Memories of childhood and adolescence stay with a person for life: of the native log house with a Russian stove; of sun-warmed dusty paths in the garden and vegetable patch, of the sawbucks (often stressed on the second syllable in speech) for sawing firewood, standing to the side in the yard by the woodshed…
And my son Alexey, a museum professional fascinated by the past of the Russian people, having heard the word that had become almost a swear word, talked me into making a wooden “sawbuck” for firewood—not for sawing tree logs into firewood (there’s no need for that anymore), but as a decorative garden element (photo 1).
The raw material was brought from a neighboring dismantled house, after asking the new owners for permission.
A section of wall log and two pairs of poles (2) from a partition proved to be suitable material.
My son cleaned the log of clay plaster and planed it with a hand plane. Log length is 1200 mm, diameter 200 mm.
I made four thin legs a meter long from the poles. Then I trimmed them with an axe and planed them with an electric plane.
On the body of the log, my son and I laid out the “individual” saw cuts for the leg slots (see dimensions in the drawing) and marked the corresponding numbers (3).
Sawing the slots was easier with a bowsaw (4), and chopping out the wood from the slots with a wide chisel (5).
The last step was assembling the “sawbuck” with large nails. On all four legs we marked the protruding height at 250 mm and drilled a 5 mm hole for the nail (6).
After nailing three legs and taking the fourth, we measured its length more precisely so that the sawbuck would rest on the platform with all four legs at once. On four legs the “sawbuck” should stand firm and not wobble. In that position we drove the last nail into the last leg.
In the old days nobody, of course, painted sawbucks. Now the finished piece was stained, coated with deck varnish, and set up in the garden by a decorative wattle fence (see 1).
About the wattle fence—a separate story, or rather a few words. A friend wove it after seeing the sawbucks and suggesting a barter. The following weekend my son and I made another one. The customer supplied the material and did the painting himself.
So life memories led to creating what I would call a vintage piece.
«Modelist-Konstruktor» No. 7’2015, A. Matveychuk
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