“Take a piece of wood – plane, sand, and oil it, and you will find it a beautiful thing. The more you do to it from then on, the more chance that you will make it worse.” Tage Frid 1979 ^[1]

So I came across this quote from the late woodworking monster Tage Frid while we were part way through a commission to make an oak washstand and it got me thinking. Partly because we spent a good deal of time selecting different bits of wood we considered would look good for different parts of the piece, and partly because we spent even longer detailing and designing joints.

What is beauty anyway? A question that’s been debated for thousands of years and still gets us going. Over that time, the ‘answer’ to the beauty question has been trending toward three differing attitudes. First, the kinda formulaic ‘objectivist‘ view: beauty is the property of an object that induces pleasure in a perceiver. The objectivist viewpoint says the object is where the beauty’s at – its proportions, complexity, symmetry, contrast, that kind of thing. Plato usually gets …Continue reading »

1. ^[1] Frid, T. 1979 Joinery: Tools and Techniques, Taunton Press,Newtown Connecticut. ↩

The stove is burning away as we write this, making for a nice cosy workshop :D There have been a few problems though and a number of modifications since we first got it going. Most irksome amongst these was smoke escaping into the shop space – not good. Anyway, we’ll come to that, first lets have a quick look at the finishing bits of the installation. We have some primary and secondary air supply piped in from outside. And we have fiddled about with the injection location of this air a fair bit. In the video below it is as it was when we lit it for the first time.

In the vid you can see the two primary combustion air supply pipes, the one on the left comes from outside, down the secondary combustion chamber (for pre-heating). The smaller pipe on the right comes from the bottom back of the stove and runs through the sideways burn chamber for a little preheating. The problem with the pipes were that …Continue reading »

We have been testing the experimental wood stove and heating the workshop for a while now, but for the sake of completeness and order lets have a look at the heat exchanger build.

Just as a recap on the design: The heat exchanger is a completely separate unit to the burn chamber. That way the burn chamber can be massively insulated – giving a very hot efficient burn. Once that burn is effectively complete we need to get the heat out of the waste gasses and into the room. This is where most …Continue reading »

Winter is here and we finished the plastering of the workshop straw-bale walls before it arrived. It may have taken a little longer than anticipated, but objective achieved :) !

Our big sliding door and the finished strawbale wall with truth window

To put the final nail in that side of things, we’ve written up the whole process, our research and experiences as a ‘make your own’ step-by-step: the Earth and Clay Plastering Guide.  Do …Continue reading »

Super insulated burn unit

We have begun lining the inside of the wood stove with heat proof insulating materials. The first thing to do was get a good amount of insulation down for the stove floor. For this we used some insulating fire brick type material that came from Dave’s chimney reconstruction. It was a little oddly shaped, so it ended up being a procedure much like stone wall building, using standard fire cement to hold it together.

Then, we popped in some some super C26 graded insulating fire bricks. These are very  …Continue reading »

The clay plastering of the FE workshop is completed and we are between coats on the exterior lime wash. The only reasonable thing to do is use our spare plaster experimenting bale to carry out some destruction tests!

So we have had most variants of the predictable jibes and japes about straw as a building material: it will burn, it will rot, the wolf will huff and puff, blowing the workshop across the field… Even the local farmer selling us the bales warned us not to put anything electrical in the ‘workshop’ when it was done, for the sake of fire safety. That’s all complete nonsense, and …Continue reading »

So, Flowering Elbow attended the first Mend*rs symposium 29th June-2nd July. Organised by three inspired menders and scholars: Jonnet Middleton, Guiseppe Salva and Beck Collins with the aim of:

And, somewhat more ambitious, to ‘bring about the age of mending‘!

When we saw the call for contributions for this it sounded really …Continue reading »

We had our first plastering party, hoorah! A really good fun weekend, with lovely people and lovely mud. Here’s a quick low down on what we did and learnt.

Since our testing of different clay plaster mixes and digging mission (documented in the previous blog post) there was quite a bit of

…Continue reading »

Plastering party: 18th-20th May

Duel purpose post here: a little update on workshop happenings and an open invite to come and learn/do some clay mixing and plastering on the straw bale walls. So the weekend: the scene is set, we have some bale walls crying out for plaster, a lovely load of clay earth and other ingredients to mix some plaster with, now all we need is your enthusiastic hands and feet to help put the whole lot together!

This should be really good fun: play with mud, learn new skills and experience different, natural building materials, check out the invention studio so far, and enjoy the beautiful surroundings at the Golden Hill Centre. We’ll start Friday evening and carry …Continue reading »