Pumping Iron, Well Not Exactly.

My son Stephen is building a house here on the farm. He and his wife are doing pretty much all of the work themselves. It’s getting pretty close to being finished. They decided on 8/4 hickory counter tops. One run of counter is 18’ long. The other two are 9’ and 6’. Today we began dressing all of the hickory. The first thing you need to know about hickory is that it’s very heavy.

We managed to run about a third of the lumber today. We face jointed it flat and then edge jointed one edge. Lastly we ran it through the planer.

Before I started woodturning full time, my wife Pennie and I did a lot of flat work. We built our own home in 1994. It is post and beam construction out of red oak. When I mentioned to Pennie how heavy the hickory was she pointed to all of the posts and beams in our house. We ran all of those ourselves in my shop. One beam is 15’ long and is 6” X 14”. I have no idea how we ran all of those beams over the jointer and through the planer but we did. Be that as it may, that 11’ X 8/4” hickory is still heavy.

My muscles have sore muscles tonight. We are waiting on a second delivery of hickory. It is due tomorrow or Wednesday. I’m secretly praying for Wednesday.