Back to the Movies

A few posts back I mentioned that the last thing I had to do with the movies was with Nights in Rodanthe. That movie, starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, came out about 4 years ago.  Ms. Lane is portrayed as a woodworker who in her past built a small rustic box of driftwood. In the movie she makes another more elegant box.  Well, I was contracted to build both boxes, provide some of my tools for props, train Ms. Lane to look believable while planing, sawing and doing other woodworker things, and provide a sequence of materials so she could appear to do some hand cut dovetails.  For that alone you gotta love this movie! That was all fun and good, but unfortunately I was not credited for my part in the production — so much for fame and fortune in the movie industry.  Well, it turns out, in this day and age of the internet and search capabilities, it is relatively easy for folks that want to find the maker of the driftwood box featured in Nights of Rodanthe to do so anyhow.  This week I have three of them to make in time for holiday gifts.  I have other work on my bench (like acoustic guitar number 26!) but these orders all just came in recently and they are not too time consuming to build, so I am slipping them in to my work schedule. The boxes actually play a pivotal role in the movie where they have both a romantic twist and a keepsake aspect to them. It’s easy to understand why people feel a connection and want to manifest that.

The original boxes were made of cypress, which I found out I am quite allergic to in the process of working with the wood. Henceforth I have made reproductions using other types of driftwood or salvaged wood that I have fished out of nearby Watauga river.  Half the fun of making these boxes is going out hunting for the materials.  I’ll be making these commissioned boxes from a pretty nifty log of cherry I pulled out of the river about a year ago: The stuff is nicely weathered, but still quite sound inside. One nice thing about the cypress was that the wood is so rot-resistant that it could weather quite deeply yet remain sound for doing the dovetailed joinery. It’s a challenge finding other woods that are nicely weathered without being rotted as well.

Here I’ve used a pair of wedges to create a flat face so I can now band saw what I need from the log. I’ve had my eye out for a froe to make this kind of splitting more convenient, for quite some time, but have yet to come across one, or to simply make one. Laziness.

The 14″ log is up on my saw.  I’ll bandsaw free-hand along the layout line that’s visible and then set up with a fence to saw the rest.

Most of the wood is cut up.  The three slabs will become the ends of the boxes. This wood is amazingly dry for coming right out of a log, but the stuff must have dried for some time as a snag in the river and then its been in my shop for a while now too.  It all stayed dead-flat coming of the saw, but I’ll be letting it settle for a while.  From here on I will just be building one box at a time.  The dimensions will all be slightly different box to box as I respond to what I have to work with, and this isn’t a cookie-cutter type object so I like being able to concentrate on each box as it takes shape.

Until next time,
df