Wilson Burnham Guitars

W ell now, in any case, I hope you enjoy these songs, they are, like you and me, product[s] of a long, long human chain, and even the strangest ones are distantly related to each other, as are we all. And there be many links to come. Pete Seeger, The Bells of Rhymney , 1964 If you have read A Handmade Life by Bill Cooperthwaite, you might have come across the short section where he describes a knife maker who makes crooked knives from store bought knives. The maker shapes the knife with files and then goes to an anvil and proceeds to cold bend the "crook" in the knife with a hammer. I thought I'd give it a try. In the above photo is an old hoof knife that belonged to my grandfather, at some point in its life the hook at the end got broken off. It's a perfect candidate for this project. I spent almost 2 hours drawing filing the knife to the shape I wanted and putting a proper bevel on it. Then I went after it with an India stone. Here is the knife with t

There seems to be no doubt that bindings-or what holds the feet to the snowshoes-are the most controversial part of the whole apparatus of snowshoeing. William Osgood and Lesile Hurley, The Snowshoe Book , 2nd edition, 1975 16 inches of snow at 5am and an inch fell in the hour that I took the dogs for a walk this morning at 7am. Josey is bugging me to go out and play in the snow as I write, I guess I should strap on the old Indian webs. The snowshoes on the left are the Huron/Maine/Michigan style, as you can tell they are claimed by several different groups of people and the ones on the right are the Alaskan style. The Huron pair I bought 15 years ago and the Alaskan pair my wife got me 13 years ago, I've used them every winter when we've gotten snow. Many people think that these old styles webs don't work in the snow anymore, they say that only modern snow shoes give the best flotation. I disagree, I have snowshoed with people who used the modern shoes, they "p

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today. Aaron Copland Got back on Saturday, 10/22, from a 3 day class in Historic Building Structural Assessment at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville. We crawled through 4 buildings in town, the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, St. George's Episcopal Church, the 6th Street Gym and the Horace and Augusta Tabor House, assessing the buildings for further preservation work. With this knowledge we are to complete a Historic Building Assessment, a document which is used in Colorado to get grants from the Colorado Historic Fund to preserve the building. Horace and Augusta Tabor House, 1877 For those of you who don't know, Leadville was the "Silver Queen", millions of dollars in silver were pulled out from the veins underneath the town from 1877 until 1893 wh

Returning from his wartime duty in England, one Montanan watched as his ship approached New York. "Just think," the guy next to him said, "somewhere in those canyons you can find anything you want." "Yeah," the Montanan said. "Show me where I can go shoot an elk." Edmund Christopherson, This Here is Montana , 1961 This is the view outside the Projects Administration Shop where I worked this summer at Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO). Not a bad view. Here's a view of the inside of the shop, it's quite cramped and tiny compared to what I worked in at Yosemite. I am a specialist in repair work on historic windows, my dad taught me how to glaze a window when I was a teenager in the 1970's and got really good when I worked at Lassen Volcanic National Park. At Lassen I restored windows and built new sashes, the same at Yosemite where I lost count of how many windows I repaired, built and glazed. For some reason this summer a

The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains. Josephine Baker You can take the boy out of the mountains, but you can't take the mountains out of the boy. I can think of only a few times in my life when I didn't split any firewood in the fall, to split wood is such a part of my life I miss it when I don't do it. Split wood, carry water, the only 2 things one really needs to do with his/her life. This dead Douglas fir was behind our house, the National Weather Service is calling for snow on Saturday, it would be nice to have a fire in the fireplace to enjoy watching the snow fall. That's Rufus, our wonder dog, sniffing the wood. This is my mule. The wheel came from a wheel barrow that my grandfather made years ago, the handles were made in 1975 by me, my mom and my brother when Mom decided to re-build the barrow. I rebuilt the barrow about 4 years ago when we were at Cedar Grove, the handles and wheel I kept, but the

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart? Pablo Casals There are people who think that when someone is unemployed, or in my case, on furlough, they have nothing to do. Monday, I felled a Douglas fir for firewood, yesterday was spent making a guitar bridge from ebony for a WRC/Maple guitar that I need to complete by November and today I hauled firewood and cut out a door on the garage. I know that is not the point of this blog, it is about a Craftsman style rocker that once belonged to my great aunt and uncle. In this photo you can see that I have glued the rails into their mortises. All the joints have been cleaned and I used "Tite Bond II" brand glue for the job. I had to take some time to figure out how to glue the 2 halves together, I did one dry run before I poured the glue. Thank goodness for ratchet straps! I don't own enough long Pony clamps for this job so had to resort this this solution. I