I have had some council of late–a propos of this blog–that I should be using correct punctuation, etc. So I’ll make a concerted effort to utilitze those tools of the English language that make the beginnings and endings of setences more coherent. I know it’s hard to read in addition upon the black substrate of this whole website… but I continue to like the black, mostly because it is the purest color in my imagination… though, there, I continue to imagine which means there must be some differentiation in the void represented, that is, impulses of light and rays from the world of the living, where objects are distinguished, etc. I don’t know, maybe someday I’ll change it to white for other reasons. I’ll wait to go into those reasons. I know this website needs a lot of work. One thing I’m going to focus on is better detail shots of furniture. Heretofor I have used a little dinky digital camera for all these photos which I admit is totally inadequate when compared with what I’m trying to make here. So for that I apologize. I have latetly procured a very nice interchangeable lense camera that takes excellent up close shots and have many items to put on the website, new furniture and new projects. So stay tuned please and thanks for being patient. I was going to recount a trip I took down to Albany, Oregon recently whose aim was purchasing some slabs of black walnut. The species is actually Oregon Black Walnut, which, I may not have told you is by far my most favorite wood, for its deep color, grain pattern, lightening near the sap, and utter joy to work. There is a man called Gary Gobe (go-bee) who has specialized in the milling and curing of walnut (mostly in slab form: flitch milling) for the last 35 years. I only recently found out about him, which is why my first trip down to buy wood from him was so recent, about three weeks ago. I had heard that he sold an incredible product, but I was totally struck by the magnitude of his operation when I got there. Driving onto his property there are rows of cedar trees that he planted probably thirty years ago, lining the drive up to his warehouse, operation and home. I met him (I think he might have been a little put of by my white hair) and he invited me to poke around the warehouse to find something I wanted. I didn’t see what pleased me in there and asked if there was anything else. He replied in positive and indicated an area down below his house (which is pretty magnificent: another story). We walked down there into a grove of fir and THAT is where the whole volume of his inventory is located, for the most part. There was rick after rick of walnut, each pile an entire royal walnut tree, flayed into flitch form and covered with plywood at its top to air cure. There were hundreds of these ricks in the forest there. Unbelievable. My jaw dropped. The unit measurement for furniture grade lumber is the board-foot. One board foot=a board one inch thick, one foot wide, one foot long. Mr. Gobe has curing on his property nearly 400,000 board feet of Oregon Black Walnut. It is all air cured, which is the most painstaking, patience-requisite practice (the alternative being: best: solar kiln and not-so-good: electric kiln, which both dry the wood out much faster and make it more prone to flaking and totally undesirable performance when cutting joints and planing)… that he has been working at for the last thirty some years. So down in the forest behind his home I found exactly what I had set out to buy and he helped me load it all on his tractor. I later found out that he is an M.D. and does the walnut sort of on the side, though I can’t believe that he would be equally passionate about both disciplines. You know? It was one of the more incredible businesses I have ever been privy to. So; so
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