, wow, exactly so. And from the beginning, the MCMA has been an organization of makers for makers. And it still is that way. So obviously there's been a transformation since the days when cooper's and buggywood makers made up the membership, but the maker community here in Maine is really robust and fascinating. And so this is starting to be one of the places where makers can get together, meet each other. And this is one of the venues in which that happens at the makers at the Hall of Electric Series. So obviously the last Wednesday of every month we're here. We invite in one at a time some of the extraordinary makers who live and work here and have them share with us what they do, why they do what they do. It's also a chance for y'all to meet each other, to meet and chat with the folks who are speaking. The sort of structure of the evening, I'll get done in a moment. I'll introduce our speaker. Well, he'll do his thing. There'll be a little time for Q and A. There's one in Cape for continuing the conversation in an informal way beyond that. And Carolyn has just let me know there's been some interest expressed in seeing the rest of the building, but in particular the ballroom. And she'd be happy to take anybody who's interested upstairs to see that once things fall down in here. So without further ado, this has been a steel, a landscape gardener and woodworker from families now in Yarmouth in an extraordinary sounding 1860 farmhouse, timber frame with a crazy big barn. And I won't say any more than that because he's here to do that. So. Thank you very much, Megan. Thank you guys all for coming tonight, taking your time to come learn about what I'm up to. My company, I actually have two businesses for really intertwined together. It's Wheelwright Landscapes and Wheelwright Woodworks. The reason why I chose the name is because I was given that name as my middle name. And I really like circles and I thought it kind of made sense to me to use it. And hence I am Wheelwright and my logo is the flower of life. And I definitely draw a lot of inspiration from sacred geometry and the flower of life. Pretty much makes up everything that we are and everything around us. So it's a pretty interesting logo. I actually traded pruning work in exchange for the logo. So it was a nice exchange, go ahead. This is actually a picture of the first gardens I built. And these were for myself. As you can see, I really like the circle patterns. At the time I was studying permaculture. Bill Mollison has wrote a lot about permaculture and I bought his book, The Designer's Manual. I would highly recommend you guys look into that if you haven't already looked into it. It's really a beautiful book. In his book he talks about natural patterns, patterns found in nature. And he talks a lot about the Fibonacci spiral and obviously mandala shapes are common in a lot of cultures. And so I wanted to build a mandala garden. So I built the mandala garden first and then in the years to follow I added the two other gardens. So you can go ahead and click it. So as you can see it's sort of cool from the top and it's funny because the garden on the right actually, I like to watch history channel. So I've actually started to look at this shape and it looks a lot like Atlantis to me, the lost city. And I thought it was kind of weird that I kind of created that garden just out of the plain function of it. I wasn't trying to actually make that shape. I just wanted to lay out a shape that was efficient and the beds on the outside are four foot, the paths are two foot, the beds on the inside are four foot. So you have a two foot path with a four foot garden bed and then a four foot circle in the middle so you can reach everything from every side. And when you lay it out that way it turns into this really cool shape. So a lot of times when I do my design work I'm often letting the form of it follow the function. So it's all about function for me, not high tech pretty stuff. Although I really like, as you will see in the following slides, things to be quite pretty because that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make the world a prettier place. You go ahead and click to the next slide. This was actually the neighbors of mine at the time and they used to walk their dog and they would always look through in and see my gardens and one day she's actually, she's a surgeon in Portland. She came by and said, hey, do you do gardens? And I said, no, but if you want me to do one for you I'd be more than happy to. So she said, yeah, we'd love it if you'd build us a garden, we really love yours. So this is what I was working with and I transformed it into this and this was sort of the early phases of me bringing wood into the landscape projects that I did. So I built these cedar beds for her and about three years later came in and built those two trellises for her after because I had done some other ones that she really liked and she wanted those too. So it's nice when you can talk people into doing fun stuff and that was kind of the case here and I did some other stuff for them as well. This was another project that I did that incorporated wood in the landscape. This was for a lady that lives off of Eagles Nest Road in Scarborough and she really was particular about how much she loved her birds and she lives on Eagles Nest Road. So I figured I wanted to do something that was sort of like birdsy a little bit and I drew from that inspiration and I tried to create something with wood that resembled a nest. And these are some of the materials that I used. I actually, at the time I really didn't, I'd never done it before, I Googled waddling. This is actually a waddle garden that I built and we didn't have any sources of willow which is what typically they use for waddle work in Yerp. So I was looking for straight pieces of wood and really the only thing that I could find was this apple sucker wood. And I had the idea that I would just go around and prune apples for people and take the wood and make this garden. And I didn't really know what I was getting into and this was one load and I think it took like about 10 of those loads to build this garden. And I got to the point where I was literally driving around looking for apple wood because I couldn't find anywhere, I burned through all the places that I knew had it. And it went into the winter where I was still working on it looking for wood. But these are really nice pieces. I was calling these dream weavers. You can go ahead and click it to the next one. And this is what I was looking for. So I was driving around neighborhoods and I was looking for apples that hadn't been pruned in 10 years. And these are what they call water spouts and apples and they're the suckers that shoot up. And when you prune an apple you really want to take all of those out. So this particular tree was a couple of older folks that lived up in Sabatus. And I stopped by and said, hey I really think your apples could use a pruning and I would do it in exchange for the wood. And they said, you must be sent from heaven because we've been wanting to prune these trees for years and we just can't afford to do it. And I said, well, it's your lucky day. So I pruned all the apples on their property and was very happy to do so. And I honestly thought that this was gonna finish my project off, but it didn't. Go ahead and click to the next one. So I had the bright idea that if I took the bark off the wood it would last longer. So we started peeling it. And my brother Josh got involved. My sister got involved. Everybody got involved. And we peeled and peeled and peeled and finally I realized that I wasn't gonna be able to peel every twig. So I did a little section where I blended it in and it looked pretty nice. But I pretty much gave up on the peeling idea. So this is the garden and bloom. And it really worked out quite nice actually the way the waddle held the plants up. It was like sort of like a little cradle for the plants. The squash really liked it as you can see. Go ahead and click to the next one. And I got these posts from a friend of mine. They were some old, it was a dead cedar snag that I wanted to use for the entrance. And then I built a trellis form as well. So after experiencing the waddle garden made out of apple I started to realize that that wasn't really all that sustainable because after like three years it started to like disintegrate a little bit. I did give my client four warning that it was probably not gonna last all that long. But she said, don't worry about it, we're 85. We just want something to enjoy right now. I said, perfect, sounds good to me. But I wanted to find a way to do something like that with something that was gonna last a long time. And my love of black locust, which is the wood I use for this, led me to doing this type of waddle fence. This is made with black locusts that I took and I actually started with rough sown black locust boards that I got from a gentleman in Sheffield, Massachusetts because I couldn't find any black locusts around here and no one sells that I was aware of. So I drove all the way down there, filled up my trailer with some black locust and started ripping it into three eighths inch strips and me being the perfectionist or at least try to be as perfect as possible and that's sort of my objective in life. I decided I was gonna round each piece. So I routed all four sides of these pieces, all the posts, rounded everything. I wanted it to be nice and soft. So about 4,000 strips. Times four. You know, you're talking quite a few passes through the old router. So I got my workout for sure and I went through a few blades but it really did come out quite beautiful and I was really happy with it. And it's been now four years and it's still looking really nice. As well as the locust fence, I made the hand woven trellis which is sort of a staple of my edible art skate projects that I make. I like to use the vertical space as much as possible and instead of buying a panel and slapping it in, I actually make these by hand. It's actually pretty quick now but it's a little time consuming. This was the gate I made for the fence and this was actually thinner strips that I steamed. I had to steam them to make, because the gate's actually a three foot wide gate so and I have one, two, three, four posts technically so it's a tight weave. So in order to do it without the pieces breaking, I had to steam them. So this was the first attempt I had at steam bending wood and making something with it. It worked out really nice and it's really a really pretty gate. You know, that's a good question but I would imagine as soon as it starts to cool off and lose moisture, it would probably be less flexible. I really didn't have any experience at all with it. I actually did what I always do. I went to Google and how do you steam bend wood? You know, I made a little box to do it and there it was. It actually worked beautifully. It was really easy because really the hardest part was getting the nails on the ends and getting them flat. You know, and it worked out really nice and none of them have popped in three years so the jury's still out on it. You know, that's how I usually learn the hard way but going back over the years and seeing the work and seeing how it performs in the field it sort of makes me a little bit wiser and I change, accordingly I change my techniques. You can go ahead and click to the next one. This is another wood project in my landscape business. You know, just a little blurb about me. You know, I do the woodworking because I love it. I'm passionate about it. That's not something that I've done to make money. Actually I haven't even sold one of my pieces. I do it because I love it and really the landscaping is my primary business and that's where I make a living. So anyway, I was making this black locust garden out of wood that I got down in Sheffield mass as well. Black locust benches. I made a nice black locust arbor trellis with through tenons. So, you know, I learned a lot through this which sort of catapulted me into the interest of making furniture. So this is sort of a progression of my learning in experimenting. These are applewood tomato towers that I made and, you know, again the applewood isn't all that durable over the long haul. It looks beautiful right when you make it like this but they really dry out fast and these probably aren't even in service anymore. So I started to change my design philosophies and use different materials. This was sort of the first phase which was Cedar. This was a garden I did with a friend of mine in New Jersey that we co-designed and built. It was a garden in Rumps in New Jersey. You can go ahead and click to the next one. And then this was the next phase for me which was making it out of black locust. Which for anybody that's, I don't know if anybody here is familiar with black locust. It's a wood that's native to the, like the Appalachian mountain range. It's not a native here but it's found a lot in this area because back in the early 1800s when people were moving to Maine and New England to farm they often times clear cut the entire forest and they didn't have any shade trees because if they left a tree it would often get blown over because it was suddenly exposed to the elements. So they wanted a fast growing tree to put near the house to provide shade and also to act as like a lightning rod so that the tree would get struck not the house. So people started to plant a lot of black locust trees on farms which is where you find a lot of them now for that reason. Black locust is the most durable wood in North America. It's extremely high in silica content. They used it in Colonial Williamsburg for the early structures there and they went back 100 years later and the posts were still totally intact. So it's really extremely rot resistant. It's sort of like a tropical hardwood that grows here. It's also a tree that spreads rapidly and quickly and it tends to outreach its intended area of planting. So it's on the invasive species less here in Maine now. And you'll find a lot of black locust often is has companion plants like bittersweet, you know, barberry, other invasives. They all sort of tend to cluster together and the black locust is strong enough to support the vines and the weight of the vines and they're really burly looking. You'll see them along the road, along the highways of highway department planted them extensively because they're really good at stabilizing steep slopes because of their rhizomatous behavior. But so I continued with the black locust, the design that I had in the three earlier phases, when I started to want to move the tomato cages around the garden and I would try to pull them out of the ground, the nails would shift so then they would rack. So then I could, you know, I'd putting them into the new spot, you know, I want things to be pretty much real square in level and they were getting knocked out of level. So then I came up with this is the current design with through tenons on all the cross pieces so it can't rack. And then I used the poly twine that I used on the woven trellises just to make it a little lighter too. So this is, these have been out for two, like in their second season now so, so far so good. You can pull them right up and they're not racking and so far so good. This is another example of using wood in my landscape projects. This is a project I did for some people up in Wayne, Maine and they wanted me to build them a vegetable garden and you can see the tomato towers in the background there and the other trellises over on the left and I talked them into doing a worm bin. And they said, sure, let's do it. And I said, oh, wonderful. So this is a worm bin that is recessed two feet into the ground and I dug a three-foot hole and put about a foot across stone under it and then set the granite and after four years the worms are still thriving and this was an experiment because I had never heard of anybody doing it in Maine because of the cold temperatures but I figured if I went three feet deep, there wasn't going to be much frost that deep and the worms could migrate down in the winter and come back up in the spring and they're really thriving. Go ahead and click to the next one. You can see how it opens up but it also is like a deck. You can walk right across it so it's sort of like part of the patio but I really like this. I was actually just up there the other day because I maintained the gardens for them still and everything's really nice and this is a really nice system if you do want to compost and you want no smell and you have a little space outside your kitchen door and this is a wonderful way to compost it's really low maintenance. Fourth year and we still haven't emptied it. It's three feet by five feet in dimensions so. So where do I get my black locust? That's, I got a little bit tired of driving all over New England looking for it and after searching high and low I had no one was selling it in Maine and finally I started to think about it and I started to call Arborus and I said this black locust everywhere I see it everywhere and I started to drive around and sure enough I saw five logs on the side of the road on Route 88 and I left a note on them and said I would be really interested in these logs please call me and I got a call back and that was where it all started and then I was lucky enough to get the possession of this tree which is a tree that was growing on Main Street in Freeport. It was an 1860s inn, the Kendall Tavern Inn in downtown Freeport and the gentleman that owns the inn didn't want the tree to go to Firewood and he was looking for someone like me an artist to utilize the wood to make beautiful things out of. So I found them online and I agreed to make them a table and return for the wood and pay for it to be trucked to my house and that's what I did and I sawed this wood up and it's drying now and I'll be making some nice pieces out of it in the coming years. I also find wood in my landscaping work when storms roll through like the storm we had last, I think it was October we had that big blow and this beautiful curly maple tree got blown down, it was actually at one of my client's house and it had to be taken down so I was able to salvage some really nice pieces from this tree as well and I'll be making some stuff out of this in the future. But it's usually the storm damage that creates the flow of wood for me. In a lot of this really big wood that you'll see that's damaged in these storms often times we'll just go to the landfill because it's too big for people to process into firewood and it's much too big for the mills to make lumber out of because they don't have throats big enough to fit these logs into their saws. So it's an opportunity and I've sort of jumped on it, I ended up buying a chainsaw mill with a 54 inch cutting capacity. So I can cut pretty much anything that Maine can throw at me. This is a log that I was lucky enough to get from Lucas Tree Service. I was driving down the road and I saw the log in the back of their truck and I said, oh my God, look at those logs. And I just followed this guy right back to his yard. And then I went in there and I said, what are you guys doing with this wood? And he's like, he goes, well, it's probably gonna end up going to Bitterford to the dump. We don't want to, we can't do anything with it. So in my other lifetime, I was a golf pro and I worked for a season at Portland Country Club and I remembered that the owner of Lucas Tree Service is a member at Portland Country Club. He might remember me. So I wrote him an email and said I was interested in these pin oak logs and he said, they're all yours. Have fun. So I was lucky enough to get this beautiful log from them. It's about 52 inches on one side in diameter and about 46 on the small side. This side. And if you look at the size of the tire, I mean it's a monster. So I've sawed this up and it's all in slabs now. So this will make some beautiful dining room tables. And this is how I saw it. This is how I saw it up. I saw it up with a double powered Alaskan chainsaw mill that two people operate. And it's not for the light of heart, even though Victor makes it look pretty easy. It's not easy work and it's a little scary when you're making those first cuts that head high and you're thinking to yourself, is this my day? Because if that chain comes off, it's going to come right at your head. Lucky nothing's happened, but we try to be careful with it. Victor is an old schooler, so he doesn't like all the protective gear. He says he likes to hear the saws running. He said, okay. This is trimming the pin oak to length. And that's a four foot bar. This is actually one of Lucas Tree Service's top arborists. And he was the one that cut the tree. He said it was the biggest pin oak cut in Maine. And I said, oh, interesting. He said, I'd really like to get a couple pieces of it. And I said, no problem. What do you want? He said, I want a couple cookie slices. I said, you go ahead and have at it. So he came over before we milled it and cut some cookie slices. And then I actually gave him a couple of nice slabs out of it, too. I thought he deserved it. The other way that I find the wood is online. And this was black walnut that came from Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey. So I found a guy that was selling some of it in New Jersey and I went down and got some. And he also sold me some black locusts because he had some. This was before I had my own source locally. So I was lucky enough to get my hands on some of that. And you're going to see in the future pictures, a table I made out of one of these slabs. So in order to make furniture out of these pieces of wood, you have to make them flat. And when you're dealing with pieces of this awkward size and shape, oftentimes people around don't have planers wide enough to handle these types of pieces of wood. So I use a router, a hand router to flatten them. And that's a router jig. So you have to go over it. It's a slow process, but it's very precise. It also sort of leaves a rough texture to it, so it takes a lot of sanding to get it out. It's not necessarily the most efficient way to do it, but it works and it's low-tech. And then once I've got them flat, I like to try to put a little of my love touch to it. And that's something I just kind of came up with. When I was building the locus tomato towers and fences, I like to round things off and make them soft and smooth and ease the edge a little. So this was kind of my idea of easing the edge by hand and not using a router that probably wouldn't have worked anyway because it's sort of like an odd shape. And this particular piece where the pieces came together, it was sort of like an uneasy not-so-solid connection. And I didn't want it to fall apart, so I ended up getting a two-foot drill and drilling all the way through this piece and joining it into the other solid piece. And then I put two stainless steel bars through this particular piece and glued them together so that it wouldn't fall apart. I love there was a beautiful piece and you're going to see why in a little bit, but that's sort of I'm not afraid to go to extreme lengths to make something work because quite frankly I was doing it for the fun of it, not so much for the financial reward of it all. It was sort of my passion. And I was doing it in the winter when I'm not busy with my landscaping. Part of what I'm trying to accomplish is trying to take what the wood offers and add some cool features to it. In this case, this was a rotten section that was all punky and then I just chiseled it all out because I didn't want to have a punky section that was soft in the finish of the table and I cleaned it all out and then I filled it up with resin to about a quarter inch and then I followed that with some crystal inlays which you can see here. I used red opal and turquoise and then I filled the cracks and checks in the wood from the drying process with blue lapis. So I have three types of crystals in this piece. In my travels I've sort of learned that everything around us has a frequency and a vibration and there's a reason why healers over the years have used crystals because they have healing properties to them. They resonate frequencies that are we don't really see but we might feel. Turquoise they say makes you a little calmer. So anyway, I thought it would be nice to add a little bit of energy to the piece and I do that with some crystals. This is an example of one of my more rustic pieces. It's really a pretty simple technique. I use a hand drill with a tenon cutter and then I use branches of wood. In this case this was a wood that insects had gotten into the under the bark layer and they chewed little patterns in the branch and I really thought that was neat so I made legs out of them and I drill a two-inch hole in the bottom of the piece and then that's a an inch and a half diameter tenon that's pretty much completely solid so it's not necessarily the most complicated way to make a leg attachment. It's not a fancy dovetail or other mortise and tenon type connection square but it's really strong and that's what I'm trying to do. I don't think I have enough skill to really make those intricate ones anyway. Probably the area that I excel the most at in my woodworking from my perspective is in the finished work I grew up working on boats and detailing boats so I gained a high appreciation for detail. Part of the finished process for me is filling all the voids. So I do that with resins and I fill all the cracks and I don't know if anybody I know there's one woodworker here he'll probably agree with me that you can't just do it in one step because the resin will sink in and it will absorb into the cracks. To fill all the voids in a piece like this it takes about three or four applications of resin and then you need to sand down and then you can start applying the finish. So it's quite a long process just to fill the voids especially when you're working with burl wood which tends to have more pores in it and this is a burl that was harvested in Cumberland, Maine by a friend of mine who's also an artist Danny Boudreau. He had these burls sitting in his barn for twenty years and he didn't know what he was going to do with them and I came by one day and said hey Danny I'm looking for some interesting wood do you have any cool pieces I know you collect wood he's like I got some burls so he started feeling around in his garage he he doesn't have any eyesight anymore he's pretty much a hundred percent blind started feeling around he's like oh yeah this is an oak burl you'll love this so I ended up leaving with a partial truckload of burls from Danny and this was part of it so this is uh... a piece of wood that I got off of a log that is curly ambrosia maple this tree was cut in South Portland and it was going to go to the dump and it was a giant log and the guy that I deal with for the wood called me and said hey man I've got this monster maple wood piece of wood I'm going to take it to the dump do you think you might be interested and I said I said I'm really kind of only interested in the black locust okay he's like I don't know it could be kind of interesting so he brought it over and I didn't know what I was getting into I saw it up and I sure enough it was all curly the whole log pretty much a miracle to be that lucky but I was that lucky and this was the top of the log piece and as soon as it came off the mill I knew exactly what I was going to make out of it a coffee table because I could see the shape I knew pretty much exactly what was going to be and this is what I this is what I created with that piece it's a really pretty piece the metal base was done by a a friend of mine in Portland Jeff Herger who's a metal fabricator slash metal artist who has an he's extremely talented and he's been really a pleasure to work with I kind of told him what I wanted and he's exceeded my expectations there's a top view of it and you can see the the figure in it it's highly figured it's got a lot of curl and it also has a lot of the ambrosia coloration this is the only piece I've made so far with the wood I actually have another I have a whole stack of the slabs that are all longer and wider than this so I'm thinking I'm probably going to end up making countertops out of it or dining room tables this is another piece that I made out of a scrap piece top of the log cut I was actually sawing this log with a friend of mine Ethan Neteru who is also a woodworker grain woodworking down in Portland and he actually is the one that really got me into the to find in the wood he's a he's actually a tree climber and he said hey Ben I want to saw up a log I need someone to run the other side of the mill I said I'm all over it if you give me a piece so I got one of the nice slabs out of this but then I said what are you doing with these top and bottom pieces he said firewood I said I think I think I got an idea for him can I take him he's like yep and so that there it is and it's kind of a cool piece I really like it you can go ahead and switch to the next one this is an inlay I did on that piece of turquoise through the whole crack basically just flipped it vertical and then tape both sides and tap that turquoise in and then filled it with resin it got a little bit expensive because the turquoise isn't that isn't that cheap and it actually takes a lot to fill a crack like that this is another this is the other piece from that same log which was the bottom I thought was really interesting because if you look you can see there's a hole in the very middle of it and that's the bottom of it I thought it had a neat shape I actually thought the bottom might be more interesting than the top and that was the piece that I made with that with that slice you know it to me it looks like a hammerhead shark if you look from the top because it's got the mouth and the eyes it's it's hard to see from this this angle but if you look straight down on it you can see the eyes and the and I also did inlay work on that piece as well there's Jeff in his shop uh... you'll either find them at the shop or you're gonna find them down at the commercial street pub but uh... he he's a guy that I thought I worked a lot until I met Jeff this was a Sunday and he said come in I'm working on the the bar top piece why don't you come in and take a look and so I figured I'd take a picture of him doing his thing he's quite the magician with the wood or the metal excuse me there's the top view of the piece you can see the the eyes here the mouth in the nose and then the hand so I think it looks like a hammerhead shark the nice thing about the wood is people will see whatever they want to see in it you know I'll see one thing and someone else come along and see a a monkey in it who knows what they'll see but it's it's really amazing the grain textures and how they uh... they just appear to you and you see what you want to see in the piece this was a piece of that walnut that I got from hurricane sandy it's actually it was about three inches thick which is actually pretty rare for a slab of wood of walnut and then when it dried it warped quite a bit but I was able to to get a net two inch finish out of this which is actually pretty rare you won't find a lot of walnut slab tables that are actually two inches thick but this is a two inch thick piece of wood and I actually had this cnc flattened I was really busy at the time and I didn't want to spend about six or seven hours probably more flattening it so that I had the cnc flattened he said he had it on the machine for like eight hours there's a top view of it and you can see there's a little bit of figure to this piece as well and I did it inlay which I did before we had it flattened which I probably shouldn't have done because it dulled the blade so much on on this angle you can see there was a little void that was left after I had it milled flattened and then I cut the radius so I was like oh okay I'll just stuff some more turquoise in there and it actually worked out kind of neat and when the light comes down through it actually lights up from the sun so it's really kind of neat how sometimes the mistakes are the best you get you get some really interesting results so this is this is pretty much what I did in my first year and this was all from the one log actually it was one tree for about four logs of the tree that I drove by on Cumberland foreside and saw the butt ends of them and I said oh boy I know exactly what I'm doing with that I could see these tables and this is what I did and that's really what got me started I produced all these in one off season and that's really what got me going on it these pieces I was lucky enough to get into edge compoters in Portland and Booth Bay they sell them there this is a nice example of taking advantage of nature's work this is where the ambrosia beetle chewed its way in and it left a perfect little void for some color and to me it looks like a brain but I don't know could be an alien brain I don't know that's the curly ambrosia maple and that was a cool rustic bench that I made that I use for myself and this is another piece of black locust and I call this piece the ghost it's hard to see from this angle but I see an eye there and an eye here and a mouth and a tongue and you know the ghostly body but you know again you'll probably be able to see whatever you want to see in it another example of how nature's chaotic ways create an opportunity for the craftsmen the beetles chewed the heart of this piece out and I was able to fill it with a little bit of rock that I had in the backyard I put a lot of black tourmaline in it um quartz and then of course I used some other more exotic crystals I used the red opal and some amethyst little touch of turquoise and filled it all up with some interest and I really like this piece and Jeff made the base for me which is a little bit funky but I really like it you can go ahead and click this was another burl piece that I got from my friend Denny Boudreau um box elder burl and it was cut in Cumberland four side Denny was saving it to build sculpture with and when he was feeling it he's like oh I remember this piece it was you know because it's real prickly you can you can see there's a little I left a little bit of it when I cut cut the circle I left a little bit of that outside texture and he said oh I never could quite figure out what to do with it and I said well I think I can make some tables out of it that's what I did and that's an example of how I left a little bit of the natural edge I kind of think they look a little bit like globes like earths you know it's really quite interesting to see how porous it is and that's actually after a lot of resin work I just didn't do the final I didn't do this this was an oil wax finish and the pieces over here from the same burl wood and those are the Miracot epoxy finish so those are there's no porosity left in it but you can see there's still a little bit in these this is a piece of wood that I I got from Lucas Tree Service as well they had about a four foot section of it and I was driving through their yard and I said what are you guys doing with that piece and he said he goes I don't he goes this is our worst nightmare I can't run that thing through the splitter he's like we're gonna have to take it to the dump I said well I might be interested he's like well go get your trailer and we'll load you up that's what I did and I brought it home and dumped it out and it flipped out and landed up right now I said oh geez thank god it didn't break anything it's a white ash it was a white ash tree I later found out it was actually probably the biggest white ash that they had ever caught in Maine this piece is about forty-seven inches in diameter so it's pretty big and it's about five inches thick Jeff did some wonderful work here you know I kinda came up with the design I wanted it to be the radius I really like the radiuses and the circles and and then Jeff made a little bit of a mistake with it and he ended up I had originally had this coming out of the top and Jeff did it underneath he called me up and said why don't you come take a look I loved it I thought it was absolutely amazing because it looks to me like the top grows out of the bottom and it's very organic looking so that's what we went with and uh... I mean he's a real genius it's all aluminum so it's very light so it's uh... two people can pick the piece up no problem moving around but if I had made that out of steel you know what a way it's probably twice as much as it does and the nice thing about this piece again is it's it's curly this has a lot of curl to it you can usually tell if you have curly wood when you look at the cross cut and you see the wave pattern that's how you can tell if you have and if I flat saw if I had flats on this would made slabs it would have all been the wavy figure it was only four foot a four foot chunk so it wouldn't really made great tables but and I really was into cookies at the time so I saw them all up into cookies really hard to dry these without them making massive cracks so I actually made a pile and I made I made the stack in a big pile of coconut fiber that was dried so the coconut fiber slowed down the dry rate but the coconut fiber is extremely uh... hydrophilic which is a term you use it absorbs water extremely rapidly coconut fiber holds up to seven times its own weight in water I use it for the mulch on my vegetable gardens it's the byproduct of the coconut harvest so they cut I think there's like thirty two products that come from a coconut and one of them is the fibers and the fibers are wonderful they have incredible properties for growing food and vegetables but I just kind of thought hey maybe I could slow down the whole drying process but yet still drying because I know the coconuts gonna want to take water so I stuck them in a big heap of coconut coconut fiber for one year and then I took them out and dried them the rest of the way geez I barely got any cracks at all I did leave them six inches thick because I wanted them to have more meat so if they did crack they wouldn't break apart the guy on the CNC machine ran the CNC machine for like twelve hours to make them four inches because I said I can't have it much more than four and a half inches thick it would be just too heavy so to get it down that much he put it on the machine for twelve hours luckily you know you sort of gave me the bro deal it wasn't that expensive but to make a long story short I brought it back into my shop and I started filling the little cracks I was doing my early crack filling process I put my first coat on went inside went out went back about two hours later to check on it it looked like a flying saucer you know those things you sit on when you go down you know the snow the saucers it cupped about an inch and a half and I about lost it I was I was devastated I couldn't believe it oh my god what am I gonna do so I thought about it I let it sit I went to bed I got up the next day and I said oh I think I think I could just fill it with resin and make it flat again and I'll make that the bottom and then I can route the top to make it flat so about three hundred bucks later in resin it was flat in about three weeks of you know because you can't just pour an inch and a half of resin without getting bubbles I mean I'm kind of weird you know I like it to be I'm striving for perfection I know it doesn't exist at least that's what they tell you in school but I try to make things as perfect as possible I didn't even want air bubbles in the bottom of my piece just in case someone looked at it so I did a little pour let it harden did another pour anyway I eventually got it flat flipped it over put the resin on the other side the other side cupped so I did the same thing it's flat as a pancake now and there's nothing getting through it because it's got resin all the way around it never you know it's it's pretty much completely packed so if you want to do this kind of stuff you got to be super patient because you're gonna make a lot of mistakes and if you want it to be good look pretty much perfect you're gonna have to try and try and try to get that finish unless you have a dedicated finish from which I don't you really need to be patient there's a side profile and again this has that insect pattern in the cambion layer and it's sort of neat I try to leave it the burl pieces I got from Danny I use for the stools I've got pretty lucky I think because the set I'm calling the vortices pieces the vortices or vortexes and if you look at this barstool it's pretty much a perfect vortex and if if you were to look outside at the galaxies their vortexes if you if you look at the DNA spiral it's a vortex if you look at a black hole it's a vortex pretty much the scientific beliefs people are coming to the conclusions now that vortices are actually black holes that's pretty much a black hole but it's really neat how nature works this way and it's actually the abnormalities or the what is the term I want to use the mutations that are the most interesting the burls the figure the stresses that the wood goes through makes it more beautiful and really I honestly think that people are the same way the more hard knocks you go through the more tolerant you become the more understanding you become of the way the world works and how nature works in an order to chaos state it's constantly moving in the fluctuation between those two states just like our lives so when I'm making furniture some days everything works great and everything's coming to order and then I can come back out the next day and the pieces warped like crazy and it's all chaotic again but if you just relax and take a few deep breaths you can bring it right back into order again another cool example of Jeff's metalwork and you know I feel really lucky to have him on my on my team to help me make these pieces more beautiful thank you all for coming there's an example of perfection Jeff, yeah, and so you mentioned burls several times could you just talk a little bit about what a burl actually is, a copper one it looks that way, what is that? right, so a burl is basically a mutation and it's a it's like a canker that grows on the side of a tree so if you look at a tree and you see a big lump on the side of it that's a burl so it's probably going to be from an environmental stress that the tree went through, maybe someone dinged it or you know it got damaged in that particular area or it just became like a a wart it's like a wart on our skin it's a mutation that I mean probably in the unexplained category because you know if you look at the cross-section of it's a vortex so who knows what it really is it's interesting though I think they're absolutely beautiful and if you look at it on the outside of the tree and you see a tree with burl everywhere you might think it's the ugliest tree you've ever seen but actually when you slice into it it will be filled with not just three dimensions maybe ten dimensions, twenty dimensions if you cut it on, you can cut it on twenty different angles and it would look different in every angle so it's it's quite amazing and we're not even capable of understanding it I don't think I'm not right so when you talk about curly patterns inside the tree that's different yeah well so like a curl right like a curly pattern it's usually found in older trees from my understanding and as the wind blows the trees develop ripples and reinforcing structure to keep them upright and you often see like a branch if a branch comes out on a really weird angle like a really flat ninety degree angle relative to the ground and they spread out a long distance away to get light on the underside of that branch you're gonna see a lot of rippling which is curl it'll show up as ripples in the wood and it's really just the tree reinforcing itself from the environmental stresses it's architectural it's structural and it's funny because um... like if you if you do any homework on figured wood you're gonna find that a lot of the times the musical instruments are made with figured wood they're called tone woods because they actually resonate sound differently than regular wood it's that whole frequency thing so with that curl pattern it actually changes how that would resonate sound fantastic and so actually over the course of your talk we started out with some gardens and then we moved in and then by the end it was all tables and chairs yeah I got kind of lost there well no so when we spoke briefly on the phone it sounded and it came out as we were speaking that your your furniture work really did grow out of your gardening work so living things and then using ex-living things to make your furniture right I I was working with wood in my landscaping work you know as a landscaper I do a lot of pruning work and I you know I sort of shape landscapes and I prune trees and shrubs and you know and as you drive around and you're in that flow often times I see wood and I see blown down trees I see tree guys cutting down trees and I just sort of have been drawn to it and I've realized that I'm in a field where I can actually find really nice wood through my work and being out there and about in the landscaping and that's how I've come across a lot of this beautiful wood in my daily work as a landscaper and it's really also really as a landscaper in Maine it's a short season so you need something to do besides plow snow which only happens twelve times a winter so there's a lot of free time you know I like to surf as you can see here you know this is this is this is my idea of a perfect day you know a double rainbow and nice two-foot high thigh glassy waves so you know you can only find you know I needed something to do in my spare time I do a lot better when I'm busy than if I'm sitting around dwelling on how slow it is and you know all the problems I have if I'm if I'm whittling away at wood I'm all my problems go away and I'd really just get really hyper-focused It's a really fascinating element I feel like this is something that has come up as several makers have come through and talked about their work that ability to sit down and focus to sort of shrink the world down to your work but at the same time really engage completely in this so many tangible way with one element inside the world that this is one of the reasons that many makers make stuff Yes and that's why I think I would do what I do is because if I look at the big picture I often time get a little overwhelmed with it all and I feel like oh geez you know I can't do anything right but when I have a piece of wood in front of me or let's just say it's a whole garden bed with a million weeds in it if I just take it one weed at a time it's no problem in two hours all the weeds are gone you know it's like it's amazing when you when you look at one thing around you and focus on it you can accomplish it but it's sort of overwhelming if you look at all the you know everything around us and how messed you know how messed up everything really is Wow Shall we? I got a couple questions that relate to your cookie cutter so I wanted to know two things there's one about the cutting of the cookie itself and how that's performed I know you're doing some adjustments with the router but you want to minimize that amount of that so how are you actually cutting this cookie? so you have to have a so it depends you know a smaller cookie I'll use a smaller chainsaw bar a bigger cookie you need a big chainsaw bar so you have a bar you need a bar that's big enough to slice through the whole cookie and then what you need to do is when you go to slice that cookie you've got to get yourself centered to the universe as I say you've got to find your center you've got to get your core centered and then you need to sort of like eye your bar what I do is I'll oftentimes I'll take and take a tape measure and if I usually make my cookies about four inches thick that way they're thick enough so if they crack they don't fall apart so I'll measure four inches and then I'll go down I'll go around the log to my visual plane and I'll make a dot with a sharpie and then I'll stand up over it and I'll sort of eye that bar and you know just like shooting a gun you kind of sight it and then drop it in once you drop in you're committed you got to just go so it's really just you know doing a lot of cutting you get better at it so I've gotten to the point now where I might only be like a quarter inch or a half inch off on a cookie which turn you know and then what I do is I have a big hand planer it's actually a power hand plane it's a Makita it's like a six and a half inch thick six and a half inch wide you probably know the planer you do it's a beast it's a beast let me tell you so I'll rough it out with that first because it's quick once I get it almost flat to get it perfectly flat I run it through the router so I'm not I don't want to have to spend six hours routing a piece so I go with the planer it's a little bit of a burly job because it's dangerous and it's heavy and it's you know you're it's you know the piece weighs a lot but it speeds the process up so the second part of the question and it relates to the router and really the blades I mean you're spending this blade for a million pasties and so are you sharpening your blades? so the blades I use are carbide tipped and I have a router bit that's like a fly cutter and the blades actually attach to the fly cutter with a little hex nut and then the carbide blades you can rotate once so you have basically it's like having two router bits in one and then you just replace those little blades not the fly cutter and then you can send those back to get sharpened it's actually relatively inexpensive although you know it really starts to add up when you really do the math especially sandpaper and stuff you know like if I go if I'm doing the epoxy resin finish I'm so particular about it that you know I don't just get it done in the second coat if it's not perfect I'm gonna do it again so then I gotta go sand every so I might use 50 pieces of sandpaper on one set of tables you know and then you know the drill bits and the router bits you know in the time it's just if I log every hour it's like it gets a little bit crazy of course you know I'm not really as fast as I could be I'll probably get a lot faster as I do more of it so that it's gonna be a little bit more affordable if I wanna charge a a rate that I can actually make a little profit on but it's tricky it's a tricky balance but again this is more out of passion not so much out of you know thinking dollar signs but you know I love them so I'm not just gonna sell them cheap because I just soon have them next to my bed you know so so that's how you sell this stuff you know I haven't really gotten to that point because you know I'm so busy making and stuff that I really don't have a lot of time to focus on this it's funny like a lot of my friends and family are like where are you gonna sell them and I'll say I don't know I hadn't even thought of that well you know you need to sell I'm like not really I kinda like them like you know everybody as an artist you're not really too worried about selling them but all your friends see all the time you put in and they think oh jeez you better start making some money on that or else it's not sustainable so you know I was lucky enough to get into Edgecom Potters here in Portland and then they also have them at the store in Edgecom they're not really selling a whole lot of them yet but they've sold some stump pieces I did and I'm gonna have a gallery at my house I'm in the process of renovating an 1860's farmhouse which has a 35 by 40 foot timber frame barn and I'm gonna make that my new workshop instead of a two car garage and that'll have an area in it where I can have my furniture and it's in a really nice location so you know ideally I'd like to sell direct to the people so that I don't have to the galleries often will you know double add or whatever they have to make their margin so it gets a little bit exorbitant any further questions things we should talk about when you talk about the resin that you use yes you can say the west system of foxy basically so I started with the west system to fill the cracks and then I would follow it up with varnish so the piece in front of me here the one that the computer's sitting on that's a varnish piece and I'm using I did west systems to fill all the voids and then I varnished it and I did about 30 coats of varnish the table that comes right I used bar top I used the systems 3 mirror coat is that in the August when it happened when it comes no it was in the dead of the winter but it's just when you're dealing with the end grain they're like straws so it sucked in the moist just the resin moisture made it happen could you avoid that if you got the bottom did the top did the bottom and then flip it over pretty much what I've learned and I've changed my system now I'm doing a viscous systems 3 penetrating epoxy which waterproofs it I do 3 coats of the systems 3 penetrating epoxy waterproofs the entire surface it's super viscous so it sinks in faster better absorption then I followed up with either the mirror coat or the varnish and if I do 12 coats of varnish over that it looks like I did 30 because when I did like that walnut piece it's varnished it looks like it has 30-40 varnish on it I only did like 12 still a lot but look what it looks like when it's done I mean it's worth it plus again it's really hard to lay down that perfect coat so I polished that piece and went to 6000 grit so it looks like it's like glass this is in its second year they look better as they get older actually I think it probably the varnish hardens even more now the epoxy when I've been around the epoxy it stinks so are you concerned like how do you manage toxicity so that's the yeah so I wear a full white tyvek because I get really itchy easy with that I don't like it because when I worked on boats I used to do the bottoms you know and I did and I did all the wax jobs and the acetone cleaned up I worked with a lot of toxins as a kid I never had any protective gear so I'm really kind of sensitive to it now so I wear a full face respirator and I wear the full hooded suit you know I I'm an organic gardener so I really am pretty how I what kind of toxins I use and I want to be as sustainable as possible there's quite a bit of waste that goes into doing resin work because you can't really save containers of brushes but once you make a piece with that finish it's literally never going to degrade it's 100% encapsulated on all four sides you could throw that thing in the ocean and it probably wouldn't take on water so from a sustainability standpoint it's a given a take in that area it makes the grain really pop too which is really I like that look you can you know really bang stuff on the wood and it's really hard you know so there's a lot of benefits there are some drawbacks but I wanted to show people three or four different looks so I went with the oil finish with the wax oil wax finish that's sort of the most natural and then I went with a linseed oil varnish which is a really natural varnish with no VOCs with the varnish and then I went with the super high tech epoxy so I've got three things kind of going and I've experimented with I like all three you know the varnish and the epoxy are definitely a lot more material intensive the oil is actually more time intensive because you have to let the oil dry so much you know you have to let it dry before you I don't want just one coat of oil I gotta put like 15 or 10 and then I gotta wax it three times so you know it takes like six months to get a proper oil finish and then it needs to really be re-oiled by the homeowner or re-oil waxed periodically yeah fantastic well I wonder if this is a good moment for a round of applause thank you so much