Remodeling The Van: The Plan

Over the years I've built or modified a number of slide-ins, campers and/or vans. (I know, I know. What is wrong with me?!!) And in these small spaces there's not always much room to show off any styling or design elements, but in what little space there is, the cupboard doors and drawer-fronts do stand out so that's where I've tended to focus my efforts.

Maybe because I'm still trying to 'find' myself, maybe because I get bored easily, or maybe because I have the attention span of a gnat, whatever the reason, over those years I've used a whole range of styles for my doors and drawers.

I've done everything from crude plywood (Which I was too embarrassed to photograph.)






to cabin-in-the-woods with cane inserts, which I'm sure I photographed but can't seem to find any record of now.

But, even though it's going on 2 decades since then, I do still have a box of leftover cane tucked away on a high shelf because - well, you never know. . .











then there was beach-front rustic,













followed by understated refined, (With hand-made louvered vents)











and the current doors, whimsical contemporary with hand-made lattice inserts (The only way to get the proper scale, besides, in my perverse way they were fun to build, stick by sick - I mean stick. . .) painted to match the rugs.






But I've been looking at these latest doors for over 6 years now and that, in combination with the overwhelming urge to do a real shop-project this winter, (It's a sickness best not denied.) has driven me to yet another iteration of cupboard doors.

When casting around for a style for this new project it didn't take me long to zero in on the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800's early 1900's.  Basically Arts and Crafts came about in counterpoint to, or protest of, the industrial age and its soulless cookie-cutter mass production. The movement got it's start in architecture, most commonly of the private home, but quickly spread into furniture, built-ins and lamps as well.

On the furniture side, probably one of the more widely known variants of Arts and Crafts is Stickley. This is because, good or bad, right or wrong, Stickley was not at all adverse to taking his designs to the factory and churning them out at prodigious rates, despite the anti-industrial age leanings of the very movement which drove his design decisions. In fact Stickley furniture is still being factory built today under license.

Lesser known are the Greene brothers, or Greene and Greene style. They started as architects but soon branched into the world of furniture, built-ins and lamps as well. The reason they are not that well known today is that they insisted their pieces be hand built, most of them by the brothers Peter and John Hall. As a result, the number of authentic Greene and Greene furniture pieces number in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands-and-counting of the better known Stickley.

Just exactly what defines the Greene and Greene style is not an easy question to answer, but there are a few details that stand out and I've chosen to focus on four of them.

First, true to the Arts and Crafts movement, oak was predominant (Although here I'm actual getting a little off the Greene and Greene track since more of their work was built of mahogany or teak than oak, but hey, it's my project!) And in those days good straight-grained oak was the first choice, none of this cathedral-grained plain-sawn stuff. Figuring was also highly sought after for the more informal pieces.

Second, in 1904 Charles Greene visited an expo in St. Louis and came away with some significant Japanese influences, one being the cloud-lift, an example of which can be seen in the aprons of the table above. (Those steps or notches are cloud-lifts.)

Third is the use of ebony plugs and accents, also seen in the piece above.

And finally there's the use of decorative or accent elements. These could be organic such as in the glass panels of the lamp above, linear such as the thin lines or leads on the glass panels of the sconce to the left, or, if you want to get really fancy, a combination of the two such as in the chandelier below.

I chose to go with more linear accent elements in the hopes of retaining some sort of sanity. (At least that was the plan. . .)

If you look close at these light fixtures you see that each of them incorporates at least three of the four elements I've picked out to focus on.

Now all I had to do was retire to the drawing board and churn out my brilliant  design, or at least a design. . .

I don't claim that what I came up with is a good representation of Greene and Greene style because I'm no - well - Greene and Greene. Even if I did have the space inside The Van to play with it, understanding the brother's sensibility of proportion and weight and flow is far beyond my capabilities, but what I did come up with is definitely Greene and Greene inspired.

Now all I have to do is translate that from the drawing board to reality. . .

Next time: Cabinet Door Frames

Oh Crap! The Damn Fool Is At It Again!!

Hey! Wait a minute! That's me you're calling  damn foo - - OK, fair enough - -

Because that's right. There's yet another self-inflicted project on the horizon.



Hint: That's 40 board feet of S2S, (Surfaced 2 Sides) random-width, quarter-sawn White Oak in those packages. And yes, this is yet another Van project.


What the hell is quarter-sawn??

Plain-sawn

It has to do with the way boards are sawn out of the log.

The easiest way to cut up a log with the least amount of waste is plain-sawn.  Just throw the log down on the mill and start slicing it into board-thick pieces.

By the way, today's 1" boards, though only .75" thick by the time they get to the lumber yard, start out a full inch thick in this first step of milling process. If I had ordered my wood un-sided rather than S2S  it would be a full inch thick, but I didn't need it that thick and having the mill 'surface' the boards on two sides in their massive, and very fast, surface planer saves me some work since I would have to surface it anyway to remove the tool marks




Plain-sawing produces boards featuring what's called a cathedral grain pattern. Most prominent on the left side of this board.


Unfortunately plain-sawn boards also tend to cup, or warp across their width. Now to be fair, most any board can cup regardless of how it's sawn from the log, but plain-sawn boards are especially susceptible.

Rift-sawn

The boards least susceptible to cupping are rift-sawn, but you can see how this would be the most time-consuming and wasteful way to use a log.

Rift-sawn boards don't cup much because they have a very straight grain that runs vertically through the thickness of the board, something like what's seen on the right side of the board above. This makes them very stable.

So straight grain is good, but oddly enough there's another feature of rift-sawn boards that make them unsuitable for this particular project. Rift-sawn boards show little if any figuring. And I'll come back to just what figuring is in a moment.

Quarter-sawn

Quarter-sawing is sort of a combination of rift and plain sawing. The rift part comes from cutting the log into quarters, (Quarter-sawn, get it!) though without trying to get boards out of those first cuts like would be the case with rift-sawn, then each quarter is laid on it's back, the rounded side, and sliced into successive boards, similar to plain-sawing.

Quarter-sawn boards have a largely straight grain and also tend to show any figuring the wood might have.

This particular board needs some additional surfacing. As it is, some of the tool-marks from where it was sawn from the log are still showing. One such spot is right there close to the near end of the board.

Pretty much all woods (Except the palms which don't have growth rings.) have a grain pattern to them.  That comes from the growth rings and in the photo above can be seen running the length of the board.

Some boards of just about any species have figuring as well. Scientists don't all agree on just what causes figuring. It could be stresses within the tree as it grows, it could be genetic, it could be some sort of fungal-caused defect, but regardless of how it got there, figuring is various combinations of luster, color, texture and micro-grain deviations that can show up on the surface of wood independent of the grain. Figuring comes in a whole variety of 'patterns' such as curl, tiger-stripe, blister, wavy, birds-eye, ray and many others. In the photo above the light squiggles or dashes are medullary rays.

Figuring is unpredictable and basically uncontrollable, running, when it wants to show at all, amok; free and wild and playful. And, along with a light colored wood and straight grain, I wanted figuring to be one of the features of what I have in mind for this project.

As you might expect, more to come.

Next time, The Plan

Snow Moon on a Dimmer, Sort Of

I suspect that you had to be living in a hole somewhere the past couple days to avoid hearing all about last night not only being a full moon, the snow moon, but that at moonrise there would also be a penumbral eclipse.

Anyway, we were out at sunset/moonrise yesterday because, while not exactly rare, stuff like this doesn't happen every day.



Since the moon was only going to be in the earth's penumbral just after moonrise, the viewing window was narrow. (OK, I'm sure someone has a very good reason for getting all fancy about it, but why not just say 'earth's partial shadow' instead of this prenuptual - prenumber - premature (Oh wait! that's never good so don't even think it!!) thing??)

In order for us to see anything close to the actual moonrise around here we have to walk five or six hundred feet of winding, tree-lined driveway all the way up the hill to the gate, then look through the trees along the fence-line of the ranch across the county road.



Since we can only get glimpses of the actual moonrise through the branches we had a limited view of the eclipse during it's peak.



And by the time the moon got above the treeline



there wasn't much eclipse left to be seen. (That shadow on the bottom-right is a branch, not some weird space thingy.)



But that's OK because the moon can, and should, be appreciated at any of it's stages. (Even when it tricks me into thinking it's sunrise and has me up at 2 in the morning, because we all know that 3 or 4 hours of sleep is plenty. . .Oh who am I kidding! At my age that's just enough to make me good and grumpy!!)

Abilene Texas, Campgrounds and Owls

As you saw from my previous two posts, not too long ago I was in the Abilene area.



Normally I would have checked out the Abilene State Park a dozen or so miles south of town. It's a small park with a state road running right through it, but it does have a lake, a few miles worth of trails and often state roads in this area are lightly traveled, so it just might be a decent place to stay.

Never know unless I try. Right?

But there was a reason I was in the Abilene area in the first place. Jim and Jackie, fellow Sportsmobile owners and authors of the Travels of the Mercury blog were in town.

So what's that got to do with not checking out the state park??

Well I first ran into Jim at the Silver City NM KOA which they owned at the time. They have since sold the campground and retired but as KOA owner's alumni, they were baby-sitting the Abilene KOA for a month or so while the managers took a break, so of course I stayed there at the KOA to hook up with them for a few moments snatched from their demanding work schedule. (This KOA doesn't use work-campers so the managers pretty much have to take care of everything 24/7.)






This is the second time I've stayed at the Abilene KOA and though the campground gets consistently good ratings I have to give it a wobbling hand rating myself. In other words an "Ehh" rating.



Mostly because my first stay was several years ago and at the time the bathrooms were under renovation and this time two of the three shower stalls in the men's room were still under renovation. . . But all in all, it is still: A OK KOA. (Get it?! See my incredibly clever play on letters there - - - Oh never mind. . .)

Even though it sits right on the I-20 frontage road, somehow the freeway noise isn't too bad, as long as you aren't in sites  75 - 89 which are literally right on the frontage road, as in you have to drive out the campground entrance and down the frontage road a few feet to get to them. And even without the KOA Value-Kard discount the price is lower than the nearby Abilene RV park which by all accounts gets pretty bad traffic noise from I-20.

The KOA is located in an old pecan grove and if you time it right you can still collect a pail of pecans off the ground.



One of the larger pecan trees sits right outside the entrance to the laundry and Jackie told me about an owl that had been hanging around up there for the past few days, so naturally I had to go see for myself.



I'm pretty sure this is a male barn owl.



I'm also pretty sure he'd had enough of the damned paparazzi!!

Jackie asked me for copies of the owl photos I took and after slaving away at her easel for who knows how many hours, in turn sent me a photo of her painting, titled Between Night and Day, a Portrait of a Barn Owl, inspired, in part, by the photos. (By the way, this is her property and the image can not be used or reproduced without her permission.)

She will be entering this painting in the Grant County Art Guild's Southwest Birds Show running from March 24 to April 21 at Bear Mountain Lodge in Silver City, New Mexico. There will also be photography, sculpture and pottery so if you're in the area check it out.

Frontier Texas Museum, Abilene

In the previous post I was at Fort Phantom Hill, a very laid back, understated place suited to personal introspection. In this post I'm at Frontier Texas, a museum that is pretty much the complete opposite, but definitely in a good way.



Located right in the heart of Abilene, (Population about 120,000) but still easy to find and get to, the museum is a big deal around here





and I was concerned that showing up on a Tuesday morning during school season was a bad idea.




That I might end up trapped in hordes of grade-school field trippers that would grind me up and spit out the tattered remains. But my fears were completely unfounded.



I should have known better after checking out the museum on Google Earth the night before (To make sure I wasn't going to get into a parking-garage situation there in downtown Abilene, a bad thing to do since The Van is nearly 10' high.) and saw that the number of parking lot slots was in the low 10's and not the hundreds I was half expecting. (Because there is limited room it might be best to leave the motorhome behind and arrive in the toad instead.)

At any rate I was greatly relived after following the signs in off of Business 20 and First Street to find the parking lot pretty much empty with not a single one of those dreaded yellow school buses in sight!

In reality, from the Google Earth image the museum looked decidedly small, and perhaps it is in physical size, but believe me, inside it's anything but small in exhibits!! So give yourself plenty of time.



Once you get through the short introductory film, well done and, I suspect, one that will keep the attention of even kids, and leave the Blood and Treasure theater (No, really! That's what it's called.) to enter the museum proper there are plenty of the usual static exhibits



scattered along the way



including this enlarged reproduction of a painting depicting Fort Phantom Hill where I was just yesterday.



But somehow the curators have made even these static exhibits come to life



and deliver with a punch.

Slightly less static are these cylinders mounted throughout the museum alongside relevant static exhibits.

They spin to reveal three times the information a simple plaque

mounted in the same space could, but only if you can keep the kids, of all ages, from spinning the things faster than you can read!

But wait! Things get a whole lot more interactive with the many touch-screens scattered about



that let you drill down through multiple layers of almost overwhelming information.

By touching the Apache tab two photos ago I get here, then can find out even more about them by touching the three tabs in the bottom left. Or I can tap any one of the 'Pluses' there on the screen



and get 'pop-ups' with more intimate details about daily life.

What an ingenious way to maximize exhibits in a relatively small space; at the same time fully engaging the electronic-age kids while seeding their little brains with knowledge.



But the ultimate in engaging flighty minds (Studies show the average attention span of Millennials is about 8 seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish! Literally!!) are these exhibits of actual historical figures. I didn't count how many of these there were scattered about, but there were a lot.

Touching one of these tabs doesn't just bring up another screen of information,



instead, in the mini-theater like space behind the touchscreen a full size hologram of the figure appears and delivers the information in spoken word, as if you are having a conversation,

and not in the flat, 'just the facts' manner of Jack Web on Dragnet, but with full human emotion.

Nope, not an actor (Well technically I suppose it is. . .) but another of the holographic characters describing their lives and times. In this case a man that built a successful freighting operation from pretty much nothing but hard work and a desire to provide for his family.

I didn't get any photos of her, and I can't remember her name now, but watching the woman who was working in her kitchen talk about her life since moving west, including the daughter and string of husbands she lost over the years, was compelling, mesmerizing and heartbreaking all at the same time.

For me it's things like this that breath life into the dry, almost irrelevant textbook facts of a typical school history class. (At least the typical history class of my day.)

If you find real history, personal history, the daily lives of the extraordinarily-ordinary as fascinating and compelling as I do, this is the place for you!

There's one more major exhibit in the museum that I didn't even try to photograph. It's called the Frontier Experience Theater. A theater in the round where you sit right in the middle of the action on stools you can spin in-order to track everything that is going on around you. Things like a stampede, a prairie thunderstorm and a shootout in the Beehive Saloon. But you have to try out the immersive visual and audio experience of that one for yourself to get the full impact.

If you do decide to go to Frontier Texas be sure and stop by a tourist kiosk somewhere first and pick up the pamphlet of coupons for Abilene attractions and business's. (I got mine from the campground.) The $1 coupon from the brochure (The ticket taker at the museum even carefully cut it out for me so I could still use any of the other coupons if I wanted to.) is good in combination with the senior discount so my entry fee was a whole $6.



But in my opinion even the full admission price of $10 is a bargain.