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Wood Shop News #21 book matching grain, snowflakes and other news from around the shop March 08, 2011 |
brought to you by: wooden-box-maker.com.
In this issue:book matchingBook-matching is when you use consecutive boards from the same log to create a repeating pattern in the grain (such as with the box in the logo). It can make wonderful grain designs and is easy enough to do yourself with the proper tools.
Click the link for more about book matching. New & For Salecheck out my Etsy shop for gift ideas. Or drop me a line and have something custom made.
Also For Sale Contact me NEW: Take a BowI've decided to add a new section for those of you out there who would like to share photos and/or comments about your own work. Unfortunately, I've yet to figure out how to add the actual form to this newsletter, so I have created a link. Click here to showcase your woodwork.
Woodworking Classes(Located about half way between Boston, MA and Providence RI)Learn new skills or hone old ones in small group sessions tailored to the individual. 
Classes are limited to 3 people and take place in my shop outside Boston. They generally meet once a week for 2-3 hours. The sessions go on as long as students are interested, a few months or a few years.
As students progress, class becomes "open shop" time when they work on the projects of their choice while I answer questions and give suggestions as things come up. Individual instruction is also available. Click on the links below or contact me
for more information. Snowflakes
Those of you who live in the Northeast US may have noticed that we’ve had a bit of snow this year. It got me thinking.... just what is a snowflake anyway? How are they formed? In my travels across the web I discovered a wonderful website called snowcrystals.com. They have intriguing pages such as “a guide to frost” and “snowflake touring” (visit the Snowflake Bentley Museum in Jericho, Vt, for instance) as well as information on how to preserve your own snow crystals (hint: use super glue). The following information comes mostly from their “snowflake primer,” as well as the other sources listed below. Do check them out for more info.
A snow crystal is a single crystal while a snow flake can be one or more crystals joined together. A crystal, by the way, is a material whose atoms or molecules are aligned in an orderly repeating pattern. Water freezes into crystals and that is what gives snowflakes their wonderful geometric designs.
Snow flakes begin as water vapor that condenses into crystals of ice. (Snow is not frozen raindrops, that's sleet. Sleet is frozen when it falls, freezing rain is liquid as it falls and freezes on contact with the ground or other surface.)
As with other precipitation, snow begins with humidity. Humidity is simply a measure of the amount of water vapor in air. As air cools the water vapor within it condenses. (Condensation is the change from a gas into a liquid. Evaporation is the reverse.) Rain occurs when water vapor condenses into liquid and adheres to dust, soot or other particles in the air. If enough of these water droplets collect they become heavy enough to fall as rain. Snow, on the other hand, occurs when the water vapor within a cloud condenses then freezes into ice crystals. This process requires below freezing temperatures (around 14F or -10C) and it doesn't happen all at once. Instead, the snow cloud begins as mostly liquid water droplets. As it cools the droplets begin to freeze.
When a droplet freezes it's surrounded by the remaining liquid water droplets in the cloud, which in turn freeze, and some of them freeze onto the original ice crystal. This process continues as crystals are added on, until the original frozen droplet becomes a full grown snowflake.
Different weather conditions create different types of snowflakes depending on humidity, temperature, etc. For example, powdered snow is cold and fluffy, while granular has melted and refrozen and it is hard and grainy.
In case you're curious: frost is water vapor that condensed and immediately crystallized (froze) on a surface near the ground (grass, window pane, etc). Dew is water that condenses close to the ground and remains a liquid.
Sources: Snow Crystals, Snowflake Primer, http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/primer/primer.htm (Feb 25, 2011) Wikipedia, Snow, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow (Feb. 25, 2011). Jericho Historical Society, Jericho, VT, Snowflake Bentley, http://snowflakebentley.com/ (Feb 25, 2011) Scientific American, Why do Snowflakes Crystallize into such Intricate Structures?, by Charles A. Knight. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-snowflakes-crystal (Jan 26, 2004).
Final WordsI hope you have enjoyed reading this ‘zine. Do you have ideas for future topics? Comments? Feedback? I'd love to hear from you. Just hit reply and tell me what you think.
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