This last week, we have been working on getting the gallery room finished. This is the last big dirty job to get out of the way. Once this is done we can really start to clean the place up and get ready to make some pots. There is of course loads of other jobs to complete before we can fire anything, but they can wait. They will get done in good time while our first pots are drying.Some of these other jobs will include getting the kilns ready for firing.
However, in the meantime we have cut the huge pine slabs that we milled 20 months ago. I have sawn them into rectangular planks 3 metres long and 750 mm wide and 80mm thick. Not too many people can afford to use timber like this in their gallery. We can’t! It would be completely out of our reach if we had to buy it.

We can only do this because we grew the trees our selves. We got the dead pine trees that were killed by the fire, felled professionally, as they were right up against the house. We then hired a portable saw mill to cut them up into big slabs for bench tops and planks for lining boards. They have been seasoning for the past 18 months.
I had to build an extension bar for my small hand pumped hydraulic crane on the truck. An extension of 3 metres is a bit far, but it worked quite well. I took the first lift very slowly to test that it wouldn’t bend under the load. A few weeks ago, I had a friend come and help me lift and shift these massive slabs onto the ute. But we are now in total COVID 19 lock down statewide, so another solution had to be devised. This way, I can do it all myself.

The huge slabs needed to be cut to have parallel sides and squared off ends, then planed, and sanded a few times with ever decreasing grit sizes of 40#, 60#, 80# and 100#, finally washed to raise the grain. After drying, the rough raised grain texture was again sanded with 80# and then 100# to get a fine finish. There are so many hours of work in getting a massive surface like these slabs from a very rugged chain saw finish, to glassy smooth. I’m not a wood worker, so I don’t have access to any large wood working machinery. All this had to be done with hand held tools. I have to thank my very good friend Len Smith for giving me all his Makita power tools. I need 4 big slabs for the bench tops and 24 planks of 2.4 metres to be dressed like this to make the shelving. It’s taken me over a week.
Once the slabs were finished, I needed to shorten the crane arm to lift them onto the truck to drive them up to the pottery.

I needed to weld up a suitable steel frame to support all this wood.

We’ve ended up with something that resembles a massive kitchen dresser. One on each side of the room, with another huge slab table in the centre. This gives us plenty of storage space in the cupboards and a lot of flat display space. We spent today sweeping, vacuuming and generally cleaning up all the saw dust that ended up coating everything in the place. That is all now done. This was the last really messy job. We can now relax a bit and look forward to making some creative work.

Tomorrow I will start by making some throwing and turning tools. My first job on the wheel will be to make some clay ‘chucks’ to get them stiffened up so that I can turn my pots once I start to make them.