Birch Darts and Duck Feathers

Until they are done I'm going
to keep them bundled together
 so they aren't tempted to bend.

 I spent the better part of the day working on the birch dart shafts.  The split birch was fairly straight, with even grain and hardly any knots.  I've tried to match the dimensions of the ice patch darts as closely as possible and the resulting shafts seem strong with a nice whip to them.  Currently the shafts are about 2 metres long, but I'll most likely trim them down to 150-180 cm.  Two of them will have detachable foreshafts and one will be all one piece.  I have an extra shaft on the go in case something goes wrong with the three that I need for the order.  If all of the darts survive, I should have an extra one for my own collection.

The dart staying in Canada
gets duck feathers.  The ones
crossing international boundaries
are getting ptarmigan.

The proximal end of the darts is very narrow - about 7mm wide and they taper gradually for a little less than a metre and then they have a more-or-less constant diameter around 1.3 - 1.5cm.  This makes a very flexible dart with a good bit of weight towards the distal end.  Combined with a largish stone projectile point and ptarmigan or duck feathers for fletching these should be very efficient projectiles.  The three I'm making are for display and teaching purposes, but it would sure be fun to try playing with these.  If anyone has tried throwing these darts, I'd love to hear from you.

I removed another couple of
millimetres in diameter after this
photo was taken.  These darts
a lot of spring to them.

I've taken some liberties with the process.  I harvested and split the birch trunk by hand and I've been working the shafts with hand tools, but they've had metal blades and I've used an electric disc sander for a lot of the shaping.  If I was making these entirely with a stone and bone tool kit, I think I would have kept splitting the wood to get smaller and smaller diameter splits until I had something close to the right diameter for the dart shafts.  The final shaping could be done with a stone scraper or flake.  It seems like the birch would be fairly cooperative with this type or reduction.  It can be little stringy if you aren't careful with the splitting, but the grain is nice and straight and the resulting staves should also be nice and straight.   The bends in the wood are pretty minor and I used a heat gun to straighten the wood several times as I worked it down.  So far it seems to be taking the new shape well enough.  I don't anticipate any bending problems.

These ducks don't migrate and they
obviously don't need these feathers
anymore, so I'm taking them.
Thanks ducks.

For references on the dart shafts and feathers, I've relied on Yukon ice patch finds.  There are lots of good references, but these two have been especially useful:

ARCTIC VOL. 65, SUPPL. 1 (2012) P. 118–135 The Archaeology of Yukon Ice Patches: New Artifacts, Observations, and Insights P. GREGORY HARE, CHRISTIAN D. THOMAS, TIMOTHY N. TOPPER, and RUTH M. GOTTHARDT

ARCTICVOL. 58, NO. 1 (MARCH 2005) P. 38–43 Identification of Ancient Feather Fragments Found in Melting Alpine Ice Patches in Southern YukonCARLA J. DOVE, P. GREGORY HARE, and MARCY HEACKER 

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Continuing the Dorset Drums

This groove runs all the way
around the drum and will be
used to tie down the caribou
rawhide drum skin.

I continued to work on the Dorset Palaeoeskimo drum frames today.  I've cut the hoops to length, incised the groove to fasten the skin down, and finished the scarf joint to tie the hoop together.   There were two drums found at the Button Point site off the north end of Baffin Island and I'm using the more complete of the two for my model for these reproductions.   The incomplete drum is missing about a fifth of the hoop and the handle is partially broken.  It has a slightly lighter frame than the one I'm reproducing and the details of the scarf joint are less obvious.

The scarfed ends with the incised
grooves for tying the hoop closed
with sinew

The scarf joint that I'm using as the reference has about 5 cm of overlap and three very well defined lashing grooves.  Once I bent the split willow shoot to a complete 360 degree circle a little bit smaller than the intended drum diameter I cut the wood to the correct length, which in this case was about 24" or 61 cm as measured along the outside circumference.  I cut and shaped the top and bottom edges of the rim, to give it a peaked top edge and square bottom edge and then incised the groove around the entire outside of the hoop.  I carved the wedge shaped scarf area on each end and cut the three opposing lashing channels.

When they went into the pot they
were still pretty tight circles, but after
a few minutes of heat they expanded
again.

At this point I boiled the drums again to cinch the hoop closed and ready them for the sinew lashing.  The wood became flexible again and the hoops started to expand in the water, which made matching up the scarf joint tricky.  I wound up wrapping the whole hoop around a pot lid again and using clothespins to temporarily hold it in place before lashing the hoop closed with wire and pinching the join tight with clamps.  The wood at the scarf joint is necessarily thinner than the rest of the drum frame so the wood wanted to bend more there than elsewhere, creating a bit of a sharp angle in the hoop.  The hoop became shaped more like a fat egg, with the little end at the joint, than the perfect circle that I was trying for.    That bugged me a little until I compared the reproduction to the photo of the original artifact and noticed that it has the same shape.  Evidently, the Dorset drum maker had the same problem that I had, which made me feel better.  The only thing better than intentionally making a matching reproduction is accidentally making a matching reproduction because you happen upon the same design and construction challenges as the original maker.

The photo on the left shows two drums stacked on top of each other.  The one in the middle, with the long handle pointing down and to the left is the one that I'm trying to match.  The scarf joint connecting the two ends of the hoop is in the 3 o'clock position and you can see how the drum hoop bends sharply at this point.  The reproduction on the right is oriented the same way, the clamps running out of the frame on the right are pinching the scarf joint together.  You can see how it also bent sharply where the thin ends of the wood overlap each other.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Bending the Dorset Drum Frames

A mostly bent frame and the
original drum patterns printed
underneath it.

I hope my dislike for bending wood comes across clearly in this blog.  I'm really bad at it.  You might have wondered why I've been so quiet about that Dorset drum project that I started a few weeks back.  Well, its because I've been having a terrible time making progress with bending the wood frame. When I talk about things going poorly in the workshop its usually after I've made some sort of forward progress and have a few learned lessons to report.  While things are actually going badly, I focus on other things. Like tropical fish or snowshoeing.  Mercifully, I've finally made some headway with the frames and I should be able to finish them up fairly quickly and get this blog back on track.

Heat and then slowly
bend over my knee

I was hoping that bending green willow shoots would be so easy that I wouldn't have to pay attention to things like wood grain and growth rings and the cross-section of the wood.  But I was wrong.  After a bunch of trial and error, I finally worked out a system for bending the small drum hoops that gives me a good match for the size, shape, cross-section, and diameter of the original Dorset artifacts.  I'm still not certain that the Dorset drums found at Button Point were willow, but the willow is creating a good match so far.

I bend it to 180 degrees or so in one
session, soak the wood in snow or
water and then finish bending it to
270 degrees.

The best results came from very straight and fairly thick shoots, an inch or more in diameter at the base.  I split them down the middle and planed the centre of the shoots flat.  I removed just enough thickness from the inside of the shoots to remove the pith canal.  On the outside of the shoots, I removed the bark and tried to flatten the wood somewhat.  The trick with the outside of the shoot is to treat it like you are making a bow and avoid violating growth rings.  As you bend the wood the tension grows on the outside of the bend and the lamination between growth rings will want to crack and come apart.

If you look at the cross section through the original drum hoops, they are shaped kind of like a tall skinny salt box house - with a flat bottom and a peak on top. But like a saltbox, the peak has a long edge and a short edge.  The long edge is a long bevel inside the edge of the drum frame on the "top", where the skin is stretched.   I'm not sure whether the hoop was shaped to this cross section before or after bending, but right now my hunch is that it was a bit of both.  I'm finding it easier to bend thicker wood if I carve a long bevel on the top and bottom of the inside face.  I think I'll end up bending it with a top and bottom bevel and then planing off the bottom bevel to create the square edge on the bottom of the drum.   The inner bevels also seem to help avoid some of the compression folds or pinches that want to form on the inside of the curve as you bend the wood.  There are a couple compression folds in the original artifacts, so I'm not too worried about a few showing up in the reproductions, but I don't want them to become so acute that they harm the integrity of the drum.  These instruments are meant to be played.

The heat gun is clamped in a vice.
Its a little simpler and less prone to
scorching than an open flame or
hotplate

To actually bend the wood, I'm using a combination of dry heat and steam-bending and boiling.  I suspect that if I had a pot big enough to boil the whole stick then I could just boil the wood and bend it around some sort of jig or frame in one go.  But I don't, so I'm using dry heat from a heat gun to incrementally bend the wood to at least 270 degrees, at which point the hoop will fit into a pot that I can boil on the stove and finish bending with boiling.  I found that it was safer to only apply heat from the heat gun to the inside of the bend as I went along.  The heat gun is strong enough to heat all the way through the wood to the outside surface, but if I applied the heat directly to the outside of the bend this outside surface would dry out and become prone to cracks and delamination.  Its a bit of an ordeal, but the occasional scorching from the dry heat is helping antique and harden the wood as I go, so I don't mind as long as its working. I had lots of trouble with this, but I have a system going now that seems to work.

The fish shaped hoop is done with
dry heat for now.  I'll boil it and clamp
it like the one clothes-pinned to the
pot lid.

I had tried boiling sections of the wood outside, but it is so cold here now that the part of the stick outside the pot would freeze and want to crack while I was bending the part inside the pot.   The willow also stays very flexible when only wet heat is used and wants to straighten itself out again, which makes clamping vital.  On the other hand, using dry heat the wood stays bent a little better as the moisture in the green wood is driven out and the new shape is locked into the wood. So far these frames seem to be holding up.  I have them bent a little smaller than they need to be to allow for some springback when the clamps come off.  The next steps will be working on the scarf joint to connect both ends of the hoop to each other and the groove that runs around the outside circumference of the hoop for the lashing to hold the skin on.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Building a Drum

Laying out the unfinished drum pieces

I started assembling the Central Arctic reproduction drum yesterday.  The first big step was to bend the wood.  I started with two slats - one poplar and one red oak.  The finished drum needs a diameter of about 20.5" and with a little bit of overlap at each end to fasten the hoop together, the wood needed to be at least 70" long to start.  My wood steaming box wasn't long enough to fit the slats so I decided to try heat bending the wood instead.

Bending the wood 1 degree at a time

I've had a lot better luck with using dry heat to bend wood than I have with steaming, so it was an easy switch to make.  Bending the hoop over a blowtorch would also save some antiquing time at the end thanks to the soot staining and give the hoop a more authentic looking, imperfect, segmented bend.  I started with the oak, because its supposed to be one of the easiest woods to bend.  It shattered the first time I tried to heat and flex the wood.  Lesson learned - don't try to bend oak with dry heat.

Almost there!

The poplar slat fared much better.  It took 3 or 4 hours to bend it into the 360 degree hoop one tiny bend at a time.  Occasionally the outer surface of the wood would tear slightly, but nothing too dramatic or deep that would endanger the integrity of the finished drum.  I sanded those scars down, and they'll be held together with the canvas drum skin.

The hoop clamped in place

The ends of the hoop overlap by 8 inches.  I found the middle of the hoop much easier to bend than the ends, but thinning the overlapping ends down to create a shallow scarf join helped make the tips more flexible.  The handle will be attached at the join, and an additional brace piece is tied on to the inside to the drum hoop to reinforce the join and provide a sturdier attachment point for the drum handle.

Brace piece on hoop, handle and drumstick

Everything will be tied together.  I'm chewing on a wad of sinew as I type this to lash the hoop and brace piece together.  While that's drying this evening, I'll keep braiding the sinew line that will tie the canvas into place.  Hopefully I'll be able to finish antiquing the wood and lash the handle and canvas skin in place tomorrow.

An hour or two into the bend

Its a different kind of build for me - I only have two reference photos of the front of the drum and a couple measurements to work from.  When I have the canvas on I'll be sending it to B.C. where someone else will finish antiquing it and install it for the client.  There's a bit of educated guesswork on the interior design of the drum and I don't have the usual fussing over the final antiquing and matching with the artifact to worry about.  Its just a nice, simple opportunity to learn about drum building.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

The Rooms Harpoons and Tuktut Nogait Bow update

As the Parks work winds down I'm splitting my workshop time with some of the other pressing pieces that I need to make. I've started a Maritime Archaic Indian harpoon to be used in public programming at The Rooms, in St. John's. I'll post more on it when its finished, but here's a sneak peak at the harpoon head. I found out on Wednesday that a Groswater Harpoon that I made will be used in a future Rooms exhibit and the Thule Inuit harpoon reproduction (below) is currently on display in the Bob Bartlett Exhibit, Collecting the Arctic: Bob Bartlett's World of North . I'm glad to see this stuff getting used. I tend not to be able to get far enough ahead on my orders to be able to keep many of my reproductions on hand, but over the years The Rooms has amassed a nice collection.


The Tuktut Nogait Bow is moving along. I haven't done much on my own working copy as time gets a little more precious, but the Parks reproduction is getting close to completion. One of the interesting things that I noticed is that the short splice is made 'backwards'. Most bows are made with the back of the bow facing the outside of the tree, towards the bark. The spliced section carefully follows the growth rings of the yew, but its back faces inwards toward the center of the tree. In the photo with the inset, you can see how precisely the wood grain is followed in the artifact (the belly of the bow is facing up in both the photo and the inset photo). The body of the bow is very desicated and the growth rings too hard to see to tell if the rest of the bow is made the same way. It might be.

Remember all the trouble I've had bending wood? All of that was meant to be practice leading up to putting the bend in the limbs of the Tuktut Nogait bow. The last time I bent the kayak rib (which is doing just fine now that I built a stand for it) I put the bow in the steaming box and attempted to bend it with steam and clamps. It bent easily and when I took it out of the clamps the next day it flexed back into a straight line almost immediately. That sucked. A couple days later I was antiquing it with a blow torch and when it was good and hot I decided to try bending it using heat instead of steam. I held the torch on the point I wanted the bend for a minute or two and tried to heat it without burning or scorching it. I bent it on my knee. Given all the problems I've had with bending I bent it 2 or 3 times farther than it needed to be, expecting it to spring back. It didn't. It just cooled and held its new bend. I did put it in the same clamp set up as before, but I really don't think it was necessary. You can see the overzealous bend in the photo below, behind the artifact. After more than a week it hasn't moved. Yesterday I actually had to reheat it and bend it back. ugh.. After seeing how easy it was to bend a thin piece of yew, compared to the pine I've been struggling with all summer, I can definitely see why people say pine can't be bent.

Photo Credits:
Top: Tim Rast
Second: Elaine Anton
Third-Fifth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Maritime Archaic Indian antler harpoon head in progress
Second: Thule Inuit Harpoon Reproduction currently on display in The Rooms' Captain Bob Bartlett Exhibit
Third: Tuktut Nogait spliced bow limb showing the wood grain. Inset and photo both show the piece with the belly of the bow facing up
Fourth: Clamping the bow to bend it. Didn't work; clamps not really necessary.
Fifth: Tuktut Nogait reproduction in progress (background) and actual artifact (foreground)

A Bending Solution?

I think I've solved my wood bending problem. Softwood, like the pine I'm using, seems to be on everyone's list of undesirable wood to bend. The main problem I've had with bending the kayak rib reproduction has been that it won't hold the bend. It keeps straightening out. So, I've built a block that will hold the rib in the correct shape. Maybe in a few months or years the reproduction will accept its new shape and stop trying to straighten out, but until then it can live in this little display stand.

I was hoping to have a few finished pieces to show today, but everything that I compared yesterday can be tweaked a little bit more. If I have a couple good days in the workshop I really hope that I can get a bunch of pieces off my plate on my next Rooms visit. Parks is being really good about my deadline on the project, but I have so much other work to get done before the middle of November that I really need to get this project out the door.

I need to make a raw material run out to the west coast soon, too. I really want to get more chert for the winter and I was planning to try to pick up some whalebone along the way from a couple people who I thought might have some. I still need the rock, but I got a surprise offer of whalebone from someone in town who happened to come across some bones while hiking and snorkling. It was such a relief to get these. I used a lot of whalebone this past year and its not the easiest material to replace when you are desperate for it. This takes some pressure off. Thanks Alvan!

The Fine Craft and Design Fair is just around the corner and I have very little product on hand. I'll be there during the second week, November 11-15.

Photo Credits:
Top, Tim Rast
Second, Lori White
Third, Tim Rast
Fourth, Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador

Photo Captions:
Top, The display stand solution to keep the wood from straightening out again.
Second, Antiquing the hell out of the marrow extractor with the blowtorch.
Third, Whalebones!
Fourth, Mark your Calendars - the Fine Craft and Design Fair will be here soon.

Weekend Update and Wood Bending, Again

On Saturday morning I was out of coffee filters so I darted out to Dominion to pick some up. When I got in the car I noticed that I'd left the glove box and another drawer open. Then when I started driving the centre console clicked shut and I realized that every drawer in the front of the car was open and that our parking change was gone. I must have left the car unlocked on Friday after returning from The Rooms and overnight someone rummaged through it. The only thing that I noticed missing was $2-$4 in parking meter coins. All of the CDs were still in the glove box. I guess people don't steal CDs anymore.

Sunday was a pretty chilly day. I've been continuing with my running schedule - running on Monday, Thursday, Friday with a long run on Sunday, but the Sunday runs have been getting much less enjoyable the past few weeks. Two or three weeks ago it was raining so hard that after an hour or so my iPod stopped working. After a couple days in a bag of dry rice it started again, but I know how it felt. With single digit temperatures yesterday I decided to run on the treadmill and watch Indiana Jones on Satellite for 80 minutes, rather than go out in the gloomy morning.

Lori got back from the field on Sunday evening. I just got a sneak peak of her photos and I can't wait to see her blog posts!

I worked a little on the weekend. Mostly on the bows and on some little antiquing treatments that take some time to dry. One of the pieces that I have drying is that kayak rib that I've been bending since August. I thought I had it beat a few weeks ago. It was bent to the correct curve, I'd let it dry in the clamps for several days and whenever I wasn't working on it I kept tension on it with a bungie cord. After two weeks of holding its bend I decided to cut it to length. Almost immediately it started to straighten, and within 3 or 4 days it was completely out of shape, even with the bungie keeping tension on it 24 hours a day.

Its pine and I've read very mixed reviews on bending softwood, some people saying that it can't be bent. Others who have bent it say that the 1 hour per inch of thickness steaming rule only applies to hardwood. Softwood takes much less time. I've been soaking the wood for a few hours and then steaming it for 15 minutes and the bending goes much better, but even that's not perfect. I got tension cracks on the outside of the bend. The artifact I'm reproducing is so desicated that those cracks won't hurt the final project, but on other projects they would be frustrating. Since the same piece is getting bent multiple times I've switched from a water soluble carpenters glue to repair those cracks to super glue and sawdust. The superglued repairs don't come unstuck during the long soaking process. The simple shape of the bend I'm going for also let me use a ratchet strap to bend the steamed wood to the jig this time. The strap worked a little like the backing on a bow and don't believe any new tension cracks formed on this most recent bend. I'll probably go after it with the hair dryer before I take it out of the jig this time.

Nevertheless, I'm going to assume that the wood won't hold the bend, so I'm going to have to come up with some kind of support to send along with the reproduction to hold the shape. At some point it will stop trying to straighten out won't it?

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Antiquing workspace on the dining room table
Middle: Correct bend shown with a bungie. There was no flex in the wood, it stayed bent with the bungie off, but I didn't take any chances and left it on all the time anyhow.
Bottom: After I cut the extra length off it started to straighten, so its back in the bending jig.

Steam bending wood - better luck this time!

I made a second attempt at steam bending wood this week and had much better results. Here are the changes I made based on the first failed attempt:

• I Left the wood long - I'll cut it to length after its bent.
• I used wood with long straight grain that did not crosscut the piece to be bent.
  
• I soaked it longer, in the bathtub, before steaming so that it was good and wet.
• I modified the jig so that I could use clamps to slowly bend the wood into place and hold the wood together in case it wanted to split.

I also got a new lucky hat from a case of Black Horse this week. I know that helped. Lori loves it, she says its a Bayman hat.

Despite the hat and the improvements in preparation, I think I'll still need at least one more bending session with this piece. The way I had the jig set up didn't let me get the full bend that I needed in the wood because the clamps were extended as far as they could go. There was still flex in the wood and I think it would have bent further, but I just ran out of clamp. I took the piece out of the jig this morning and it flexed back a little bit, but not much. I'll compare the reproduction to the artifact this afternoon and see what more needs to be done then. If the wood is going to flex back a little after its removed from the jig, then I guess I'll need to exaggerate the curve a bit in the jig set up. Kind of like how the brim of your awesome new hat has an exaggerated curve when you find it rolled up in your case of Black Horse.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top, Is hauling your new equipment onto the back lawn to work the first sign that your workshop is getting too small?
Middle, The wood drying in the jig. If you enlarge the photo, you might see the pencil marks behind the rib showing the necessary curve. I'll need to bend it again to get the curve I need.
Bottom, 1 of 3 hats free in 12 packs of Black Horse - Collect all Three!

An Embarrassing Cracked Rib

Today will be another day in the workshop. I visited the Parks artifacts on Monday and have been making the modifications on the reproductions since then. On Thursday I have another visit scheduled to compare the progress.

I suppose the most interesting thing happening at work right now are my problems with wood bending. These are kind of embarrassing pictures, but these things don't always go according to plan, so here it goes.

On Sunday I tried to steam bend the spruce board that I've been using for the kayak rib reproduction. I soaked it for a few minutes ahead of time and then steamed it for an hour. I came up with a jig that I thought would give me the curve that I needed, but when I tried to bend it, the wood cracked and split along growth rings. To me it seemed like the wood was still pretty dry inside.

It didn't break completely in half, so I took it with me to compare to the original artifact on Monday. One of the reasons that I chose this particular piece of wood to work is that there are no knots in the wood, except for a single tiny knot that matches a tiny knot in the original artifact. In the artifact, this knot is important because the weathering pattern of the wood is affected by it. Its a harder part of the wood so it has weathered like a little volcano around that knot. Its important that the reproduction have a similar knot in the same place. The knots that I'm talking about are the little black specks towards the right side of the pieces in the middle photo.

Coincidentally, the artifact kayak rib thins a lot at the same point that my reproduction rib split. I can remove the wood that cracked and still have enough mass left on that side to make the reproduction. Of course, the challenge now is to go back and try to bend the other end of the rib, which is thicker, without cracking the wood again.

To bend it next time, I plan to soak it in water for longer ahead of time, steam it longer, and use clamps to slowly bend it into shape, rather than try to wrench it into a jig.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top, The cracked rib in the bending jig
Middle, Comparing the cracked rib to the artifact
Bottom, The crack conveniently lines up with a thinning in the artifact, so I can keep working on this piece.

A Wood Steaming Box

One of the pieces of wood in the Parks collection looks like a bent rib from a kayak. (Its the piece of wood with the green discolouration that I alluded to in an early copper post, that I intend to use verdigris to stain.) The Tuktut Nogait bow also has bent recurves in each limb, so I will need to do some wood bending this summer. Yesterday I got started by building a wood steaming box.

I built the box out of scraps of plywood left over from when I built the workshop. There are dowels running through the middle of the box to support the wood that is being steamed. The steam is an electric tea kettle with a short section of washer drain pipe connected to the bottom of the box. I went with an electric kettle because I didn't want to have to use a stove or flame to heat the kettle. Electric kettles all have auto-off features which shut them off as soon as they start to steam. You need to disable that switch to get the kettle to boil continuously, which means its really important to keep a close eye on the kettle while its working.

I played around with the box yesterday to see how it would all work and if the washing machine hose would melt or the kettle would burst into flames. So far, so good. There are holes around the edge of the lid that I need to plug with rags, I had too much steam escaping. Its important to have some venting so that the pressure doesn't build up too much inside, but it needs to get good and hot inside.

I need to build a jig to match the angle of the bend that I need. The idea is to steam the wood and then quickly clamp it into the shape you want it to take when it is dry. I'll post with updates if it works. If it doesn't, I'll probably just avoid the subject and go look for curved sticks to carve.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Caption:
Top: Probable Kayak Rib from a collection of Inuvialuit artifacts
Second: Wood steaming box
Third: Boiling kettle, attached to Washing Machine drain hose
Bottom: Inside the box - the end of the hose comes up through the floor and the wood to be steamed is suspended on dowels.