The Rebuild...

As I said several months ago, I was working with a company that rebuilt equipment used in the oil business. Here are the before and after pictures of the machine they rebuilt. Really fine precise work that entailed rewiring, rebuilding, customizing, and reshaping different parts of the original machine. I love this type of assignment.

A Master at work...

Over the years I've had the privilege of meeting individuals with hidden talents. Being from a family that depended on wood ( as lumber that was sold by the carload by my father ) I seem to have  a built in propensity for the love of wood. My desk is made from the wood from the walnut trees that I grew up with in the front yard of our home in Carthage, and I have always marveled at the grain and color of the many varieties of wood from all over the world. I have had several friends that have been able to wield their creative forces through wood with amazing results.

One of my instructors in College, John Walker, created amazing sculptures with wood in the most unexpected ways. He made a series of different foods from different woods that were absolutely fabulous. Cherry pie with cherry filling flowing onto the plate, other foods all of them actually appearing to be real, with the exception that they were wood. He captured the kinetic energy within each piece. Bill Harmon, a cabinet make in Carthage could turn wood into anything and brought out the personality of a pre-ww-I airplane propeller for me through his use of the right varnishes on it.
Jack Fix took some wood I had in the basement of the studio that was probably close to one hundred years old, and made a spinning wheel for his daughter.

Jim Vander Lind, now retired from the University of Tulsa, is another guy I would have never expected to have an affinity with wood. I met Jim through the Sunrise Rotary and saw some of his work and was amazed. Because we were having to harvest a few trees from the front yard of the Carthage home, and of course the fact that I couldn't use it all, I offered him some, actually...all he could take. Jim and I rode up with a friend of his in another vehicle with a trailer and they loaded up.

The image here is Jim liberating a bowl from a piece of wood. His work is flawless and I'll soon post an image or two from the results of his working with some Morgan Walnut.