Woodworking in Bhutan

Bhutan is a small kingdom at the eastern end of the Himalayas between India and Tibet (China).  We recently spent a week there visiting forts and Buddhist monasteries, hiking through forests and paddy fields and along the way meeting the friendly people who live in this truly beautiful country (and I say that having visited dozens of countries around the world).

Punakha Dzong (Punakha Fort)

There are many unique aspects to Bhutan, one of which is that all buildings must by law be constructed in a traditional style.  This typically includes lots of timber for beams, posts, joinery and furniture.  This has kept a skilled carpentry and joinery workforce alive and well.  

Courtyard inside Punakha Dzong

Monasteries and forts receive the most detail, however even houses and office buildings are constructed with intricate features and wooden joinery. 

A new building under construction in the capital, Thimpu

Timber is harvested from within the country, with the government overseeing felling and re-planting to maintain a minimum forest cover of 60%.  Bhutan is a net carbon sink; it absorbs nearly twice as much carbon dioxide as it produces from industry, transport etc and the main export is hydropower to India.

Trees are milled close to where they are felled, often with portable sawmills - the Australian made Lucas Mill was in evidence in several places we passed through.

Milling of logs in a rice paddy field

After milling, the wood is air dried in stacks by the roadside, usually with a corrugated iron roof to protect it from the rain.

Timber stacked for air drying

Complex joints (with no nails or bolts) are formed with basic tools.  Some large powered machinery was also seen. 

An outdoor joinery shop

Once the joinery is completed the components can be embellished with carving ready for assembly on site.

Relief carving

Monasteries are often high up in the mountains.  Traditionally this would have required much hard labour to haul materials up to the building site although now this is often done with a powered flying fox.  

An extension being added to Chagri Monastery

Bhutan's most famous building, the Tiger's Nest (Paro Taktsang) burnt down in 1998 but was skillfully reconstructed, using traditional methods of course.

Paro Taktsang

Kiwi Bucolic

The view from our bedroom this morning.

Morning run on the beach

City Gallery

On display in Wellington at the moment (and along with the MONIAC also exhibits from New Zealand's entries in the Venice Biennale) are Michael Parekowhai's On first Looking into Chapman's Homer:

And Michael Stevenson's This is the Trekka:

The MONIAC

I have been wanting to see this machine at the Reserve Bank Museum for several years, since reading about the New Zealand economist and inventor Bill Phillips.  As the only visitors on a cold and rainy Wellington Monday, we were treated to a demonstration of this early computer by a very informative Museum staff member.

Just after the Second World War and around the time the US military commissioned the ENIAC electronic computer (initially for calculating artillery trajectories), Phillips built a computer for assessing and demonstrating the effects of changes in a nation's economy such as interest rates, taxation, government investment and foreign trade.  The difference with Phillips' machine was that rather than using the flow of electrons to calculate complex equations it used the flow of water.

Water is often used as an analogue for electricity when explaining the 'flow' of electrons and the effects of a constriction (a resistor), a one-way valve (a diode) and suchlike but Phillips' machine was literally an analogue (in both senses of the word) computer, where the changes in the levels in transparent containers represented the various changes to metrics in the economy in a continuous (or non-digital) way.  

The device could also demonstrate the time lag between changes in one aspect and another as money flows around the economy.

Phillips built the first MONIAC while he was a student at the London School of Economics.  Copies and replicas of the machine are located at various universities and institutions around the world.

Next Bus Due: 1978

A 40-year-old bus timetable discovered in our old shed.  Five buses a day serving Orewa, Silverdale, Dairy Flat, Waitoki, Kaukapakapa, Helensville, Parakai, Wharepapa, Woodhill, Waimauku, Huapai, Kumeu and on into Auckland City.

Cost for the approx 70km trip(!) from Dairy Flat into the city: $1.05 or 78c if you buy a 10 trip concession, but adults pay a child fare if they travel off-peak so this would be 30c on a concession if you leave after 9.00am.  From Dairy Flat to the city would have taken approx 1 hour and 40 minutes - not bad considering the circuitous route.

Using the Reserve Bank's inflation calculator, a 30c bus ticket would cost $1.31 today, and the journey on the Northern Express takes about an hour from the Silverdale Station off-peak and costs $6.20 on the HOP card.

So, it's a bit quicker today, more direct, more frequent and nearly five times the cost.

Recent Projects

Conventional paid work has unfortunately been interfering with my woodworking as of late, but I have been able to make a few things:

Computer standing desk

Lamp 'shade'

Bookshelf

Spice Tray

Also making an appearance in the workshop is a new Festool Kapex mitre saw, which I have installed between two big banks of drawers faced with poplar plywood, recycled jarrah for the handles and a couple of Bunnings acacia panels for the benchtops.

Workshop drawers

NewCaledonia

One small step back in time

I was born during the Apollo lunar missions and grew up devouring science fiction from authors like Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury.  Manned space exploration and even space tourism was just around the corner.

But it was not to be.  Skylab and the space shuttle missions never left low Earth orbit (LEO).  The international space station orbits at an altitude of about 400km, the same distance as a drive from Auckland to Napier.  Nobody has been back to the Moon since 1972.

Lately, there has been a huge resurgence in interest to send manned missions to the Moon and Mars but until then we can look back on the truly amazing achievements of the American space program of the 60's and 70's.

With that in mind, I decided to spend some dark winter evenings building a 1:144 scale kit model of the Saturn V rocket.  There are plenty of blogs out there about assembling the kits so I'll just cover the things that I did slightly differently or stuffed up (for giggles).

This one is made by Revell, and required quite a bit of filler to get things smooth enough for a spray paint finish in my home made spray booth. 

  
I initially tried using a cheap air brush and some thinned Tamiya paint but I gave up and re-coated the main body with a can of white spray paint.

Painting the white was easy, but no amount of care with masking stopped the black Tamiya paint from bleeding through, so again this was abandoned in favor of a can of acrylic.

I used to use an air brush all the time at work (as a part time architectural model maker) but clearly I have lost the knack - too much thinner I think.

For the lunar lander, I wanted to display this along side the rocket for scale so I glued a small rare earth magnet to the underside... 

...and another one under the base.

Note the polarity of the magnet is carefully marked prior to gluing to ensure the lander points the right way when sitting on the base.

Bench Seats

With the completion of the dining table restoration, covered here previously, our original dining table has been moved outside to the verandah.  It needed a couple of simple bench seats to make the most of the al fresco dining opportunities before it gets too cold.

The table was my first effort at furniture building back in about 1995.  It's made from the old front door of my first house, with some recycled timber for the legs and rails.  Amazingly, it has held together all these years considered the very basic tools and techniques I had as a recent graduate with a student debt and a mortgage.

In keeping with the table, the benches are made from recycled rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) that I recovered from our last house.  The timber was jointed and thicknessed down to size...

...then cut to length and mortised with my shop made morticing jig. 

This jig is from a design by legendary furniture designer and builder Michael Fortune who recently ran a course at the Centre for Fine Woodworking that I attended.

The mortised legs and top rails have two floating tenons to each joint for a really strong connection.  The design I came up with does not have stretchers, so relies on the glued joints for stability. 

Lengths of floating tenon were thicknessed and then rounded over on the router table to the shape of the mortices.  These were then cut up to length.

For the very simple look I was after, there are no lengthwise rails, so the leg 'A' frames are just glued and screwed to the seat planks.  I made two spacing jigs to help with the assembly.

The seat planks and leg assemblies were then pre-drilled before being glued together.

The screw holes were plugged before the benches got three coats of an outdoor polyurethane.

I think the overall result is a nice clean look, and they will hopefully last at least as long as the table has!