I've been working for many years as a carpenter. I've also been a woodturner for quite a few years. It has always bothered me the amount of perfectly good materials that make their way to the dumpster.
I was building a fairly large building that was an addition to a community center for the elderly. It was a sort of a covered picnic area where the residents could go for picnics, meetings or just to socialize.
The building was being built with very large beams called parallams. The beams were so large we needed a crane to pick them up. We couldn't even pick them up with the backhoe we had at the site.
So, prior to the day the crane arrived I had to trim and drill all the beams to ready them for installation. If you ever used a crane service you know that wasting time when they are waiting is not cost effective.
Once all the parallam beams were ready I started to clean up as usual. Looking at the parallam scrap I was throwing away I thought, Why couldn't I turn these on my wood lathe. Of course unknown to me at the time was that other woodturners had been turning parallam for years. So you see the old adage. "One mans trash is another mans treasure" really applies here. Bob |
