Making an anatomic breastplate for Gustavs horse

I like to work a bit in leather occasionally, and leatherwork gear is even easier than woodworking gear to bring onboard a ship. From before my dad got really ill, I had purchased some leather meant for making a breastplate that I had seen, and Gustav and I had measured his horse to get an idea of the size of the piece. I had made a sketch and sort of left it all due to making a coffin and all that followed.

This time due to the pandemic, I have had to stay 10 days in quarantine in a hotel in Norway. I have a hard time expressing how much I dislike sitting idle in a hotel room, so before heading out, I had made a bunch of leather straps ready and found my sketch so I could sit in the hotel room and do a bit of leatherwork. 

I had brought some basic tools with me, and a piece of 1/4" plywood, so I had a place to do cutting without damaging the hotel furniture.

A thing that I didn't bring was something to polish the edges of the leather after assembly, so I'll make some sort of polishing disc when I get onboard and then make the edges look really nice too. At the moment they look a bit dull.

All of it mounted and laid out on the bed.

Making a tabletop from a slab of beech

A couple of years ago I was asked by a friend to go and see one of his neighbours who had a tree cut down in their front yard. 
It was a massive blood beech and he asked me if I could use the tree for the sawmill. I really wanted to, but there was no way that I could move it if I bought it, so I respectfully declined, telling him my reasons to do so. Instead he offered if we could make a trade. He would get the trunk of the tree moved to my place and then I should make a table out of it for him, and I could keep the rest of the wood.

I agreed knowing that it would not be a lucrative deal, but what the heck,  I like making tables, and it was some serious wood to get delivered to my door. 

So a week or so later he had a truck with a crane coming and picking it up and dropping it of at my place.

I milled the largest part of the trunk and stacked it. I had informed him that it would take around 2 years for it to dry enough for me to start making anything out of it, and he was cool with that.

Last fall well before my dad got ill, I decided that I might as well get to it and build a Barnsley hayrake table for him. He had told me that I could make a table that I would seem fit and the material was just perfect for that.

Before starting out, Mette (smarter than me) suggested that it might be a good idea to call and ask them again if they had any requests in the size of the table. I thought it was a stupid idea but did as she suggested, and the guy and his wife were really happy to hear from me and were really interested.

I showed them the slab and the discussion started. It is always interesting when people suddenly realize that they can decide on height length finish etc. 

They asked if I could make the slab wider which I told them would be a shame since it would be impossible to hide, a bit more discussion and they agreed to think about the length of the table.

 A few days later they called back and the man said that his wife and the kids wanted a metal undercarriage, and he was the only one that wanted a hayrake system, so since he was outnumbered they just wanted me to make the slab ready for a tabletop. 

I was glad that they didn't try to make me feel obliged to make a set of metal lags since I normally dislike those on slabs. A lot of people seem to think that a table is just the tabletop, and then it doesn't matter what kind of legs or undercarriage is on it. I see it a bit differently.

The good thing was that it removed at least half of the work that I needed to do.

I started flattening the back first, using a jointer with a scrub iron. Then the slab was flipped over, and I did a little bit of work on the top.

It was Friday, and Gustav had invited a couple of friends over to have a couple of beers which was ok with us since they were going to sit in the man cave and wouldn't be disturbing us.

I told them that they could go through the workshop instead of waking up the horses constantly, but I kind of got to regret that part. 

Someone who I guess had a little bit too much to drink obviously wanted to show one of his friends that he knew what different tools were for. (Gustav did not witness it, other wise he would have stopped it all)

So the next morning when I wanted to start flattening the top a bit more I noticed a couple of holes, and surprisingly next to the holes were my awl.. He had first hacked it straight in probably 3/8" and then he had done the same plus wiggled it around to make the hole larger. Needles to say I got furious.

I tried to put some water on the marks and see if they would close a bit, but the problem was that they were in a low spot of the tabletop already. 

I calmed down a bit for probably 20 seconds (the time it took me to plane a couple of strokes more).

Then I could see that the same kid had wanted to try Gustav's batterypowered circular saw!

And he had chosen to do that with a 1.5" deep cut sort of 1.25" into the side of the tabletop. I was speechless at that point. I called Gustav and he was of course as sorry as he could be, and I tried not to blame him, but I was angry. But I knew that I could cover it up so it wouldn't be a deal breaker, just a pain in the neck.

As soon as everything was relatively flat, I installed breadboard ends. That was especially important in the wide end since it was a Y shaped trunk, and there wasn't much point in flattening it if those pieces could move independently from each other.

A lot more of flattening, and it was time to install some butterflies too, those were made out of elm since it is what they had wanted.

There were a few places where there were rotten knots and those places received a piece of elm too, as did the circular saw mishap.

Some sanding and I treated the oil with a linseed oil/varnish blend thinned a bit with some turpentine.

The slab ended up looking really good, so I might have to make one for myself at some point.

106" long, about 40" down to 28" wide, 2" thick

The dark spot on the edge left in the picture is where the saw cut was made.

Before finishing.

Using my recently acquired Ohio 08 jointer

Removing the bulk of the material with a router.

live edges and a breadboard end

Still a bit of work left.

Installing butterflies

Moving on

 Right now I am nearing the end of a 10 day long Covid quarantine in a Norwegian hotel. Lots of time to think and contemplate over different things.

I have been looking at my blog a few times, and it has made me sad every single time because it reminds me of my dad.

So I have decided that I just need to start writing something, to make sure that the first post that will meet me isn't one that will make me sad.

Since my dads passing away, my older brother and I have started clearing out our childhood home, It is tough to do, but luckily we have tried and succeeded in making it a cozy thing by making sure that we get coffee or tea and something to eat whenever we are down there.

My parents both loved collecting antiques, so there are loads of stuff, and since it is mostly all really nice stuff, we can't just throw it away. We would like to give some of it to charity shops, but due to the pandemic, they are all closed, so that kind of sucks.

We have sold some of his tools, and that was actually easier for me than I had imagined. I guess mostly because my dad gravitated from using tools to collecting maybe 25 years ago, so since he didn't have a regular go-to set of tools it wasn't too hard selling some of them. We managed to find some youngsters who wanted to learn about woodworking, and we sold a bunch to them, actually cheap, but I know that my dad would have liked for the tools to go back into circulation again.

I still managed to do some woodworking at home, also related to the clearing out. I made 6 large glass door cabinets that will be used for storing nails and screws etc. They are hung on a large French cleat in the room where the metal lathe is. It is a project that I discussed with my dad before he died, and the glass doors are extra windows from the old windows at my parents house. (As usual I forgot to take any pictures of them).
They are made with adjustable shelves, and have a total height of 75", the width is 27.5" and the depth is 7.5", so there is a lot of storage in the 6 cabinets all put together. 
I didn't do any fancy joinery or anything with the cabinets, I decided that they were meant for storage and they were simply glued and screwed together and the wood was thickness in the planer, but I could live with a less than perfect surface. I intend to paint them white at some point, but it has to be when the temperature is not below freezing anyway.

My long term plan is to do a bit of clearing out in my shop as well, and throwing stuff out that I never use. Also I would like to use the shop as a workshop, and then I can use these cabinets for storing stuff instead of keeping it in the workshop. 

Having to clear out also prompted me to start doing the same in the barn, and I have already made a lot of progress, there's still a way to go, but at least I have started, and that is the main thing.

Mette riding Bent in the forest