Catalpa

Yesterday I found my name mentioned in a column, by Dr. Richard Jagels in "Wooden Boat." Wooden Boat is a favorite magazine, because no other spells out so clearly the necessity of hands-on learning. Dr. Richard Jagels column is my favorite in that magazine because he writes about wood.

In this particular column, he addressed a question I had raised with him via email about the suitability of using Catalpa to build boats. Some had noticed that Catalpa trees are often hollow, and at first glance that might lead one to assume the worst when it comes to its rot resistance. Dr. Jagels
explained why finding the center of a tree to be hollow is not necessarily the dead end of the story.

He went into great depth to explain as you will find on Page 86 of the March/April, 2018 issue.

There a very good reason for woodworking in schools. Or perhaps I should say there are a thousand of them.  In the hands of a trained expert like Dr. Jagels, the life of a tree can be read like a book. And so humans and trees are similar in one very direct way. Trees tell their stories and we tell ours. Our own lives are inseparable from the lives of our forests and our trees, and so we might just as well learn to live with that and make use of wood working in the education of our kids. It's handy and offers benefits.

The video of roughing out a bowl blank is of my friend Larry Copas, the gentleman who supplied us with Catalpa for our boats. I took the video of Larry at Saturday's turning session with the Stateline Woodturners at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts.

Make, fix and create...