#creativeideas #woodkiln #woodturning

Some of my best artistic endeavors as a maker and a woodworker were borne out of highly impractical and wildly unrealistic ideas. Now, I realize that statement is purely subjective based on the success or outcome of implementing that idea, but sometimes the best results come from the wildest areas of your brain.

This is not to say that all ideas are gems. I’ve had my share of stinkers.

One of my first woodworking projects was building an Adirondack chair based on a set of free plans, and chose to use regular Pine for the structure. Since my young son had started to play hockey, I also had the idea of using hockey sticks to decorate the seat and chair back. Broken wood sticks were surprisingly easy to find back then, often filling up a garbage can near the Zamboni door or tossed in the rink’s dumpster. The finished chair actually looked pretty awesome and the variety of colors and hockey brand names on the sticks, made the chair unique.

I remember telling one of our hockey team parents about my project and he shared a self-awareness story about his own Adirondack chair built a few years before. He liked the wide back and the low seat comfort of his chair and loved the whole idea of making it himself. He thought my project sounded pretty cool as well, especially the part about using broken hockey sticks for the seat and back.

It was at this point he mentioned that after his last pieces were glued and screwed into place, he realized that it wouldn’t fit it up his narrow basement stairs. “I mean, it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the width of the stairs needs to be measured first”, he said. I made a face at that point because I knew he worked as an aeronautical engineer and propulsion expert. “Wait a minute”, he added. “I am a rocket scientist! You didn’t build yours in your basement, did you?”

“No. I assembled it all up at our cabin so it was easier to transport”, I replied.

“Thinking ahead. Good idea. I should have done that”, he said.

Yes, my first real furniture project was a great idea; to me anyway. Except pine likes to absorb moisture and rot quickly when outdoors, while the fiberglass layer used on some stick shafts likes to splinter over time and then poke tiny little slivers in your butt and back. That project eventually found its way to the fire pit. It burned with all the flamboyance and style befitting the original idea. I took some solace in that.

It’s a good time to talk about another awesome idea that led to one of my most ambitious mechanical displays for Halloween. To kick off this story I should talk about our old neighborhood in Detroit when we were kids. Everybody, and I mean everybody down the block decorated their houses with some sort of home made Halloween display. Even modest displays showed off multiple hand carved pumpkins and fake spider webs draped over bushes. Hard core displays included one home with a hearse in the driveway, lit inside to show off an open casket and a fake skeleton. Another home placed a jack-o-lantern on top of a ladder draped with white sheets. There was a stereo speaker under the sheets, and the owner hid in the house with a microphone to scare the kids walking up his driveway. It was awesome. Great idea.

As I got older, I started to make gravestones out of scrap wood, cutting them into various shapes and painting them gray with white speckles then making them look a bit like granite. Some of my favorites included the following memorials:

• Here lies Bobby B. Brice – “He ate too much candy and then paid the price”
• Sally Manilla – “I told you I was sick”
• Frank N. Stein – “Beloved husband, bad haircut”
• Johnny Rotten – “Yup, that’s what I’m doing in this box”
• Ivanna Newhart – “You can’t always get what you want”

I saved them and added to the collection each Halloween making it a fun graveyard for when we had our own kids. It was their job to collect leaves and make burial piles in front of each stone. The parents walking by got the jokes. The kids were just there for the chocolate!

As my tool collection grew, I experimented with adding some sort of motion to our Halloween displays that I could create with compressed air. By drilling and tapping the bottom of a screen door air plunger, I found a way to attach an air line and push the plunger out on command. It only took about 25 PSI but it could lift a decent amount of weight.

At this point I got the insane idea of creating a pop up garbage can prop, where Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street would pop straight up from a closed metal garbage can right near the front door. I had to create a facsimile of Oscar with fake green fur, bushy eyebrows and ping pong eyes, attaching the garbage can lid to the top of his head while operating the air switch from inside the garage. It was an awesome build. It had me giddy over the home made effect. It operated flawlessly. “Kids love Sesame Street”, I said.

It scared the kids to death, sending many of the young ones screaming from the porch. Other kids on the sidewalk seeing the screaming, chose not to stop at our house. Another great idea, but an epic fail in practice. “Read the room, man”.

With those epic fail stories figuratively sitting out on the table for your enjoyment, maybe it’s time to offer up a success story. After all, why write a blog about new ideas if you’re only going to talk about the bad results. “True dat”. But sometimes a couple bitter stories about new idea failures, makes a success story even sweeter, mixed metaphor notwithstanding.

So on to my crazy idea story about the Kitty Litter Wood Kiln. “Say what?”

Sometimes when you get a free piece of wood or you’re forced to cut down or prune a larger tree, you can’t really do anything with the wood until it’s dry. It won’t even burn until it sits for a year or more. Cutting green wood into boards is a futile effort, knowing it will twist itself into a banana as it dries. So too will a block of wood change it’s shape if you try to turn it on a lathe into a bowl or a vase. This is my current scenario, and my latest idea challenge.

I stumbled across a free section of a tree stump sitting by the side of the road under a “FREE” sign. Far be it from me to ignore a free piece of wood, regardless of how it comes into my possession. It was too big and heavy to do anything with until it was trimmed down into a workable block by chainsaw. I cut it down, trimmed it further on the band saw and got in into a block I could mount on the wood lathe. It was long enough and thick enough to make for a really nice vase that could hold a couple dozen flowers of your choosing. More accurately stated; my wife’s choosing.

The challenge is however, that you can start to turn down and shape a really wet / green piece of wood, but it will change it’s shape and warp as it dries. You need to leave the rough turning with thick walls, so after it dries you can re-mount it for a final turning, bringing the shape back to a round form. Thick pieces could take a couple years in open air to fully dry. You can’t do the final shaping of the vase until the wood dries completely and stops moving. I guess you can try, but you will be left with a vase that isn’t round and may rock from side to side on the table. No bueno.

There are a few experimental methods to speed up the drying process. An outdoor solar kiln works well. It’s just a shed with a plexiglass roof and black plastic inner walls to absorb heat and suck out moisture from wood. Not so effective in Michigan winters though. There is also the microwave method, where you cook your smaller wood pieces for 30 seconds at a time, let them cool for a couple hours, cook them again and again and again over a week until it’s done losing water weight. One video showed a guy with a large cardboard box lined with foil and heated with a single incandescent light bulb. That worked too, but it was slow and I worry about a potential fire.

Then I spotted a single video, where a woodworker tried drying his wood project with silica gel desiccant. That’s the stuff in little packets they stick into shoe boxes and other packages when the manufacturer wants to keep things dry. You can buy this silica in large tubs and it comes with color change dye so you can tell when the silica is saturated. Stick in the oven for an hour to dry it out and use it again. It was a cool idea, but the bulk silica gel granules were expensive.

Here’s where my latest crazy idea kicks in. Kitty litter.

Not that you’ll see the ingredients actually listed on the package because you won’t, but certain types of kitty litter are made from non toxic silica gel. Most forms of litter are made from clay or modified forms of clay, but a few options are made with pure silica gel. I found one. I bought a big bag.

Once you open the sealed plastic bag, the gel will start pulling moisture form the air or anything that sits near the bag. In order to use it as a dehumidifying desiccant, it needs to be added to a sealed container surrounding whatever wood chunk you want to dry. My vase? A five gallon no-brand paint bucket with a rubber sealed lid would be perfect.

As strange new ideas go, this was a pretty weird one. It would have been easy to throw this one away as being too illogical, too loony, or a waste of precious time. “Just put it in a warm dry spot in the basement and let it sit”, I told myself. “For a year”, I admitted reluctantly.

No, wait. The Adirondack chair was actually a good idea, but the materials needed to be improved. That whole Halloween / Oscar the Grouch mishap? The performance of the idea was great! It just scared the crap out of the kids. Kitty Litter Kiln? It’s going to cost $18 to give this a try.

So, was it worth it? On day one, my fresh cut, rough turned vase weighed 2408 grams and registered at 22% moisture content. Today is day five inside the sealed bucket. The vase is down to 2300 grams and 18% moisture content. That’s a significant drying gain in just five days. Those are pretty awesome results in a very short amount of time.

So the value of having a strange and new idea especially about something crafty or artistic, is not in having the idea or talking about the idea but rather implementing that idea to it’s ultimate conclusion. Sometimes you have to take the risk and give that idea a shot to reap a sweet reward. As my uncle who lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula might say; “You betcha”.

Updated video to follow on the final vase turning. See the stump and silica story on our YouTube channel!