So, I spent a good chunk of a day last summer working on a carving that I hope will eventually become a new stand for the One Drum. Here's what it looked like last last winter when I had it stored in my woodshop:
It's 9-feet tall and just a tad shy of a foot in diameter at the base. My plan is to carve the top 7 feet, and have 2 feet underground to support it. Eventually, Sage and I hauled it out into the sunlight (which had FINALLY arrived to these parts) so I could start de-barking it and getting a sense of how I want to work with it. And it's a good thing I did, too, 'cause I discovered that some sort of grubs (buprestid beetles, probably) had established themselves pretty firmly under the bark; I suspect that if I had waited too much longer they would have really invaded the wood. (And, in fact, they might have; only time will tell.)
Anyway, like I said, I spent most of that day working the bark off of it with my favorite buck knife (which I found years ago when I was wandering around in the tundra north of the Brooks Range about 150 klicks south of Prudhoe Bay, but that's another story) and trimming flush a lot of the knots with my chain saw. I let myself get a truly wicked sunburn. Stupid, yes. Careless, yes. But ... it felt so good to actually be working on something for SpiritFire ahead of plan.
What's most on my mind in the long term, though, is what I'm actually going to carve. I have some ideas, and with luck I'll actually be able to pull it off. More as it develops, I promise.
And oh yeah, the wood came from an elm tree Joss and I had to have taken down more than a year ago. It was right on the corner of our house, and the trunk was splitting in a way that made it virtually certain it would topple into the house during a storm. So, we had a crew with a crane come in and take it down, with the request that they leave all the long pieces and cool-looking pieces intact. Check it out:
So with luck and a little bit of perseverence, we'll have a new One Drum stand, sustainably and locally harvested and hand-carved. And who knows what other cool stuff will come from the other pieces saved from the tree. Notice in the picture from the wood shop the other piece of wood in the background; that's from a part of the trunk where three major branches forked. Joss has some thoughts about carving it out and heading the branches to make a three-headed drum. Now that would be cool!
