Farewell gifts (and geese)

In addition to the larger furniture pieces I showed off in my previous post, I've been making a number of smaller woodworking projects too. Two friends of mine are both moving away from Hawaii in the near future, so I put my newfound skills to the test to make them some farewell gifts.

For my friend Mark, I wanted to try an end-grain cutting board after watching a video on how to make them. Basically, you glue a bunch of strips of wood together (all cut along the grain, or “rip cut”), then cut them in strips across the grain (“cross cut”) and flip them up 90° so that the end face of the board is made up of the end grain faces of each piece (the end grain is where you can see the rings). I haven't been able to test it myself yet (for reasons of time), but from what I've heard this results in a more durable cutting board than simply leaving those strip glued together to make an edge grain cutting board, though it's also more work (and has more wood lost to kerf from making more cuts). Experienced woodworkers can make all kinds of fascinating patterns by the selection, arrangement, and cutting angles of various kinds of wood, but the basic premise is relatively simple.

After wetting it down to “raise the [wood] grain” to get a smoother sanded finish.

The project still took me over a week, since I discovered the miter gauge on my table saw isn't really accurate enough for repeated cross cuts like I needed to make. I ended up with a bunch of wood strips which, when glued together, weren't all quite the same thickness. There are some tools which could potentially solve this easily, but I don't have them, so I had to spend hours trying to sand down and smooth out the irregularities. (Going forward I intend to preemptively solve this by making a cross cut sled, a simple jig made using plywood and some screws which should make getting repeatable cross cuts much easier.)

And here it is after applying a protective mineral oil and wax finish.

Anyway, after a lot of sanding and small cosmetic fixes I got it to a state where I'm mostly happy with it. It should serve as a cutting board, at least, even if it's not perfect. I wanted to make something using local woods as a reminder of Hawaiʻi, so I used koa and ʻōhiʻa (plus some African padauk for a pop of orange contrast. The edges and center are koa, with ʻōhiʻa to either side of it down the middle and then padauk just inside the edges.) I haven't decided on whether it'd be better with things like a juice groove or edge handles, but since Mark's still got some time before he leaves I'll probably just ask him.

For my friend Josh, whom I worked with at my job with NEON last year, I decided to make a little coaster from some scraps of Phillipine mahagony I had from another project (which I'll reveal at some point). A few years ago I bought some novelty coasters designed to look like little wooden pallets, and I thought something like that would make a practical gift.

Raw materials after cutting them out, and the inspiration.

The strips of wood I had were slightly wider than in the original coasters, so I went for a solid flat face on the top. The result came out looking pretty good, in my opinion!

And since Josh enjoyed seeing the nēnē while we were working up in the natural area reserve, I pulled out my wood burning kit and doodled a quizzical nēnē from a photo I took while visiting the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge last year. This project was a lot quicker, and only took me a few hours over the course of a day.

The inspiration…

…and the (slightly off-center) result.

While the occasion of their creation is for less-than-happy reasons, it was a lot of fun to stretch my creative muscles for these projects and make something new. I like making practical furniture, but it's also nice to make smaller practical (and decorative) wood pieces. I've got more things to show off here at some point too, so stay tuned! A hui hou!

Pyrographic presents

As the end of the season approached, and it came time for us seasonal field technicians to say goodbye to NEON, I decided to make some little gifts for all my coworkers. Between moving and work I didn't have a lot of time to think about it (or make things) so I settled rather hastily on some small wood-burning (pyrography) pieces. Since I get bored of doing the same thing over and over I decided to do a unique design for each person based on what I knew they liked or enjoyed about the work we did. I've grouped them into a few categories below:

1. Plants

ʻĀhinahina (silversword) and Peperomia sp.

I did these for two coworkers who mentioned these plants as being their favorites. On the left is a Mauna Loa silversword (Argyroxiphium kauense), or ʻāhinahina in Hawaiian. We were privileged to see some of these that were outplanted in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (out of reach of voracious ungulates!), and they're just as beautiful as the Mauna Kea species.

Leaves of Peperomia sp. from beneath

The disk on the right shows leaves from a species of Peperomia (using the photo above as reference). There are over a thousand recognized Peperomia species (at least twenty-two in Hawaii alone), and there are thought to be more since they can be hard to tell apart and positive identification can be very difficult. While we normally would (and could) identify most plants to the species level with confidence, we simply couldn't identify any peperomias we found to better than the genus level. They're pretty plants, though, with strikingly-colored undersides to their leaves.

2. Beetles

Mecyclothorax neonomas and M. rufipennis

As part of the work we did we collected, identified, and preserved various Carabidae beetles. Members of this large and varied family are found around the world, with both native and invasive species present in Hawaii. Shown here are two native species from the genus Mecyclothorax, M. neonomas on the left and M. rufipennis on the right. M. neonomas was actually discovered just a few years ago at our site from the kind of collection work we did (one of two such species), which is pretty neat! We didn't find any new species this year (beetles in general were scarcer than the previous few years), but there could be more out there waiting to be discovered…

3. Birds

Nēnē, ʻiʻiwi, & ʻalalā

Birds ended up being the biggest category, as we got to see a lot of endangered and rare native birds in the Natural Area Reserve. Nēnē were a very common sight; we would often see between ten to twenty on any given day. (This was the first one of these wood-burnings that I made, so it's a bit less polished than the others as I was relearning it on the fly). In the middle is an ʻiʻiwi, a striking native scarlet honeycreeper with a dramatically curved bill. I modeled this after a photo of one perched on a māmane tree, and while I didn't get its front quite right I like the contrast with the black wing and tail feathers. (The light was at a poor angle for this disk specifically, so I had to play with it a bit in GIMP to get it to look better.)

The third bird is one which I haven't actually seen personally, and isn't currently at the site: it's an ʻalalā, the Hawaiian crow. By 2002 there were no known wild individuals, with just a few remaining in captivity. Intensive breeding and rehabilitation programs have increased the captive populations to the point where some individuals were released into the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve several years ago…where they were unfortunately quickly predated by ʻio, the Hawaiian hawk. One of my coworkers, before joining NEON, was part of this effort and used to track the birds around the reserve, so I made this for him. (Amusingly, he immediately could tell from it that I'd used a reference photo of a not-quite-adult bird ­– something I didn't know – as its head was still a little big for its body.) In some good news, around a dozen ʻalalā were recently released in the wild on Maui where there are no ʻio, so hopefully they'll be able to re-establish a wild breeding population there and eventually bring them back to the forests of Hawaiʻi.

4. Tower

The fourth and final category has just a single disk, but it's probably the one I'm most proud of. I made it based on a photo I took of the top of our instrument tower seen through the trees along one of our trails, and I managed to get a lot of details in there. Here's the photo in question, for reference:

Funnily enough, this photo is now out of date: two weeks ago, during my last week with NEON, some site infrastructure people came out and moved one of the boom arms visible on the left to the other side of the tower to better sample the prevailing wind direction. When the tower was originally built in 2018 it was laid out using data on wind direction from Pohakuloa up on the saddle, and no one seems to have thought to question if the wind patterns were the same for a different site. (Spoiler: they aren't.) Our tower had thus, for its existence, had the wind-sampling equipment off to the wrong side for the prevailing winds. It wasn't a huge problem by any means (the tower being in the way probably wasn't affecting things too much), but it's good that it's fixed now.

And that's it! It was nice to have motivation to pull out my wood-burning kit again; when I originally got it I imagined I'd be doing a bit more than I have (so far it's pretty much just been the two pieces in this previous post). Several people said I should sell these, which…with some more practice…we'll see if that goes anywhere, I suppose. A hui hou! (And if any of my coworkers are reading this, thanks for being such an awesome group of people!)

P.S. Also, after a week of intensively cleaning my old place, I'm finally fully moved out, and can concentrate on things around the new place.

Some new projects, while recuperating

It's been longer than I'd like since last posting here, due to a one-two punch combo: spending a week in California visiting my family over Memorial Day, and then just as I was settling back into a routine upon my return I came down with something that knocked me out for a week. I'm over it now, thankfully; while it wasn't particularly virulent it was tenacious, and just kept hanging on several days after I expected it to clear up.

Although I wasn't feeling particularly creative while ill, I found such creativity as I had focused on some hobbies I hadn't done much with in a while. I turned my hand to wood-burning again, for really only the second time since I tried it soon after moving back to Hawaii while my things were in transit. I had a piece of wood that I'd picked up last year and never done anything with, so I was able to use it for something that'd been on my mind for a while, ever since Gemini Observatory got a new logo last year. The new logo uses just a few shades of orange/brown, making it fairly simple to mimic with wood-burning. At least, that's what I thought, and it did sort-of work out that way in the end, it just took some trial-and-error to figure out which of the various interchangeable tips that came with my wood-burning set could produce what level of darkening. Anyway, here's the finished result:

The logo is intended to represent the two telescopes of Gemini (north and south), hence the negative space line down the middle (and not, as some joked, representing a serious structural flaw in the telescopes!). There's basically just three different levels of orange in the original logo, so the stars should all be the same lightest shade as seen in the telescopes, but such are the pitfalls of experimenting on your canvas. I did learn some interesting stuff about wood-burning from this project, though, so it was a good learning experience. Principally, the fact that it's difficult to get a solid gradient; you can approximate it with a hatched pattern (and I think I did a decent job of that), but there can be differences in the wood grain itself which make it burn faster or slower at different point. (There's a wavy dark mostly-horizontal line in the medium-dark section of the dome on the right, just below the windows, where a line in the wood burned so fast that it got dark no matter how quickly I moved the tip over it.)

Anyway, it was a fun little project, and I'd like to get better at wood-burning, maybe combine it with painting or something in the future. That's something I haven't really gotten back to other than a few abortive attempts at pictures, but instead, this week I found motivation to get back into crochet; and not only that, but to finish a project started and abandoned all the way back in 2017, when I moved to Australia:

Yes, I had a crochet lei in progress that I ended up leaving behind with the rest of my crochet equipment and some other things with some friends while I was away. What I hadn't anticipated was missing crochet enough to pick up some more hooks and yarn in Australia, leading to something of a duplication of effort; but this is the first time I've gone back and looked at what I left behind here. I found this in-progress lei, and since it was already started it was easy to get back into the swing of things and finish it. The center “backbone” (as it were) was done, and maybe 15% of the flowers; I wasn't able to successfully reverse-engineer the stitch sequence I was using back then, but I found one close enough to mimic it. (Though you might be able to work out the original section in the photo above if you squint.)

It's been good to get back to doing something with my hands, and it'll be nice to have something to do in meetings again. We'll see where things go. I was recently given a big collection of knitting needles as well, and I wouldn't mind trying my hand at more knitting in the future. And now that I'm back to mostly-healthy I might have some other projects to share soon – I had a great time flying drones with my brothers in California and have some footage that's begging for editing. But for now, I need to get some sleep, so I'll leave it here. A hui hou!

Fake edit: I realize, looking back at my posts from around the end of 2021, that I don't think I ever mentioned my first foray into wood-burning. A friend at Swinburne had suggested I might find it interesting, so after I first moved into my current place in November 2021 (and while the majority of my hobby materials were in transit) I picked up a little wood-burning kit at Wal-mart for something like $12. It's essentially a soldering iron and some interchangeable tips, nothing too fancy, but I find there's a surprising amount of nuance that can be achieved. Anyway, I picked up a cheap piece of wood along with it and started doodling, ending up with the scene below:

This one, I think, shows the strengths of wood-burning off better; it's very good at creating a sense of natural depth and subtle nuance, rather than my attempts at solid gradients above. I didn't have much of a plan when starting this piece (and it probably shows), intending it mostly as a scratch pad for experimentation, but everything I put down kept working so well that it ended up being a picture with very little I wasn't at least satisfied with. Anyway, that's the extent of my wood-burning experience to date, but as mentioned I'd like to practice more with it in future. For my second project, the one above, I experimented with scratching the outlines of the areas into the wood first, allowing me to invisibly sketch a picture to fill later; that worked pretty well, I think, so I'll be interested to see where that might lead.