Spring In Winter Wonderland...

 So my wife celebrated a birthday this past week, and in doing so, we were out of town.  

We went to a nearby town a little over an hour away, and as she wished, we stayed in an historic old hotel.  I learned a few tricks.

The hotel is rather widely rumored to be haunted.  That is, there have been news stories about the alleged haunting of the building.  When we arrived, I thought the place was rather spectacularly kept up and had some pretty impressive features.  To begin, the place is a little cramped on a city block, and the apparent parking was either across the street, or on the street.  But there it was - the entrance to the hotel's parking ramp.  So we pulled in, and unloaded.  

In the lobby, a large, round table stopped me in my tracks.  I am a wanna be woodworker.  That is, I do make things out of wood, and enjoy the process.  I imagine I'm somewhat more competent than I probably am, but I've had some bits of good luck.  And a fair amount of bad.  As it goes.  But I do have, or rather have developed, a pretty good eye for some things.  

One of those items I do look for are any products made out of burls.  That's right, folks.  Most lumber you find, and items you will see that are made out of wood are going to be made from what is called straight-grained wood.  If you look at any item you see which has been made out of wood and not painted, you will see streaks and features of the wood that appear to be lines.  That's what's called wood grain.  

Just about everyone has seen end grain.  That is, if you take a look at a tree stump where the tree has been cut down using some sort of saw, you will see a flat surface.  There's usually a sort of spike if the tree has been removed using axes - but a saw tends to leave a fairly flat section.  If you look down on that cut, you'll see what's called end-grain.  Or the growth rings.  Every year for a tree leaves a period where the tree expands during the warmer summer months, and a narrower ring that typically denotes where the growing went from great to winter-dormant time.  

If you cut a tree down and then start making boards, those boards get their strength from those tree rings running vertically - much like the tree does, itself.  Pieces that run across the grain, like the stump, aren't necessarily all that strong.  They're great to look at, but you really don't want to try to support a floor with them.  Because the growth rings don't offer a whole lot of strength to them.  It's the longer grains where you get the strength.

Those streaks you see from most boards are the tree rungs running vertically, so instead of looking at the tree's growth from the top down, you're seeing it from the side.  That's why the wood grain appears to be different.  Some years were good, some winters were hard.  Some grains are nice, straight even patterns, while other types of wood have flecks and bits that are different.  Oak is easily identified if you look at it closely because it will often have dark spots mixed into the grain.  These spots are typically smaller than a grain of rice, but do not harm the strength or structure of the wood.  In fact, as oak trees tend to grow slowly, they make very strong wood.  Pine trees, douglas Fir, and Birch, on the other hand, grow pretty quickly.  The speed of the growth determines whether the tree is a "softwood" or "hardwood" tree.  Softwoods are less expensive for the simple reason that, as they grow more quickly, they're easier to plant and replant.  Like most crops, good management can increase production - and greedy, poor management can destroy it.  

But wait, I hear you saying, why do we use softwood to build houses?  It's all relative, for starters.  Soft wood isn't a bad thing.  The simple trick is this.  If you can force your fingernail into the wood to dent it and leave a mark behind, it's a soft wood.  It also means that it's gonna take a whole hell of a lot of effort to break it. But we can use hardwoods or softwoods to build houses.  The trick is cost, for the most part.  

There's a wood species called Ironwood.  It's not as strong as iron, but it does take a hell of a lot to work.  It will easily dull most tools, frustrate most woodworkers, and give you an item which may not be bulletproof, but highly unlikely to break or be harmed by daily use.  Due to the slow growth of the wood, one does not often plant or harvest these trees.  This is because they grow pretty slowly.  Other trees that grow slowly will do so due to their environment.  I mean, we have trees in Sequoya forests that are hundreds of feet tall, maybe thirty feet across, and they're still not as old as some of the oldest trees in the world, which are still relatively small shrubs.  

One advantage of the shorter, older trees is they're less susceptible to weather damage.  Wind does all sorts of damage to trees, and the taller they are, the more the wind pushes on them.  So sometimes, being short is an advantage.  The first of those is less wind damage, the next is there's very little good wood to be found in a tree that isn't more than ten or fifteen feet tall.  

As for history, it might be interesting to note that one of the reason that England was excited about "the colonies" of America when they were first starting out was because of all of the trees.  Being an island nation, the English came quickly to rely on boats.  In order to maintain their independence, they learned to build their own boats and their own Navy in order to keep any threatening forces far from their lands.  One of the more famous uses of wood was, for years, ships hulls.  The English Navy enjoyed their reputation for many years thanks to the strength of English Oak - a strong wood that grew in a northern climate, and did well to survive.  When the trees were cut down, they were incredibly strong.  The boards from these trees became the sides of ships which required cannons to break open.  Cannons which were originally developed to blast down stone walls outside castles were made a little bit smaller, and portable, and put on ships.  

While that might not make a whole lot of sense, there's another history lesson hidden here.  American woods that were highly prized by the English did end up making some formidable ships.  While the English Navy has moved on, one of those ships is still in service in the American Navy.  The Constitution, otherwise known as "Old Ironsides" got it's nickname due to the density and strength of it's wooden sides.  The nickname came about because the hull of the ship was known to simply cause cannon balls to bounce off it.

No, Ironsides isn't out sailing with the Atlantic fleet.  It is used as a training ship, which is why it's still on active duty with the Navy.  But when it comes to history, a significant part of a ship's history is due to the commanders and crew who served on it.  It is also a credit to the shipyards and craftsmen who built it.  Any sufficiently experienced person who knows their craft will tell you that a critical factor affecting the end result of their work is the quality of the material they use. 

Which is where we get back to the quality and featurs of wood.  Just about everyone will recognize when you see a tree branch disturbing the growth of a tree.  Those are the little bullseye rings that appear in some pieces of wood.  They're often very interesting and a different color from the surrounding wood.  If you look at these spots closely, you will see the growth rings of the branch - just like a tree trunk, they grow layers each year.  And while these "dots" leave some pretty interesting patterns around themselves, they can also be weak spots for the wood.  If you find yourself looking at large sheets of wood often called "plywood" you will occasionally find what look like footballs in these sheets.

Those are a little trick that lumber producers use to strengthen the product - they remove the knot.  They have these huge machines that will take a log, usually the trunk of a tree, and it shaves off thin layers of wood.  As those sheets go through inspections, these machines use a football-shaped die to cut out the knots, and they're replaced by a small piece of wood which has been cut to fit exactly in the spot the die punched out.  

Then these huge sheets of wood are layered with other sheets of wood to make what we called plywood.  The reason they exist is because it is much less expensive to make and use large, flat sheets to build things like houses, instead of out of boards.  They provide more strength and are easier to use than a hundred boards of varying lengths to make up a wall.  

Where was I going with all of this?  Well, if you spend any time in nature, looking at trees, you will often find strange knobs or lumps as trees grow.  Sometimes they're the location of a branch that broke off.  Or they might be the spot where an insect dug in and caused a few problems.  Trees, being growing things like us, tend to try to recover from these traumatic events by sending their growth into these areas to heal the wounds left behind.  Because the trauma is usually not in a straight line, the tree's growth patterns tend to be disturbed.  Instead of nice straight lines and rings of growth,

Which is where we bring winter and the whole freaking point back to where I was going.  In the lobby of this historic hotel was a round table perhaps seven feet across, which did open for leaves to be added.  The top of the table, rather than featuring long, straight-grained wood was made up of pie-shaped pieces, about 38 inches from center point to edge of wood burl.  The chaotic features in the wood grain were spectacular.  So yeah, I was impressed.  

Which is where we start to circle back to the beginning of this little diversion.  The furniture in our room was also nicely finished wood, as you might expect.  It was thanks to the assembly of these items where I may have stumbled upon one of the tricks of the trade in maintaining one's alleged haunted reputation.  And again, another disquisition off into furniture building.

Today, everyone is familiar with opening a drawer.  You pull this box-thing out of another box.  It comes so far out, and you can reach in and sometimes find things.  That's a drawer in a nutshell.  They are incredibly complex items, if you look at them closely (and they're made to last), but the really critical part of a drawer is that it slides out, and in, from another box.  In this case, the dresser had six drawers.  Two top-level half-width drawers, and five lower drawers that ran the full width of the dresser.  

To slide in and out requires some fairly careful work.  Early on, drawers were made to fit inside the other box so tightly and smoothly that you did not need any other hardware.  It hadn't been invented yet.  But because wood remains something that once grew, it reacts to the environment.  No matter how carefully you finish a piece of wood, air will always reach the wood.  And air often carries moisture.  That is, we call it humidity.  As a growing thing, wood reacts to that moisture by swelling and shrinking.  

What, you say?  I've never seen my furniture grow. Well, you might not have noticed.  For hundreds of years, a drawer was a box inside another box, and it fit tightly.  Which meant that on occasion, those tightly-fit drawers might stick closed, or require an extra tug to get them out.  Which is where things that fit together tightly didn't always work together well.  And that's where inventions happened. 

Without boring you further beyond tears with a discussion of the varying merits of the different designs, the bottom line is that you can, if you wish, learn everything you need to know about a drawer by pulling one out partially, and looking at the side.  If all you see is a boring, flat side, then you might have a drawer made like those in my dresser.  My dresser is an item which we acquired from a friend when she moved, and we paid much less than the furniture originally cost for them.  And unfortunately, they're of the sort of quality you might expect.  

Hey, they were inexpensive, I needed a dresser, so I got one.  Nothing wrong there.  But inexpensive furniture can be assembled with staples and the "careful" design which offers a thin bit of wood to provide internal structure and sits right below the side of the drawer box so you don't need hardware.  As things developed, and the stuff we put in drawers got heavier, the drawer glides were invented.  

Most good drawer glides rely either on ball bearings or wheels, which fit inside metal tracks, to hold drawers in the box and allow them to glide in and out easily.  There are some "under-mount" glides which work best for lightly-loaded drawers, but they can be affected by the weight of the items in the drawers.  The side-mount drawer glides, or slides, tend to work better.  The ball-bearing sort are used for heavier drawers carrying more weight, while the wheels sort are for lighter items.  

And then we come to the rather critical part of mounting the drawer glides.  If you are careful, you mount the drawer glide level to the drawer and the dresser box.  Most drawer glides have two parts, so they require a fair bit of finicky work to make sure they're done right.  If, however, you're looking for a little advantage, and you have a drawer you need to get into but you want it to be closed regularly, you might cheat a little bit and mount the front part of the drawer glide slightly higher than the back end.  That is, the part of the glide that's closest to the drawer face will be 1/32nd of an inch higher than the rear of the glide.  This would encourage the drawer to close, as gravity would pull the wheel in the drawer down, by pulling it back into the case.

And if you wanted to drive someone nuts, you could mount the front a little lower.  If you're in or near an environment with a fair amount of vibration, that could cause the drawer to slowly open.  By vibration, I'm talking passing motor vehicles, heavy production machinery, or other vibration sources - including even fans.  Any electric motor will create vibration, no matter how carefully balanced, and that vibration causes items to move.  Like drawer slides.

So what, you're asking, does that have to do with all of this?  Two of the drawers in the tall dresser in our hotel room kept rolling open.  The room wasn't haunted.  The dresser glides were improperly mounted.  That's all there was to that little story.

Our trip was only two overnights.  We got there late one day, spent a day wandering around town, then headed for home.  Our departure was a little nerve-wracking because the town we went to was along a river, and we had to cross another river near the town.  Because of the terrain, we had to go through one valley to get to another.  Valleys imply hills, and as we're a fairly flat state thanks to glaciers which plowed us mostly flat, these valleys were wide, and therefore rather than going over the valley, we had to go down into it, back up, and back down again.

Which can be nerve-wracking when the outdoor air temperature is 34 degrees and it's raining.  That is, just a wee bit above freezing, when water is hitting the ground.  If you hit a cold spot, say in a valley, you might find that it's 31 degrees there.  Which means ice.

We were fortunate in that our trip home was not, at all, disrupted by ice.  Not until we got home.  Then there was the partially melted snow, which then froze again, making the yard and certain spots icy.  So we had that to get through.  Then the rain got here.  And the entirely dry basement, where this computer and my bedroom are, got wet.  

The genius who designed and built this townhouse decided to put two father large double-hung windows in the semi-split level basement.  Huh?  All right.  This house is built on a sloping lot on a bit of a hill.  Our garage is on the ground level, and six steps down from that gets you to our basement.  Seven steps UP from that gets you to the main floor, where our living room and kitchen are.  The front entry is six steps up.  The side entry, through the dining/kitchen area, is about two steps above grade.  And the back yard is at "ground level" with the garage, so the two windows have their bottom edges about two inches above grade.  Or, if you're me, looking at the window frames from the inside in the semi-unfinished laundry room/home office (I work out of my bedroom, the other end of the floor, so I keep my home and work stuff separate), you can see the insulation stuffed around the window about an inch thick - and there's the small hole that we found when we moved in that was about the size of my thumb, which was where we stuffed the cable for the cable TV to connect to our world.  There was a connector on the front of the house to bring in the line which is where the modem connects.  

But that small hole where the cable came in was plugged with laundry lint and fairly heavily caulked and sealed so it wouldn't leak.  I didn't do anything about the rest of the window frame, but it looks like I probably will end up having to do so this spring.  Fun fun fun.

So enjoy what's left of your day.  Time for me to go feed dogs, me, and accomplish something other than this today.  If possible.