Wednesday, May 24, 2017

The Real World Can be Frustrating

We all know the expression "strike while the iron is hot."  Just as well you must also strike while the glue is hot.  There are plenty of videos on the internet that discuss in length hammer veneering.  What experience teaches you is there is a lot of work behind the scenes when it comes to a proper veneer application.

Today, I began hammer veneering the cherry onto the Chest of Drawers, but something went horribly wrong.  I think the glue was not hot enough, or too thick of a consistency; therefore, it lost it tack. The veneer turned into the mountainous landscape you see below.


The veneer did not stick onto the substrate and began curling up.  Despite all my attempts to get the veneer to stay flat, I ended up with it peeling up at the sides, and air bubbles underneath the surface.  I even tacked down one end to keep it from lifting off an sliding around, but it didn't help.  After several curses, I cleaned up, melted the glue back down, and took a break.

A little later I picked up a piece of flat, plain sawn wood cherry, honed my smoothing plane, and took a stroke across the board.  Instant relief.  I continued to plane away, producing a bundle of pink-orange shavings by the time I was finished. 

When all of your hard work and planning crumbles down before you, it seems like the end of the world.  It's ok to curse and yell, but I know at least for me, I need to remove myself from the situation and find something to take my mind of the stress and pain.  Today that was planing a piece of cherry.  

In that moment, nothing was wrong, and the product of my work was what I might consider perfection.  Although it wasn't a project component working well, just having something go right reassured me that there are things I am able to do correctly, which will help me rebound from this and start fresh tomorrow.

Tomorrow I'll have to cut three more veneers, and make a fresh batch of glue because I used almost all of what I made today on this one case side.  But I will go into it with a positive mindset, and hopefully produce a result that I am satisfied with enough to put my name on.

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