Details, details

I went to Mike's HandleWorld today to pick up my order and saw this stack of tool handles. These are square ended post hole digger handles. Most broadforks on the market use these, but I don't. 

When I set out to make broadforks, I didn't want to be another broadfork maker, I wanted to be the best broadfork maker. I had to find the details that the others manufacturers were missing and fine tune the Gulland Broadfork to make it better. I came into this job after blacksmithing for the last 23 years and I learned a lot about wooden handled tools in that time. I always carefully installed handles in my hammers, knew how to choose the right ones out of a pile of handles. 

A striking tool handle should be used with the grain of the wood running in line with the direction of the strike to make the handle stronger. The broadfork is not a striking tool, but it's very important for the grain to line up with the direction of the pull so that the handles will be able to utilize the ultimate strength of the wood. Take a look at the photo below.

It's easy to see on the square ends which ones have diagonal grain running through them, and you can see it on a lot of the round ends as well. These diagonal grain ash handles are very strong, but ultimately not as strong as those with a grain that can run in line with the pull of the tool. With a square handle socket, the handles can't be spun around to line up properly.

That's why I use a round handle socket. It's a little more difficult to assemble because welding a round tube to a square tube makes for a more 'interesting' weld joint, but it allows me to align the wood grain of the handle to be exactly where I want it. 

Each handle is pre-drilled with the proper grain orientation so that all you have to do is tighten 2 bolts and the handles will be as good as they can be. 

When designing this broadfork, there were lots of places I could have ignored such details but too many people do that these days. I wanted the Gulland Broadfork to be a generational, heirloom tool.

It's all in the details.

Gulland

Sawdust

This is a picture of the parts of the broadfork handle that will never make it to your hands. This pile of sawdust won't go to waste; it will be sent to a factory from here to be used as fuel to fire a boiler. 

I get to see my handle man tomorrow. I first met him by phone last summer and saw him for the first time just a few weeks ago when I went to his 'factory' to say hello and order some more handles. Mike's just a little over 45 minutes away, which is dangerous because I could spend a lot of time visiting if I'm not careful. I consider him to be a partner in my business because without his handles, the Gulland Broadfork would just be a doorstop.

I like to support small businesses like his. On the day I was there, 3 people were working, including Mike, and when his business peaks in the summer, there may be 4 or 5 at most. He spent a lot of time with me showing me around the log yard and the sawmill, and explained how everything worked. His building burned down several years ago and he rebuilt from the ground up, salvaging and rebuilding a few irreplaceable specialty machines, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, and trying it again. I don't know if I'd have the courage to do what he did, but Mike's a man of strong Faith and he's really good at what he does. I hope all his customers appreciate him as much as I do.

After the logs are cut into slabs, two men set up at the saw (above) and feed the heavy pieces through the beast, over and over cutting square pieces from the slab until there's nothing left on the in feed side. Ash is a heavy, dense wood, and although the slabs get smaller every time they pass through the saw, there is a nearly endless supply of slabs in a day's work. 
On the off feed side, the square pieces are stacked and stickered to insure that air can circulate freely around them so that they can be kiln dried more efficiently. Mike's drying room is run off of wood scraps that fire a boiler that provides the heat. The drying room runs constantly and this pallet of handle material will spend a couple of weeks stacked wall to wall and floor to ceiling with other handle stock before the real work of shaping and finishing them begins.
There are about 38 dozen handles on this stack. One in ten handles will meet the quality standard that I specify for my customers. To put a visual on that, essentially, the top 3 rows on this stack will be good enough to go to my customers. 

I'll have about a dozen dozen handles to work on after tomorrow and I really enjoy the woodworking portion of broadfork making. I look forward to the peaceful, quiet work of sizing the handles with my block plane and soaking them in the linseed oil and turpentine mix. This has been a fantastic project so far and I'd like to thank all of you that have become my customers and my friends along the way. 

I saw a t-shirt this week that said something like, "If you find a job you love to do, you will never work a day in your life." Thanks to you, it's going that way for me.

Gulland

"A Chicken in Every Pot"

We've all heard it, but exactly where did that phrase come from? A little research and I found that in 17th century France, King Henry IV wished that each of his peasants should enjoy, "A chicken in his pot every Sunday." Later on, in 1928, though President Hoover never actually said the phrase, the Republican Party used the phrase in a 1928 ad campaign touting a period of "Republican prosperity" that provided a "chicken in every pot."

Yeah, and we know what happened shortly after that.

The metaphor of the chicken in the pot brings up all kinds of warm thoughts of visiting Grandma on Sundays and the closeness and joy of a family meal together, scents of home made foods wafting, and the crisp autumn air just right for a friendly game of football in the yard.

Go to the grocery store today and try to set that lovely Norman Rockwell scene with a factory farmed bird and you have to add some not so pleasant images and words. Let's see, "Arsenic in 70% of pots," "Salmonella in every pot,"  "Campylobacter in every pot," "Antibiotics in every pot," you get the idea. 

For several years now, my wife and I have been watching the quality of food we purchase. We raised chickens at home and grew a lot of our own food, supplementing it with high quality local food when at all possible, and in general, being very careful what we bought and how we cooked it.

We recently spent 105 days camping, and in that time we ate a dozen meals out. You read that right. Sometimes we needed to stop in and use a wi-fi, and occasionally, we just wanted some fried chicken or a burger. Otherwise we did as Lewis and Clark would have done, as they were a great inspiration as we traveled through South Dakota and Nebraska, and a hard act to follow. We cooked our own, we also packed our own, and we bought high quality food as we traveled.

Raising one's own food supply is not easy or convenient or stylish, but it's high time a lot more of us did it, and none other than the main stream media has inspired me to post this today.

MSNBC.com posted an article today that everyone needs to read, then decide who you want to provide food security for you and your family. Clearly the USDA isn't doing a good job for us. Just take a look at the e. coli and salmonella contamination issues we have been faced with in recent years. As funding is cut to monitor food quality (and it WILL be) and food factories cut more corners in production (and they WILL), we will face a point in time where we're playing Russian roulette on our dinner plates.

Take your fate into your own hands and grow your own. It is the only way to insure that you will get good quality food. Grow your own vegetables and grow your own chickens. Find a way and make it happen. Start small, and learn your way as you go. Visit Harvey Ussery's site and get all the information you need to have to make it work for you. Do it today. This is really important stuff. If you can't grow it yourself, try to buy your food from a source you trust. 

Here's that link to the msnbc.com article again

Gulland

Creating Broadforkers

I had a great Saturday. We visited with Alex, who had recently bought his first house. It's on 5 acres with a barn and some fenced pasture in the rural outback of north central Alabama, and is a perfect a place for a young man in his 20s to begin. Alex has spent his whole life up there, surrounded by farmland and home gardens, but had never had one of his own. After my wife and I had a tour of his new place, he asked where he thought his garden should go. 

We took a look around and decided on a spot, which was, coincidentally the same one his Dad had chosen. I told him we could lay it out and start working it with the broadfork and he could get some spinach started if he had some seeds and an old storm window to cover it on cold days.

Alex thought it would be a lot more complicated than that. He said, " So that's it?"  I told him we could lay out a line with a garden hose to get a look at exactly where it should go. We looked at the shadow of his (very nice) barn and of the surrounding trees, considered the approximate angle of the sun in a few more months, stretched the hose out and started working. I always travel with a broadfork lately, and I showed him how to handle it, then he tried it out. The soil was a sandy clay soil and was very easy to work. 

As we worked, Karen and I talked with him about the foods he liked to eat, and how to get them started. He'd never had fingerling potatoes before, and from the look in his eyes as we talked about them, I think he'll enjoy them a lot, particularly when he digs up his first basket with his broadfork. He's going to have some really good potatoes there.

He seemed a little surprised that he didn't have to 'till' the whole garden, but just the rows that would be the beds, and it would look kind of like earthen corduroy. I told him I'd be back with my scythe when the grass got up to show him how that works to make great mulch.

I left my demo broadfork with him to work on the garden this week, and I plan on going back next weekend to see how it went. I felt like something very important happened there in the warm sun and chilly breeze of the last day of January. Alex really wants to produce some of his own food, and now I believe he is going to do it. He's off to a good start.

I think demystifying gardening is part of the challenge in getting someone started. From the outside, it seems like so much work, so much equipment, such a miracle to get food to grow in the Earth. I told Alex that when we open the ground and put in a seed and water it, we are simply letting Nature happen. 

Try to help someone start their first garden if you get a chance. You'll feel good about it, I promise. 

Gulland

Time in the can

We're back at the broadfork workbench again doing the last step in the handle making process. 

I put a lot of thought into making this tool in every step of the process. I didn't want to get started with distribution and find out that I was doing something wrong, and have to rethink procedures on the fly. I am frequently reminded of the words of my first boss, Ernie Bradshaw, who told me, "Take time to do things right, because we don't have time to do them twice." 

I have tried to live my life that way as much as possible and it's worked pretty well for the 35 years since I worked with Mr. Bradshaw. 

When the tool handles come to me, there is a light wax coating on them that has to be applied for production purposes. When I ordered my first sample order of handles, I wasn't sure exactly how to deal with the wax.  At first I thought I would have to remove it by sanding and then apply a spar varnish to seal the wood. Then I remembered another old voice from my past, the one of Nol Putnam.

Nol was my first blacksmithing instructor at the John C. Campbell folk school in Brasstown, NC in July 1986. I had signed up for a 2 week class with this amazing master smith, and for some crazy reason, they didn't cancel the class, even though there were only 2 students. It turned out to be a great break for me and for the other student, Keith Kilby, who incidentally turned out to be one of the best knife makers in the country. We had pretty much one on one instruction at the earliest point in our careers. It was like showing up to your first guitar lesson and seeing Segovia sitting in the teacher's chair. I have to say in retrospect, that I learned as much about blacksmithing in those first 2 weeks as I did in the next 10 years, and I am still drawing information from that class.

Nol suggested I shape the handles of my hammers to better fit my hand. He suggested that I scrape the varnish off my hammer handles because it would keep my sweat and natural skin oils from getting into the wood. The varnish, he said, might even cause more issues with blisters. So, I took out my knife blade and scraped all my hammers, and I have ever since on all my wood handled tools.

Another trick I learned from Nol was an old formula for a metal finish that would work well on ironwork that was to be used indoors. It was a mixture of boiled linseed oil, turpentine, and bees wax. I have used all the years since, and I am using it now on broadfork handles.

Instead of trying to remove the wax that was in place on the tool handles when they came to me, I chose to add turpentine and linseed oil to it.

The process goes like this: After the handles are fitted to their sockets (from the last post) I soak both ends of each pair for 8 hours in a can of 50/50 linseed oil and turpentine.  Soaking the mix into the end grain helps to protect the handle ends from checking (cracking).When the ends are done, I rub the whole handle with the same mix with some 0000 steel wool. This mixes the oil with the wax, and takes advantage of the wax being there in the first place. The handles are then set aside to absorb the mix and dry. After that they are rubbed out, packaged, and shipped to their new home.

This is the least toxic handle finish I could come up with. Linseed oil is a product of flax seed, and turpentine is from a pine resin distillate. The combination of the two has been used for centuries as a wood finish. I also use the same stuff to finish the metal part of the broadfork. I know you don't want to take painted tines and put all that chemistry in your nice vegetable beds, so I did my homework and came up with this solution. It's old fashioned, and will need to be re-applied from time to time, but I think it's the right thing to do.

The weather is getting right to do a little 'forking, so check back in a day or two for some pictures of the broadfork in use. It's almost February and I am anxious to get something planted and under a cold frame. 

Thanks for tuning in,

Gulland

 

Making the Gulland Broadfork

When I started this blog, I really wanted it to be about the broadfork. So far it's been about pears, intermodal logistics, chickens, and Chernobyl. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about the broadfork.

I want you to know that I make each one by hand, one at a time in my shop. I pay attention to details during this process to make sure that each tool is as good as it can be. I go to great lengths to insure that things are done the right way, ultimately for you, but also for me and for all of us. By that I mean that I am very careful in the manufacturing process to think about the details that will make this tool useful, durable, repairable, environmentally reasonable to produce, and actually profitable, so that I can make a living by doing this. With proper care, the Gulland Broadfork should never get to the point to where it should end up in a landfill.

First, I want to introduce the process of fitting the handles to my broadfork. The select ash handles are really half the tool and deserve to be treated as such.  My handles come from a small producer located about 30 miles from me in Tennessee who gives me the best he has to offer. He uses ash that is native to the Tennessee Valley, and the wood travels very minimally from where it is harvested to my shop. Mike runs a 4 person operation, and most of his employees are family members. I consider him a partner in my business, and I have the utmost respect for what he does. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with him.

I start by matching each pair of handles by grain density so both will have about the same amount of 'spring' which is what gives my broadfork such a great feel when in use. Some handled tools feel like pry bars, but these contoured ash handles have a dynamic feel when in use. All the handles are straight grained, and the grain runs the full length of the handle with no run-outs.  I drill each one with the hole in line with the strongest orientation of the grain. 

The drilled hole is carefully whittled out before the final handle sizing is done.

The steel handle sockets are seamless DOM tubing, and are sized just a bit smaller than the handles I get from Mike. The wood comes to me at 1.5" diameter, and the tube is 1.482" inside diameter. That leaves me with a little fitting to do as you can see from the scratches on the end of the wood handle shown here. I choose to do it this way to insure that the handle and socket are fitted very closely to each other. The wood changes size ever so slightly with changes in moisture, so it can never be perfect, but I like it to be as close as possible when it leaves my shop. The first step in sizing the handle is to see approximately how much wood needs to be removed. The handle is pressed by hand into the socket, and the resulting line gives me the exact depth of cut I need.

The sizing process is one I have decided to do the hard way. In the first few broadforks I made, I used a sander to size the handles to fit the sockets. For production, I wanted to minimize the amount of 'consumables' I had to purchase and throw away. Sanding discs wear out quickly on the rock-hard ash wood, and all that sandpaper would just go to the landfill, so I decided to buy a hand tool to do the job. I went straight to the top, and bought a bronze Lie-Neilsen low angle block plane. I'd like to thank my brother for turning me on to this exceptional tool. After I borrowed his, I went out and got one for myself. It is a joy to use, and though it may be a bit slower to use than a power sander, it works beautifully, and at a human pace. It's silent, doesn't create that fine dust that gets everywhere, and has no throw away 'consumables'. By doing it this way, I don't have to use electricity for a sander or for a vacuum system. Clean up is simple with a broom and a dustpan and I use the shavings to make fire starters and garden mulch. 

I set up a simple jig to rotate the handle as I size it to fit, from time to time checking the handle socket as I slide the razor sharp blade through the wood pulling off paper thin curls. Doing this for an hour or two is quite relaxing, really, and I am always amazed at how much time passes while I am doing this very pleasant task. Yesterday I enjoyed Holst's 'Hammersmith' while I fitted a couple dozen handles. You can get much worse work.

The last step in fitting is to actually line up the holes in the wood with the holes in the metal. This is a nice, tight fit and everything lines up perfectly. The square punched hole in the handle socket is another detail I add. The handle is attached to the broadfork with a single stainless steel carriage bolt with a thin locking jam nut. The square hot punched hole holds the square shank of the carriage bolt making the fit-up as neat and clean as possible. 

We're not through with the handles yet. Next time we'll take a look at the last step in making the handles as good as they can be. If you couldn't tell, I just love these tool handles. Having been a blacksmith for all these years, I feel like I am learning something new with this exposure to woodworking, and I'm looking forward to doing more of it.

Thanks for reading along, and check back soon for more broadfork information.

Gulland

on a lighter note...

From my friend Kaitlyn: