Jelly-bean woodworking, prevenient grace, and blood sacrifice

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the end of the Fall semester, finals, Christmas, and my 40th Wedding Anniversary, I’d taken a longish break from woodturning.  I’d done some woodworking, but I hadn’t spent much time at the lathe.

When you work at the lathe, the question is what are you going to make.  You know to some degree what. You know that it’s going to be round.

Round is what lathes do. Lathes make round objects and sawdust.

Lots and lots of sawdust.

The various “jelly-bean” wood working stores market ideas.  Wooden pens for one thing.  They sell kits to make pens from.  There is a system set up.  Wooden pens are pretty cool, but if you don’t know better, you would think they were pretty expensive.  It turns out that, while they can be, they can also be relatively cheap.

The net effect of this is that if you want to put your pen-making on as something that will help to defray the costs of your hobby, then you have to develop a system to turn out pens in bulk.

That doesn’t sound like a hobby to me: It sounds like Work.

There I go, using those four-letter words again. 

But John Wesley taught us about “prevenient grace;” God’s grace as a means of preparing us for something else. Put a bookmark here, I will get back to it before long.

I’ve found a nice woodturning channel on Youtube called “Tomislav Tomasic Woodturning.”  Tomislav is a fellow from Croatia.  I like his channel for several reasons.  He has the right mixture of talk and video.  

Some of these woodturning guys are so non-verbal they just show videos of the work being done without any explanation at all.  The only sound is the gouge against the rotating wood.

On the other end of the spectrum (take that word any way you want to), there are folks who talk so much you think that maybe their woodturning has made them really, really lonely.

Tomislav has the mixture of talk to work right.  He also is a good teacher.  Add to that the fact that he doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on equipment, and you’ve got a guy I can learn from.

Anyway, one of the projects that he uses to teach from is that of making a whistle.

Making a whistle is not hard to do if you have the right equipment, and--here is where we hook back up to “prevenient grace”--if you’ve been making pens, you’ve got the equipment.  That is to say, if you’ve been making pens, you likely have a drill chuck to mount in place of your “free-center.” 

You drill out a cylindrical chamber in the middle of your blank, cut a hole near one end so you can whistle, and then make it as pretty as you like.

These are not difficult to make.  One of my neighbors has five kids, and I made them each a whistle.  This was back when the weather was warm and I had my shop door open.  I had a happy afternoon of listening to them whistle across the street. (They were quite loud.) I suspect they all “disappeared” that night after the kids went to bed, but it was a glorious afternoon of whistling.

The question arose in my mind--and it could be that a friend of mine asked it. Sometimes my friends ask such good questions, I think I’ve thought of it on my own.  Anyway, the question arose, could you make a flute?

What does one do to answer such a question?  Well you google it, of course. Well, this simple Okie had absolutely no idea there were so many ways you could blow air through a tube to get a sound. There are scores of types of flutes: recorders, Native American flutes, picolos, Japanese flutes, etc.  And in each of these types there are various subtypes.

One could quite understandably suffer from paralysis by analysis, but I have a super-power: I ask, which is the easiest?

To me, unless I find out otherwise, the recorder looks the easiest. I might find out otherwise, but at my current level of study, it looks like a long whistle with holes in.  No doubt those holes have to be placed correctly to get the right notes, but that is something to study.

That having been said, making a flute in the “Native American” style is attractive as well.  Native American flutes appear to be a little more complicated than a recorder, but they have features that appeal to me.  The first of these is that I am drawn to the Native American aspect of it. While I am not coming out of that tradition myself, this would be a way of paying tribute.  Another attraction is that there is no pressure to tune it to a standard scale.  

Indigenous peoples in the Americas were making music long before the Europeans arrived. Their flutes can just make cool sounds. As I understand it, you can tune them to a standard scale, but it isn’t necessary.

Anyway, I’ve started my journey.  I am working on techniques, and I’ve made a blood sacrifice.  God gives us his prevenient grace, but the tablesaw god extracts blood from his adherents from time to time. He particularly likes the flesh of my left thumb.

I’ll let you know if I make progress.

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.