My birthday was earlier this month. I spent it like I do most days: working on my various projects. Amanda says that's a great thing - if you want to spend a special day just like you spend other days, life must be pretty good. The big project was nailing down our new solid red oak floor in the room we have been remodeling for the last four months. Amanda selected the planks for each row. I then started at one wall and nailed each successive plank down, one nail every eight to twelve inches - just by eye, they didn't have to be precisely spaced - with two whacks on the spring-loaded nailer. The last plank in each row required me to mark it for fit, then run downstairs to the chop saw for a quick trim. A few more nails, and I called for Amanda again.
It was a surprisingly meditative process. It didn't require a ton of complex thought (especially with Amanda making the texture decisions), but it still required focus. I'm terrible at driving nails. I tap more often than I hammer - on the end of a chisel, or on the head of a drum. Delivering real force to a precise target … made me glad I could keep my off-hand safely out of the way.
The meditation was welcome, since seven days earlier my father had finally passed away after a years-long struggle with Parkinson's. It wasn't an unexpected event. While most of the progression of the disease had been eratic - uneven, up and down unpredictably - the last few months and weeks provided regular markers that the end was coming soon. I had prepared myself for it, and yet having a project that was such a simple "carrying on, a day at a time" activity to retreat into was still a comfort.
For the final few months, Mom had the support of a hospice team. Every one of those people was awesome and amazingly compassionate. One of them opened the fantastically difficult conversation to help Mom pepare the things that would need to happen after. When she told me about this conversation, I thanked the hospice worker for giving me the opening I needed to discuss my own contribution: I wanted to build Dad's cremation urn.
My career was in software engineering. I'm a woodworker by hobby only. Dad's career was … diverse, but mostly centered around appliance repair. He was a woodworker by hobby only. His father's career was farming. He was a woodworker by hobby only. Nevertheless, we each found our own happiness creating wooden things for ourselves, our family, and our friends.
For one last gift to my father, I selected a piece of 8/4 maple from the stash that I milled from a tree in my yard two years ago. At a bit over 7 inches wide, it was too wide for my jointer. But quick work with a No. 4 handplane got one side of a two-foot section flat and smooth enough to send through my surface planer to make the faces parallel.
My jointer would have squared and straightened the edges, but it would have taken a bit of extra care and effort to pass the heavy slab through properly, so I decided to try something new. I have long extruded-aluminum straight edges, each with an end-clamp and adjustable stop built in. I clamped one along the length of the board, with one edge hanging beyond the edge of the board. I then used that overhang as a reference edge to place against my table saw's fence. I ripped the opposite edge with my precisely-adjusted saw, then popped off the clamp, spun the board aroud and placed the jointed edge against a readjusted fence. I'll be using this method again, for sure - the squared edge isn't quite as smooth as the jointer would get it, but it's straighter with far less effort.
Resawing revealed more beautiful grain. The bandsaw blade was sharp and thus cut straight. Only a couple of light passes through the surface planer were all that was required to remove the saw marks. I was left with a good 13/16in. of thickness on each board.
I knew from the moment I started thinking about a design that I wanted to use the wrapped-grain style that I had used on the dice towers last winter. But this time, instead of using the thin kerf of the bandsaw blade to part the end from the side in each piece, I made the cut on the tablesaw. With the blade tilted to 45º, I raised it such that the very corner of the tooth was exactly even with the top side of the board. After running the piece through the saw, I was left with only a few fibers holding the end and the side together. As I reached for my knife and lifted the piece to slice those fibers, they folded over and the sections parted on their own. It took a bit of fiddling to get the mating edge flipped around and aligned for its own miter, but by sneaking up on it with a few passes, I believe I lost zero grain, because the kerf didn't protrude through the top surface.
Then I veered away from the plans I had drawn up. I had envisioned doing something fun with splines, again like the dice towers. I worried even before this point that that would be too busy, too distracting. When I saw the subtle colors of the maple, those worries were confirmed - the care that I had taken to preserve the grain-flow would have been entirely drowned out by contrasting splines cutting across it. But, I don't like to leave a miter unsupported. I know the internet has had this argument, and decided I'm wrong. I trust my own experience. I returned to the table saw, and sliced grooves for hidden splines. They run along the faces of the miter, instead of across it. The splines are cherry, and will never be seen. But then, neither were the pits Dad always seemed to find in cherry pie (his favorite, despite the occasional chipped tooth).
I would normally put a floating top in a box, with grooves just below the top edge for tongues on a panel to slot into. I really wanted the top to be one continuous surface, instead of a panel framed in the mitered border of the sides around it, though. So I've taken a bit of a risk and mitered the upper edges of the sides, as well as the edges of the top, and glued them together. These miters are not splined, because the two long edges are strong face-grain-to-face-grain joints. There is a risk that such a rigid installation will cause the top to split or separate from the ends when humidity fluctuates. But the box will spend most of its years in a climate-controlled house, where the humidity won't swing too far, and then will be buried underground, where such flaws will just be the start of its return to nature.
The base was also glued into place, after Dad's ashes were installed. Its joint is not a miter, however. Instead, it's essentially a tenon that fits into the mortise that is the inside of the box. I rabbeted the panel, leaving a lip about a half-inch wide and a quarter-inch thick. This lip sits proud of the bottom of the box, but recessed from the outer edges. The effect is to make the urn seem to float just off the table.
I returned to one of my favorite finishes for this project - Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil. It's what I used on the guitar I built, and it produced a lovely, lustrous finish. Add in that Tru-Oil is also known as "gun stock finish", and that Dad is who taught me how to shoot, and I couldn't resist. I applied twelve coats. That got me right to the point where the finish shined, but I hadn't lost all of the texture of the wood. Perfect.
I'm writing and sharing this because I like to write up and share my projects. But I also want to share what I learned with any woodworker who might be thinking about attempting this themselves. If that's you, then I want to say that I really think you should do it. It's exactly as special of a gesture as you expect it is. If you can build a decent box, you can build a decent urn. Your construction doesn't even have to be either perfect or fast. A crematorium will provide the ashes to you in a temporary container. The container we received was a rigid plastic box, inside of which was a thick plastic bag containing the ashes. I took a lot of care to make sure this urn was fully sealed, without gaps in any joint, expecting to need to pour the ashes in. When I saw the bag, I lifted it out of the plastic box and placed it directly into the wooden one. Now, even if a gap were to develop somewhere - from humidity shrinkage, or from a drop or other physical shock - the ashes will still be well-contained.
The one piece I didn't make myself was a brass nameplate. I'm not an engraver. Unfortunately, I wasn't absolutely sure of the year until the opening day of Holy Week in Wisconsin, better known as the gun-deer hunting season. With every trophy-maker either out in a blind themselves, or preparing to mount antlers for everyone else, my emailed inquiry went unanswered. Some fine crafter from Idaho fulfilled my Etsy order just as well.
I am truly happy with how this project turned out. It's a "plain" box from far away. But when you get close, you see elaborate detail in the grain everywhere. Some trauma in the tree's life left it with a dark streak that gives the effect of a bit of black veil in the wind, or a waft of smoke. Beveling the upper edge to meet the top revealed a glittering streak of chatoyancy - Dad's halo. This was a project I really wanted to do, despite not wanting to have to do it. It had the same moments other projects have, where I wasn't sure if what I was going to try would work. Seeing it turn out so well was a bit of joy in an otherwise sad time.
Rest in peace, Dad.
Categories: Woodworking
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