We recently took delivery of quite a large stack of timber to be put to use in a variety of situations on the block. All the timber was milled by a young furniture maker friend who has worked with me on a number of sculpture projects that involved timber posts. The logs are usually from trees that have fallen during storms or when folk are getting trees felled because they are endangering their property. Great to use this salvaged timber.
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - Stepping stones across the Rock River |
We got about 50-55 squares of timber milled into 45cm and 35cm shares by 7.5cm thick. We plan to use these as 'stepping stones' across two crossing points of the rock river - but our stepping stones will be wood. We have installed (embedded) the stepping stones into the rocks across the top of the Rock River - a bit more finessing by Fiona to be done.
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - Stacks of hard wood 'stepping stones' |
We also ordered seven 20cm square logs at 2m long. In fact 10 were delivered because several had faults in the timber. And most logs were 2.5m-2.6m long and extremely heavy because they are hardwood. In an effort to get the stockpile under control Fiona and I waxed sealed the end cuts of the 'stepping' stones and carried them down to the lower terraces in readiness for installation.
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - Ten very long and heavy squared logs |
I then proceeded to cut up the 20cm square logs into manageable and mainly fault free lengths - this involved cutting the weak spots out. We decided to turn the offcuts of this process into 20cm cubes for an installation on the new sculpture terraces.
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - Chainsawing in progress - older timber under black plastic |
We also decided to turn a couple of the logs with weak spots into bench seats which you can see stacked behind the 20cm cubes in the photo below. All the cut ends of the logs and cubes had to be roughly sanded and wax stalled as I went along. The wax sealing reduces the ends splitting. I just love the stack of cubes including two ratty 25cm cubes from the old logs. We will have over 30 cubes to play with - some are good timber whereas others are pretty ratty.
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - Two heavy benches and lots of cubes - all roughly sanded and sealed |
The cutting process is now complete; including trimming and waxing a couple of 25cm logs that have been in my stash for a couple of years - they are the logs at the far right.
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - A beautiful stash of prepared timber |
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - The stash even looks neat now |
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| ©2019 Barry Smith - Looking down at the stash from the western deck. |
So we are all good to go on heaps of projects in 2019.
