The beginning part II

…. Continuation

This must have happened around June 1996, with the completion of the box scheduled for beginning of September for my brother’s birthday. While discussing with an uncle about the idea, he mentioned that platanus (also known as Sycamore in the US) was a perfect tree for woodworking and it happened that some were being cut by the council in his street. A few weeks later I get a log from a platanus. A log, freshly cut from a tree. With no drying time (mistake number one) I started to work on it straightaway. I had 3 tools at my disposal, a hand saw, 1 chisel and a hammer. Looking back both the hand saw and the chisel were dull and I had no idea that I had to sharpened them :D (mistake number 2). I started by sawing the log straight in half (mistake number 3) to have a symmetrical shape for the base and the lid. I spent the next month or so chiselling the box. The process was all done in my room, when I had some spare time and my brother was not around.

Working on wet wood, trying to carve it with a blunt chisel with no understanding of grain orientation was quite an experience. Mistakes were made daily, taking too much material as the wood fibres would just splinter as they pleased, trying to fix it would sometime work and sometimes just result in more mistakes. This will become evident when looking at the picture of the box (see link below), the shape was dictated by multiple mistakes and the shape itself was a unfortunate mistake. With no paring technique my hands only survived the chisel because it was as blunt as a butter knife. I managed to finish the box, polished as I could - I didn’t know at the time that sanding paper could have different grits- and applied a healthy coat of linseed oil.

27 years later, the box still exists and the joy of that summer is still so fresh in my memory.

Click on this link to see: The box…. :D