“A gin pole is a simple and traditional method for raising a timber frame by hand, and straightforward solution to a site with little crane access. It’s constructed from a long, straight pole with a block and tackle hanging from the top, and two guy lines (in our case, come-alongs) that help to counter the weight of the pole and the timbers, and locate the posts in their mortises.”

“Sometimes the oldest technologies provide the best solution for the job at hand. From wedges and ramps to pulleys, I am surprised at how right my physics teachers were about the ubiquity of simple machines. When applied purposefully, with careful consideration, these approaches can be safer, simpler and cheaper. While I appreciate the romance associated with historic contraptions, ultimately, romance is not the reason we employ them.”

Read more: I’ll take a gin pole, straight up, Preservation Timber Farming.

The fujara is a long 3-holed fipple flute played in standing position with the flute held close to the body. It’s played using the natural harmonics system, which means the different tones are played by controlling the strength of inblown air. Using only three holes, the diatonic major scale can be reached playing two and a half octaves. Due to the natural harmonics the tuning will always be a compromise, but Belgian flutemaker and musician Winne Clement puts a great deal of effort in tuning and balancing the tones, in such a way that playing together with Western tuned instruments is possible.

All his flutes are made of harvested branches of local inland wood such as ash, elder, maple, hazle, etc. The wood is carefully chosen and cut in winter time – with respect for the environment, not damaging the donating trees – and put to dry for a long period of time. When making the flute the wood is never split in half to hollow it out, but hand-drilled with special old forged drills, leaving the main structure of the wood intact, benefiting the sound, and following the natural curves of the wood. No Tech Magazine visits Winne Clement in his studio in Ghent, where he explains us his tools and methods.

Ancient Drilling Tools

Clement’s fujara flutes are literally born in the forest. “Every year in winter, I walk through the woods in search of suitable branches. This has to happen in winter, because the sap content in branches is low. The wood will then dry faster and is less likely to crack. The making of a flute starts when I saw off a branch, because I already know what kind of flute I want to make from it. Most branches are curved, but they can be easily straightened once they are dry. The wood needs to be dried for about four years.”

The craftsman drills the branches using antique drilling tools. “Initially, I tried to bore the branches with modern tools but that didn’t work. Modern tools lack precision because they grind the wood. Old drills ladle out the wood. Branches always have a softer spot in the middle and a large ancient hand drill draws itself into it. It takes me about three hours to drill a branch. Most of my drills date from the second half of the nineteenth century. Farmers used them to drill water pipes, for example. I find them on eBay.”

“I know a Norwegian guy, already in his seventies, who is still making these large hand drills, aimed at traditional shipbuilders. But he’s a stubborn man who has been making the same type of drill for 50 years now. If you ask him for a slightly different type of drill, he turns around and walks away.”

Value for Money

It’s not just old drills — Clement’s studio holds a large collection of many other types of old tools. However, he’s not a nostalgic. Rather, it’s about value for money. “Antique tools are simply better than most modern tools which are readily available. Although it’s still possible to find modern tools of good quality, they are much more expensive compared to the antique tools you can find on eBay. I’m lucky to be living in a time when everyone clears the attic and sells grandfather’s stuff on the internet.”

“I don’t exclude modern technology categorically. If there are new techniques to dry wood, for example, I will try them out. They usually don’t work that good, but I want to find that out myself. I also use industrially sharpened knives for cutting the sound system — the sharper the knives, the more precise the result. But my most important modern tool is the internet. It gives me inspiration, knowledge, tools and a sales channel. I work in a traditional way using antique tools and methods, but I would never have made it without my laptop.”

Shepherds

The fujara has a unique sound with very rich sounding multiphonics, grain and timbre. Its origin lays in the middle of Slovakia, and it’s assumed that its roots would lay with the 3-holed flutes played by the tambourines in the 12th and 13th century in Europe. The fujara was played by the shepherds on their long journeys away from home. It’s said when played for the sheep it would calm them down and ease the herd.

More info: Fujara Flutes. The making of a 7 holed fipple Kaval flute is shown in the beautiful video below. The second video shows the maker playing the flute. Also check out our earlier article on hand powered drilling tools and machines, and earlier woodworking posts.

“An ingenious British designer has come up with the ultimate environmentally-friendly way to create stunning household furniture – by letting Mother Nature do all the hard work. Gavin Munro grows young trees into specially-designed plastic moulds, pruning and guiding the branches into shape before grafting them together to form ultra-tough joints. Using this method he’s already created several prototype pieces and has a field in Derbyshire where he’s currently tending a crop of 400 tables, chairs and lampshades which he hopes to harvest next year.”

“You start by training and pruning young tree branches as they grow over specially made formers. At certain points we then graft them together so that the object grows in to one solid piece – I’m interested in the way this is like a kind of organic 3D printing that uses air, soil and sunshine as its source material. After it’s grown into the shape we want, we continue to care and nurture the tree as it thickens and matures before harvesting it in the Winter and then letting it season and dry.”

“Each of the pieces have grown from one tree, planted specifically for that reason, its limbs guided in an exact shape and later grafted together to produce the unique pieces of furniture, which he hopes are the pioneers of a new method of sustainable, efficient and ecologically aware production.”

See & Read more:

• How to grow your own furniture: eco-friendly designer uses special moulds to guide branches into ready-made chairs, tables and lampshades.

• The innovators: growing solid wooden furniture without the joins.

• Pictures: Munro’s website Full Grown.

Via Unconsumption.

See them in action. Via The Shelter Blog.

This traditional smoke house for fish, photographed in the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia, is made from a scrapped boat hull. Pictures by No Tech Magazine.

More repair. More wood. Pictures by No Tech Magazine.

“Hi everybody my name is Chris. I choose my woodworking projects based on whatever happens to inspire me”.

In this video, Chris builds a foot powered treadle lathe. Great project, great video.

Via Old Engineering.

Previously:

• Make your own treadle lathe (PDF plans)
• Robin Wood, bowlturner (video)
• The battle of the bowlturners (video)

“The solar kiln described was designed, constructed, and tested at Virginia Tech. This design is based on 25 years of research and development on the solar drying of lumber in the United States and foreign countries. Drawings for two versions of this kiln are available; one for 800-1,000 bd ft and the other for 1,500-2,000 board feet of lumber. Both kilns will dry a load of lumber in approximately one month of moderately sunny weather at its location in Blacksburg, VA.”

“Drying lumber can be a complex process where accelerating drying without having quality loss often requires extensive knowledge and experience. The design of the Virginia Tech solar kiln is such that extensive knowledge, experience and control are not required. The size of the collector keeps the kiln from over-heating and causing checking and splitting of the wood. The kiln is simple to construct and utilizes a passive solar collector, four insulated walls and an insulated floor. The roof is made of clear, greenhouse rated, corrugated polyethylene.”

Virginia Tech Solar Kiln. Via Build It Solar.

“They are hard to build with, they require regular maintenance, they are expensive and they flex a lot. However, if you want a traditional looking wheel, avoiding metal altogether is a marvellous move, something that we’re lucky to still be able to do today.”

Cerchio Ghisallo has been producing wooden rims since 1946, and in this video father and son show how they do it. Inside Cerchio Ghisallo part 1, part 2, part 3.

More about wood rims: Building with Wooden Rims / Cycling before Lycra / Wheel Fanatyk / Is Wood the Goods? / Wood Sprints /Cerchio Ghisallo / Sacro Bosco Bicycle works / CB Italia.

Picture: d’Annata by Sartoria Cicli.

“Of course making wooden table ware for a living means making thousands of items every year, which seems rather a tall order when you consider the technology being used, but Rob insists that his pole lathe can turn out wooden ware as quickly as the mechanised equivalent. This theory has been put to the test and proven correct. As Robin explains in the
film, when he’s powered up, so is his lathe and he can get results quickly. When he stops the lathe turning he can adjust the wood instantaneously, whereas when you power down a mechanical lathe you have to wait for the machine to slow down and stop turning in it’s own time.”

“Any fool can make something more complex but it takes real genius to make things simple again“. A new video by Artisan Media. Robin Wood’s blog.

Via Toolemera. Previously: Make your own treadle lathe.

The lathe has been used as part of our traditional woodworking demonstrations and it never fails to draw a crowd. Of course, the reason the lathe exists is because I felt a need for it as a tool.

Some of the main considerations when designing the lathe were:

• Human powered — our solar energy system was pretty small at the time
• Size — it had to be less than 42″ tall to fit into our old truck
• Compact — since it would sit in our small shop all the time, a small footprint was essential
• Portable — as in not too cumbersome or heavy
• Functional — it had to perform the basic duties of a light-duty lathe
• Adaptable — I had in mind several untraditional uses for the tool, like sanding”

Find the manual here.

More do-it-yourself projects.

How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware.

“The Dugout Canoe Project (.pdf) began as an experiment to use traditional Native American technologies. Archaeologists are reliant on just a few ethnohistoric sources that mention how Native Americans made dugout canoes using stone tools and fire. Numerous contemporary examples of dugouts exist, particularly Plimouth Plantation’s Wampanoag Indian Program, made by burning and scraping out logs. However, to the best of our knowledge, no one has attempted to fell a tree using only stone tools and fire. We wanted to see if we could cut down a live tree using these technologies, something that may not have been done in this area for several hundred years.”

“Dugout canoes are probably the first type of boat ever made. People from all over the world made dugouts. They were widely used in North America before the arrival of Europeans. Dugout canoes were made by Native Americans across North and South America for transportation and to hunt fish with a spear, bow and arrows, or with hooks made from antler or bones. In Eastern North America, dugout canoes were typically made from a single log of chestnut or pine. Carefully controlled fires were used to hollow out these logs. The fires were extinguished at intervals to scrape out the burned wood with wood, shell or stone tools, giving the canoes a flat bottom with straight sides.”

Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museum. More posts on primitive technology.

“This manual is intended to provide comprehensive support to those involved with maintaining, assessing, strengthening, or rehabilitating covered bridges, especially heavy timber truss bridges. At one time, the United States reportedly had 14,000 of these unique bridges dotting the countryside over a surprisingly large area. Now, fewer than 900 of the historic structures survive.

Timber bridges initially were built without coverings and failed in just a few years because of rot and deterioration, because chemical wood preservatives were not available or used. Builders familiar with the construction of houses, barns, and large community structures naturally added siding and roofs to help protect the bridge. They understood that the covering would soon pay for itself.

They believed that regular maintenance and occasional replacement of the light covering was far easier and cheaper than building an entirely new bridge. North American covered bridges still serve after nearly 200 years, due in part to the continued soundness of the trusses, which was possible only with these protective coverings.”

“Covered Bridge Manual“, 327 pages, US Department of Transportation, 2005. Via Arquitectura y madera. Previously: wooden bridges / wooden pipelines. Picture by Rainer Ebert.

“A reciprocal roof is a beautiful and simple self-supporting structure that can be composed of as few as three rafters, and up to any imaginable quantity (within reason, of course). Reciprocal roofs require no center support, they are quick to construct, and they can be built using round poles or dimensional lumber (perhaps with some creative notching). They are extremely strong, perfect for round buildings, and very appropriate for living roofs, as well.”

How to build a reciprocal roof frame. Practice with matches first.

Related: How to build an earthbag dome.

Via Judit Bellostes.

“This book is intended to furnish general information regarding the construction, the advantages and the use of our wooden stave pipe”. “Wooden stave pipes“, Redwood Manufacturers Company, 1911. Via Arquitectura y Madera. Wooden pipes were (and occasionally still are) used for domestic water supply, irrigation, sewer systems and hydraulic power stations. Summary below the fold.

Durability

“When sound wood is kept thoroughly wet it does not rot. Hundreds of important stone structures depend for their stability and support on wooden piles ; and when the precaution was taken to use none but good material, and to keep it below low water level, no decay has resulted. These structures have stood the test of time, some of them for many centuries, and where parts have been removed, and old piles taken up, they have been found to be sound. Wooden bored water pipes of small diameter have been largely used in England and in some of our Eastern cities, and when dug up, after many years of continuous service, have been found as sound and clean as when they were put in.”

“The essential condition to insure an indefinite life of the wooden staves, is that they must be kept constantly saturated. This can best be attained by burying the pipe in the ground, as thereby all evaporation from the surface of the pipe will be prevented. If so buried, it is necessary that the pipe should run full at intervals of sufficiently long duration to cause and maintain complete saturation of the wood. When the staves are once thoroughly soaked they will remain so for an indefinite time if the pipe is buried and there be no ventilation through the pipe.”

“If it be admitted that the life of the staves, supposing the above condition to have been complied with, is indefinitely long, the life of the pipe as a whole is dependent upon that of the metal bands. In cast, wrought iron or steel pipe the metal serves the double purpose of forming the water-tight shell and providing the strength to resist water pressure. If the metal through corrosion fails in either purpose, the pipe has become useless. It is a notable fact that iron pipe never fails because of reduction in strength, but always because of a pitting action which affords numerous passages for the water, causing leaks.”

“This happens in riveted pipe long before corrosion has seriously weakened the strength of the metal, and such pipe would have a very much longer usefulness could its life be extended until the metal had actually become too weak to resist the strains from water pressure. Such increased life is secured to stave pipe because the metal is placed upon the pipe for purposes of strength only; and while steel pipe often has to be abandoned when but 5% of its strength is destroyed by corrosion, stave pipe would continue tight and the bands would not be strained beyond their elastic limit until 60% of the metal is rusted away.”

Construction

“In places along steep side hills and otherwise difficult of access, heavy hoisting apparatus or specially constructed roads can be avoided by the use of stave pipe. All the required material for the largest size pipe can be transported on the backs of mules, handled by at the most two men by hand or raised to the line of work by light cables or tramways. This is of great importance not only in first construction but in the matter of repairs should the work be damaged by land slides or from other exterior causes.”

“The absence of circumferential joints in its construction avoids serious local weakening of the strength of the pipe considered as a long tube, and this, taken in connection with its lightness and the possibility of producing tight work even with some water in the trench, has frequently led to its adoption in situations where, owing to the softness of the ground, other pipe would have required special foundation and expensive pumping operations.”

Carrying capacity

“The flow experiments on stave pipe that have so far been made may not entirely agree among themselves, any more than is the case with other classes of pipe, nevertheless it is an undisputed fact that the carrying capacity of stave pipe exceeds that of metal pipe, even under most favorable conditions. Entire absence of interior shoulders and smoothness of interior surface account for these results. While metal pipe is very liable to the formation of tubercles upon its interior surface, rapidly reducing its carrying capacity in the course of even a few years, stave pipe remains smooth and its carrying capacity unaffected by age.”

“It is well known that the carrying capacity of water pipe depends upon the smoothness of its interior surface. In this respect wooden pipe not only surpasses all other pressure pipe in the market, when it is new, but its capacity does not decrease with use, as is the case with wrought iron, steel and cast iron pipe. Our pipe will carry from ten to twenty per cent more water than iron or steel pipe when both are new and from thirty to fifty per cent more when both are ten years old.”

Irrigation

“Wooden flumes, which carry irrigation water on grade over rivers and depressions, are a familiar feature of irrigation canals. They have, however, some serious disadvantages, which render different methods of conveying the water very desirable. Exposed as they are to the action of the wind and sun, the wood warps and cracks, and since they are alternately wet and dry, the wood rots quickly. The trestles upon which they rest form an obstruction to the water in the creeks over which they cross, which, when coming down in freshets, endangers the entire structure. The pipe, when buried in the ground, is protected from the action of the atmosphere and leaves no obstruction to the flow of surface water over it.”

“Where water is developed from underground sources or where it is pumped to considerable height, it is of importance that great expense having been incurred in its collection, the water should all be saved and not be allowed to seep away in the ground before reaching its destination, to which clear water is particularly liable. Pipe lines instead of canals are for this reason best adapted to conduct water. They will also save whatever evaporation there may be from open ditches, will do away with troublesome growth of algae in this kind of water and with the annual expense of cleaning, and will admit of continued flow during the winter season for filling storage reservoirs.”

Sewers

“Sewerage has frequently to be conducted long distances to be discharged in the ocean, in natural streams or on sewer farms or filter beds. Where the pipe can be maintained full at intervals or where it lies in wet soil, or where sewage is pumped, conditions for the use of wooden pipe are favorable. In comparison with ordinary sewer pipe it has the advantage that it can be built tight even with a small amount of water in the trench, and that in soft and marshy soil no foundation is required, as the pipe when full is no heavier than the soil it displaces and has great longitudinal strength. Stave pipe has been so used in Los Angeles, Hollister, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and San Rafael, all in California; and the important fact that wood is in no way affected by the frequent acidulous character of the sewage is largely in its favor in comparing it with metal pressure pipes.”

Source: “Wooden stave pipes“, Redwood Manufacturers Company, 1911.

Present-day examples of wooden pipes.

Birch bark has been used in Finland for centuries as a construction material and as material for making small objects like baskets and shoes. One of birch bark’s features is good thermal insulation. The surface is water repellent and it can be gently washed with water. Some components of birch bark also protect it from decomposing.

Finnish architects Teija Losoi, Anne Varsamäki and Ilari Pirttilahti used the technique to build a lightweight sauna – basically a huge traditional birch bark basket turned upside down. The light walls are supported by a wooden structure that is hidden inside two layers of braided birch bark. More pictures: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4. Thank you, Zeltia !

“Sometimes, if a pen stutters, you can get it going again by shaking it. But sometimes it seems to take a lot of shaking. So I figured, what if I could shake it really really hard? What if I built a centrifuge to get the ink flowing again? And so this project came about!”

Hand tool overkill. Don’t miss the video (and the other projects by Matthias Wandel).

Via Make Magazine.

A hand powered sawing machine to harvest trees. Click on the illustration to see the full plans. Source: Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, june 1822.