Mjolnir and Rough Cut Lumber

 Mjolnir and Rough Cut Lumber

By Bobby Neal Winters

We cannot learn until we are ready.  When we are ready, learning comes proportionally with effort.

I am now into woodworking with hand tools. My favorite tool is the chisel.  I’ve learned to appreciate them.  There are cheap chisels and expensive ones.  You do get what you pay for, but there are some things that come by grace.  I’d been using a rubber mallet with my chisel.  It was large and heavy--24 ounces--and I was happy enough with it.  It turns out I just didn’t know better.  

All the time I was using it, there in front of me was my father-in-law’s old wooden mallet.  It was very light in comparison to my rubber mallet.  I thought surely the heavier rubber mallet was better.  Then one day--and I don’t know whether it was because my arm was tired and I wanted to try a lighter implement or whether my rubber mallet was at another table and I just was too lazy to get it--I decided to try the wooden mallet.

Well, there is no comparison.  It is ridiculous how much better it is than the rubber mallet.  Ridiculous.

I’ve decided to name it Mjollnir, after Thor’s Hammer, because suddenly I am worthy to use it.

This is not the only time I’ve had such a sudden insight lately. The next example requires a little more backstory.

I’ve got a friend at work who shares my love of woodworking.  Whenever we want to clear the room, we start talking about it and suddenly we are alone. Not everyone is as refined as we are.

Anyway, one problem we share is the great expense of wood.  However, he was talking about woodworking at the gym, and someone who hadn’t fled the room told him he had some rough cut lumber he wanted to get rid of.

That was great, but my friend didn’t have a place to store it.  He knew that I did, however.  Thus a partnership was born.  We would get the wood from his contact; I would store it; then we’d share it.

This was the first time I’d ever seen rough cut lumber.

Rough cut lumber is not like what you get down at Home Despot [sic]. That lumber has been sized and milled, i.e. smoothed.  When you get rough cut lumber, you have to mill it yourself.  That is a lot of work, but I am goal oriented, not task oriented: The details will be worked out on the way to the goal.  (I wear the task-oriented people around me out.)

There turned out to be a great deal of rough cut lumber.  I now have it sitting in my garage.  It has to be sized and milled before it can be used.  It could be milled by hand with hand planes and such, but after doing that for one board, I bought a new DeWalt 745 planer. (While I am a hand tool woodworker, there is no need to be a fundamentalist about it.)  At this point, my “free wood” has cost me hundreds of dollars.

However,...

There is something about taking a piece of rough cut lumber, smoothing it, sizing it, and making it square.  I’d noticed in watching the woodworking videos the old gents who teach treat the wood they hold with reverence. 

When my father-in-law died, 15 years ago this very month, he’d left not only his tools, but a supply of wood.  I’d thought it was just ugly old lumber and had even used some of it to make items for use outdoors.

I now recognized it as rough cut lumber.  I took a piece that was rough, gray, and stained by at least 15 years of exposure to the elements, and I milled it and sized it. It is beautiful white maple.

I’d not recognized it.  I didn’t know.  I’d been ignorant.  It was as if scales fell from my eyes.

The years of stain are still there, but that just gives it character.  I’ve taken it and some of the walnut I’d gotten with my friend, and I’m making a Harry Potter magic wand box that I plan to donate to the local library if it turns out well.  

It only seems right to give away what has come to me as a gift.

I look back at what I’d meant to be an article on a phenomenon of learning only to discover that I’ve also written an article on grace.  That seems appropriate.

I’ve become worthy to wield Mjolnir by working but was only successful because of the elements of grace that were there.  The path had been set up before me and I’d walked down it.

I can think of a couple of other Carpenters here, Noah being the first one.  He made the Ark.  His family and the animals he saved profited from it by grace, but they still had to walk on it.  

I’ll leave it to the gentle reader to figure out what the other Carpenter has done for us. You’ll learn when you are ready.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.