Weatherholtz!

My most avid, astute readers will recall a promise made in an earlier post regarding my friend Matt, from the museum. Ladies, the time has come.

There's a company called Woodcraft that specializes in -you guessed it- wood crafts, or tools, machines and materials related to wood crafts. They have a chain of stores across the country and an extensive, glossy paged, full color catalog. In case you're wondering, they also sell pricey, curved spoon gouges (that you can purchase on Christmas Eve to finish last minute gift projects for your wife); which, can cleanly scoop out a slice of cherry wood moments before gouging the bejeebies out of your left palm at 1am, Christmas morning, in your parents garage. Anyway, their company logo features an Indian guy in a loin cloth making a bow using stone tools or something  like that beneath the words, "The First American Woodworker". Matt, is that dude.

Matt came down last week to turn my pile of logs into fence posts, which involved the use of some heavy machinery (called biceps). Matt's the kind of guy who says stuff like, "Yeah, I've been using a drawknife since I was twelve" and "You ever eat redwood blossoms?", more often than, "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?" (if you catch my drift). He is at once the weirdest and most honest, interesting, genuine person I know. He is my brother.

I'm late in writing this post. I could go on about the time Matt pretended to be an illegal immigrant when we got pulled over for hauling a few tons of walnut and cherry wood through town on an unlit truck and trailer rig decked out with homemade "farm use" tags, or the time we were butchering a deer at the museum with obsidian flakes in front of a class of 4th graders and Matt picked up the head to show a group of cheering youngsters what the brains looked like (to the dismay of their teachers), but I'll spare him the embarrassment. I'll end with this, if you ever find yourself interested in making your own bow and arrows from scratch (like, from a stick in the woods kind of scratch), or wondering how to make fashionable moccasins out of a deer hide you skinned and tanned yourself, ask Matt. He offers weekend courses to folks from all around the country at his cabin on the side of a mountain. I'm not kidding, buckskinbowyer@yahoo.com.

So, some pictures.

This is Matt, courtesy of Brinn.

The man's good at what he does. He also beat me on a few Jeopardy! questions, which I did not take lightly.

Some progress on the Mt Airy coop, all White Oak siding to this point. All but the back side have beveled clapboard that I rip down piece by piece on the table saw. The backside will have some gaps between the boards to keep the coop from getting too hot and stuffy.

The remnants of Matt's splittin' an' skinnin' rampage.

Splittin' cedar. I got new wedges.

Building a fire to scorch the bases of our posts. Allegedly, the char prevents decay and stops bugs from eating the wood.

The wall facing me has a lot of Wild Cherry in it, which I think is just so cool. I'm trying to line the joists up by using an ancient technique called, "eye-balling".

This roof is a hair taller and steeper than my last, which makes room for a loft! Now there is a place to toss feed bags and the like without causing an unsightly distraction to a lovely garden tour.

I had to show this. The tag at the antique store read, "rare, unusual hatchet"; which was a little disappointing to me. Sure, it's rare in the sense that it was hand forged by an unknown maker a very long time ago, but it isn't unusual at all. This is a shingle hatchet. The blade is for splitting and shaping shingles, while the hammer is for... hammering. It's just a handy two-in-one deal that would have been in most toolboxes back in the day.

Yes, I shingled the whole coop with this irreplaceable relic. What would make Ole Jebediah (guessing on the name) happier, knowing that the tool he made and / or used is still good enough to be put to use 100 years after his death, or knowing it was hanging on the wall of a Cracker Barrel in Muncie, IN?

The coop is actually further along than what is pictured here, but I'm in a hotel room in Florida right now, so this is what you get. This coop is going to be very awesome, and I'm not afraid to say that.

-F.W.