Red Hawk Rustic

Just thought I'd give you a picture of how the gift shop looks after FPC does it's magic.

Below are a series of photos showing the entrance to the Franklin Park Conservatory as it existed before it was "rusticated" and after.  The barn siding was courtesy of Vince Brown, pine siding off sheds that housed horses while Quakers attended church in a small town in north central Ohio.  Other boards on the left side are oak braces from a barn in Pickerington, Ohio.  The bittersweet is courtesy of our farm in Noble County. 

The time consuming part of creating a rectangular mortise through five inches of 100 year old oak is in chiseling out the corners, and then filing and tweaking both the mortise and the cut tenons to get a good fit.  Once that is completed, then it is just a matter of sanding the right amount to bring out the finish you want, which can be different for each beam or board.  The last pictures show the end result, with the difference in character for the four beams pictured in the blog entry of a few days ago brought out in the final outcome.  

This was really my motivation for taking the pictures.  This bench has twelve mortises, ten open 1.5"x3" ones and one closed 2"x2".   It's hard to say exactly how long they take, but the combination of drilling/chiseling the mortises and cutting the tenons, filing and tweaking to get a good fit, is a least two to three days work.  The mortises start with drilling two 1&1/2" holes placed very carefully according to design.  The interesting thing about using old barn lumber is you are not necessarily centering all these holes in each beam, since different beams are slightly (or sometimes remarkably) different widths and seldom square.  So the center of the holes for each mortise must be lined up relative to the beam it will be connecting to, and the angle of the hole adjusted if the sides of the beam are not perpindicular.  Once the holes are drilled, the careful process of chiseling out the 100 year old oak begins, first with the relatively easy task of taking out the wood between the circles leading to the pretty oval shown here.