Tyler Whitham Final Project

Title:  Naïve Optimism, or:  F*#$ You, George.

Materials (Intentional):  Black Ash Wood, Fiber Reinforced Concrete

Materials (unintentional):  Broken drill bit, Pine Wood, Melamine particle board, Human Blood

Dimensions: 78” X 18” X 24”

Weight: Roughly 100 lbs.

Where to start with this? 

I suppose I’ll start with the moment that this whole thing went rubber side up.   

A little background:  I've been working with a material this semester called Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete (GFRC).  This stuff is cool.  It's a concrete that doesn't require an aggregate or an internal support structure.  It has fiber glass in it to give it amazing shear strength versus normal cement. GFRC has a lot of really cool properties, one of them being that you can mix it to the consistency of a clay and actually pack it onto vertical surfaces to a thickness of a half an inch.  In order to do this you need to mix the concrete and then wait roughly 30 minutes so that it begins to cure and harden a bit.  Once this occurs you have about an hour to work with it before you reach the point of no return and it cures for good, but within that hour long time frame the more you knead and work with the stuff the more fluid it becomes.  So, you can effectively control the consistency of it by how much you work it.  You can really mush it if you need it to be runny to get into a tiny space or you can just take a hunk of it and without working it at all, slap it right onto a wall and it'll stay there and not run or droop.  Like I said, it's really cool.  Here are some photos from another project that I'm working on using the GFRC that shows how it can be used to pack forms.

So, with that in mind I'll talk a little about my design.  I love George Nakashima's furniture.  I love the natural wood, and the lines and the delicate sense of balance that a lot of his pieces from his Conoid Studio have.  I am also very interested in Wendell Castle's laminated pieces, and how he is able to make a seamless design that is essentially carved from a solid chunk of wood.  I wanted to combine these two design philosophies and make a piece of furniture that was very minimally worked and I wanted it to consist of a single, solid piece from top to bottom.  I also like the white-washed appearance of Joseph Walsh's work and wanted to use that element somehow.  I originally though of using driftwood and trying to laminate it, but quickly realized that in that direction madness lay.  I will come back to the idea of driftwood later though, because check out this piece of wood that I dragged out of Lake Livingston:

 Awesome, right?  No idea what kind of wood it is but its going to turn into a table at some point in the near future.  Sorry, off topic...back to the bench.

Instead, I went to a lumber yard and bought a nice piece of Black Ash.  I then spent the next two weeks trying to get it flat.  I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say this: I lost 6 pounds doing it.  It's the most physical thing I've done in a long time, and it felt like I went into the garage every night to battle this piece of a tree that was laying on my bench waiting to ambush me.  At first I was determined to only use hand tools to do this.  Again, this was an insane idea.  These were my tools of choice for the first week:

Those are my Japanese style saws, hand plane and chisels.  I love these tools, but the guys on YouTube just make it look so much easier than it is.  After a week of fighting with my plane and the wood, I switched to a belt sander, which still made me feel like a gladiator, but I now had a more powerful weapon.  Once I had the wood flat, I started to think more about my actual design, and decided to use concrete fused to wood to make my solid piece rather than attempt any type of stack lamination.  In order to make the two materials appear more seamless, I sawed the plank down its middle to make a channel for a strip of concrete and decided that the concrete would flow from the bench top down into the legs.  I decided on trying to recreate George Nakashima style legs from a concrete form, because I thought it would be interesting to see how using a material that is almost the direct opposite of would change the nature of the piece, and I wanted to see if I could still achieve that sense of delicacy when using a material as chunky and heavy as concrete.  Using a very basic sketch as an idea, I just dove right in.

Despite the use of duct tape, that form was super solid.  Every seam was screwed together with wood screws and sealed with silicone caulking.  The reason that it looks so chunky is that it's a form, so I obviously couldn't screw directly into where my concrete would be poured.  The forms were also tacked to the bottom of the bench using pin nails and the seams were sealed with lots and lots of silicone.  The channel running up the center of the plank was also sealed with silicone to prevent the cement from seeping under the wood.  As you can see, there is a gap underneath the form for the splayed legs and the channel, which would allow the whole piece to be seamless.  The X shape routed into the wood is a channel to be filled with concrete to give it some stability and to help the concrete bind to the wood.  There are similar channels underneath both legs.   So, after triple checking every seam, I mixed my cement.  I started by mixing up a really thick batch, like I described before, in order to block up the gaps underneath the leg forms.  With the thick concrete in place, and my leg forms effectively sealed, I mixed the remainder of my concrete (100 lbs in total) to a very runny consistency so that I could get nice smooth surfaces and ensure that my leg forms got completely filled and had no gaps.  Everything went amazingly smoothly.  It was so easy.  Maybe eve a little too easy...the following took place in my head as I finished pouring the concrete:

   "Why did everyone online make such a big deal out of this process?  That went insanely smoothly...I probably did it wrong...I probably poured the legs too quickly.  I bet there's air bubbles in there.  I should check and make sure there are no air bubbles.  How do I make sure there are no air bubbles?  I'll just use this stick."

Remember how I talked about how cool it was that you could control the consistency of the concrete by kneading it?  Poking it with a stick does the same thing.  So, when I jammed a stick down into the form and agitated the concrete to make sure there were no voids, I softened the thick concrete that I had packed into the channel gaps.  I saw the concrete start to bulge at the base, and then the freshly poured, runny concrete burst through and began to flow.  Fast.  I jammed my hand into the gap to stop the flow, hoping that I could hold it long enough for it to reform that barrier, "apply direct pressure!  That's how you stop bleeding!" but I failed to consider the very first and most basic lesson in combat first aid: always check for an exit wound!  I didn't realize that the same thing was happening on the other side, and 50 lbs. of concrete trying desperately to obey gravity isn't going to form up in an orderly fashion to slowly seep through a small gap, instead it bursts right through all of your meticulously placed silicone.  Once one piece of the seal went, the rest followed suit, and there was nothing I could do then but try to catch as much of the concrete as I could with my bucket before it spilled onto the floor.

So, no problem, right?  I've got a big mess, but I saved most of the concrete and my form didn't fall apart, so I'll just try again.  I left a significantly sized mound of concrete around all of the edges so that it could harden and take the place of the silicone that had burst.  I waited for what seemed like an eternity (but was actually only 10 minutes) and started to pour again.  No good, the seal held in a few places, but didn't hold at all around the channel gap.  So I left an even bigger mound in front of the channel gaps, placed a board all along the seam to maintain pressure, waited even longer, and tried again, pouring only a small amount into the form this time.  Still, even with a small amount of concrete the seal didn't hold around the channel gap and it began to seep out.  So, I decided to be patient and I waited 30 minutes before trying again.  

Remember that hour long window I talked about in the beginning?  Once you reach that time limit, you are done for.  The concrete begins to cure VERY fast.  Once I came back from my 30 minute waiting period, the concrete was way thicker than it was before.  I began to pour the concrete into the form, but it was flowing very slowly and was so thick that it was really difficult to work with.  I remixed the concrete with my paddle mixer and it loosened up quite a bit, and I poured a lot in quickly.  The seam held!  I was excited!  I had hope!  But when I went to pour again, the concrete in my bucket was like peanut butter.  I mixed it again, but no good, still peanut butter consistency.  So, unable to pour any longer, I started packing it into the mold with my fingers.  This didn't work well at all, so I used the same stick that caused this whole mess (which will henceforth be known as The Destroyer) and used it, very carefully this time, to pack the concrete down into the leg holes.  After only a few minutes the concrete was the consistency of sticky modeling clay, and not even The Destroyer could pack it in any further.  I did the best that I could with The Destroyer, and packed concrete into the leg holes until it was as full as I could get it.  I knew then that the whole thing was doomed, because there was way too much concrete left in the bucket, and even more still hardening all over the backside of my bench and on the floor of my garage.  It was at this point that I posted that my project was doomed, after I cleaned up and bandaged a nasty cut on my finger that I have no idea how I got...hence the Human Blood in the unintended materials list.

Sure enough, when I took the form apart on Friday morning, the leg piece was so full of voids that most of it just crumbled and the rest was in even worse shape...

 De-molding process...usually a hammer and a crowbar are not required.

That piece of melamine board with the screws in it is still there...probably will be forever. 

One leg section was pretty good though, it just wasn't attached to anything else.

  

After work on Friday I began to chisel the bench out from the mess I had made and spent most of the night trying to get it looking like not a train wreck. This is what I managed to do.

The large block thing is part of another bench I'm making, but I appropriated it to put this bench on as it looks better than the bucket I had under there when I was chiseling and sanding all the concrete off.  I actually like the way it looks, so this is the direction I'll go in when fixing this bench in the next few weeks.  It will eventually have the remaining leg section removed from the bottom and the wood will get a few coats of tung oil.  There's also quite a bit of gouge marks from the concrete removal that I need to plane out, and the silicone sealant needs to be removed from the wood around the channel, but I've been sanding most of the night and morning, so this is how it's going to stay for now. I don't even want to look at this thing again for at least a week.

My take away from this whole experience is actually positive.  I've learned a lot of lessons, and I'm certainly not done with wood working or working with this concrete.  I've got quite a few projects in the pipe that I'm going to start with next week.  The next one I do will have no concrete though...I'm going to make a walnut table out of another awesome piece of driftwood I found...

That's black walnut.  That I got for free.  From a lake.  I'm still amazed at my luck on this one.

This semester has really got me thinking about wood.  It's really an amazing experience to work with it, because the nature of the material has to be considered at all times.  You can't make a cut without first considering the direction of the grain and selecting the right saw.  You can't just buy wood and build something with it immediately, because it moves, and shrinks and expands as the weather changes, like it's breathing.  You have to be very aware of not only what you are doing at the moment, but also what the wood will do in the future.  It's not like anything I've ever done in the past, and I'm excited about doing more.  I've got an ever growing stack of drift wood in my garage, much to my wife's chagrin, and I'm going to build a solar kiln in my backyard to dry it all into usable lumber.  I've glad I had this exposure to craft, and really enjoyed the history and learning about the influences crafts have on American society.  It's not something that I had ever really thought about before, which is funny, because I was once an archaeology major and I know how much you can learn about a society be looking at the way it makes things.  I have studied a ton of old pottery shards, but for some reason I've never applied that same thinking to modern history.

Thanks everyone!  I've really enjoyed this class and I'm looking forward to working with everyone in future classes!