I had a whole lot of fun a few weeks ago making this short film with April and our dog, Pug (the pug). It’s called DOG SHAMAN’s JOURNEY and features a character we made up over a year ago, Dog Shaman, the small dog whisperer. Err. Maybe you should just watch it, and then you’ll understand.
Anyway, parts of this short film were shot in my cob house, which despite its small size, actually worked out pretty well for a set.
Check it out below.
p.s. Watch in high quality!
You may have noticed lots of references here lately to hand hewing and broad axes. Call it research, I guess, because I’m still debating how I will acquire, and then work with and move those white oak timbers I mentioned earlier.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this quality video. Really well shot, very clear, very easy to understand the process of hewing here. Check it out!
Check it out. Here’s one more nifty Gränsfors Bruks video, this time inside the factory with a couple of highly skilled smiths creating an axe head.
Gränsfors Bruks: Still Hand Forging Axes in High Tech Gadget Age
I read a great post last night on the Holder Bros. industry blog about hand hewing beams with broad axes. It’s worth a mention here!
Beams that are hand hewn get a flat face treatment with nothing more than a felling axe and a broad axe. This is how beams were converted from round logs before the age of cheap fuel and portable mills and all that jazz.
Lately, I have been doing a lot of reading online about hand tools, especially those for timber framing. A couple of websites have caught my eye recently (which I’ll mention soon elsewhere), and during one of those late night reading ventures I stumbled upon this excellent video about the history and transformation of the Gränsfors Bruks axe company of Sweden, one of the top hand-forged tool manufacturers around.
I’ve been reading snippets about the company and its products elsewhere (mostly in catalogs), but this video gave me a much broader knowledge of the company than before, and I must say, it was very satisfying. Inspiring.
The mighty central bent in the Wabi-sabi kitchen
A bit over a week ago, we raised our mighty giant of a bent for the kitchen. It’s the bent we’ve been working on for weeks and weeks – an assembly of three posts, and a beam with a scarf joint. The beam in question is a gigantic, curving sycamore joined to a cannon of an oak, supported on the south side by a stout poplar, in the middle an oak with a coped shoulder and through tenon (that runs through the scarf), and on the south another oak post. Put together, we guessed that the bent weighed in around 1800 pounds. No joke!
Here’s yet another video of me destroying something in or around my cob house. This time, I take a pickaxe to the earthen floor inside Gobcobatron. Breaking it up was fairly tough work, but worse is trying to cleanly scoop up the material and carry it out of the house in buckets. Yuck. Well, I’m glad that’s over with, at least! It took a bit more than a day to complete, not without the help of a few hands throughout the process.
I was very happy to discover this video on Tony Wrench’s website the other day. It provides a little tour of Wrench’s low impact roundhouse, and Simon Dale’s new house at Lammas, in Wales.
If you’ve done any searching for beautiful natural buildings online, it’s likely you have seen Simon Dale’s original low impact woodland home. But Simon’s got limited images of his new house up, so this video gives a better impression of the design. Check out that killer big greenhouse!
Definitely very exciting to see a bit more of Tony Wrench’s and Simon Dale’s work here. These two have provided me with a lot of inspiration for my own home, and they’ve also consulted me with on some things, too. Can’t thank them enough.
Gorgeous!
This is one incredibly sweet tool: the boring machine. A boring (or mortising) machine is a hand-operated drill press, usually equipped with a two inch auger bit, that allows the builder to bore holes through timber in order to make a mortise pocket.
This particular model (I forget the manufacturer) is one that Tom Cundiff brought along with him to our timber framing workshop weekend. We banged out a few mortises a lot more easily with this tool than any other could possibly do. (Of course, not including electric drills.) We value hand tools very highly and use them nearly exclusively on our construction. Needless to say, we’re going to have to seriously look into obtaining one of these…. and to think we passed one up at the local flea market last year! Ack!
Thomas recently had this awesome little peg-making setup made by a friend, and we had the opportunity to try it out last weekend during our timber frame workshop.
It’s super simple and results in very uniform pegs, as long as you have straight grain wood to use. In this case, we were hitting white oak splits through the bench.
It’s essentially a bench with a sharpened rod projecting through the top that cuts through the wood as it is driven through from above with a mallet. Once the wood is hit all the way through, you have a 1″ peg at your disposal!
Check it out!
Hi there, I’m Ziggy. In 2008, I launched The Year of Mud while building my first natural home. This website is a collection of personal stories and experiences building with clay, straw, and wood over the past 15+ years. A few of the things that get me fired up are natural plasters, timber framing, & Japanese architecture. In 2012, we started offering Natural Building Workshops, so you can learn essential hands-on skills to build your own natural home.
