Not Exactly Fine Woodworking
During the summer I like to play golf when I’m not out in my shop. I’m a member at Priddis Greens, a course south and west of Calgary. My son, Steve, is Manager of Irrigation and Drainage at Priddis.
About two years ago, there was a huge windstorm which blew down a bunch of trees, primarily spruce. Ordinarily, blowdowns are simply cut up and made available to the members for firewood, but in this case, there were enough of them to warrant a different approach.
Another Priddis member, Cal McFarlane, has a portable sawmill set up near the golf club. The club made arrangements with Cal to mill the trees into 2x4’s and 2x6’s, and the resulting boards were sent to Bacon Veneer, who operates a commercial dry kiln, to season them.
In the meantime, I designed the bench below: The intention was to make 40 benches, one for each tee box of the 36 hole course, plus four for the driving range.
As it turned out, the drying was done just about the time that COVID first hit. There was a real possibility that golf courses wouldn’t be allowed to open at all, and when approval eventually came, players were not permitted, among many other things, to use the existing benches on the course. So, there wasn’t much point in putting them together last spring. So the wood just sat there.
At the end of last season, Steve brought most of the wood from the course to my place, and it got piled on my driveway. I would estimate that the pile was about three lifts of wood. When he advised that he had time to do the bench build, I was sufficiently tired of having it there that everyone was eager to get the job done.
The process began with Steve running boards through the jointer and planer- the drying resulted in almost all of the boards having some amount of twist to them. We ended up getting a net thickness of 1 5/8” which is significantly better than box store lumber. Here’s a sense of what that involved: my dust collector feeds a 45 gallon drum. We didn’t do a specific count, but I estimated that we took about 40 drums of planings out to my composting pile in the trees behind my shop- roughly one drum per finished bench:
The boards were checked for quality, and the best ones were selected for the top pieces, which were to net 72” in length. The balance of them were used as shorter pieces, and became leg parts or stiffeners underneath, These parts ranged from 16” to just under 23”.
Once the legs were screwed together and available, Steve did the assembly, which screwed the top boards to the legs, squaring everything up, then flipping the bench over and adding the cross braces, squaring the legs to vertical.
Although I have a decent sized shop, it starts to get pretty crowded when about a dozen of these things are finished, so we had the guys from the course come by and take them away. These photos were taken on one of the -40° days we had in February 2021. The low temperature sensor in my shop security system didn’t like the door being open that long!
And, finally, we were done. Any finishing/staining decisions will be made by the course, and I look forward to seeing them out there this season. It is nice to see this wood get used for something other than smoke up somebody’s chimney.