Thor's Hammer Introduction

Thor’s Hammer

“The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things; of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings” - Lewis Carrol

That is an appropriate quote for me, as I dabble and sometimes wallow; other times immerse myself in a large number of pursuits - sort of a Renaissance man of the woodchuck world. When people ask me what I do I tell them, “Well, I pretty much make things every day”. Sometimes I even make music, sometimes poetry, sometimes artwork of various sorts, sometimes …….trouble. It depends on the day. So that is what I will do in “Thor’s Hammer” – talk about things that I have experience with and sometimes make a little trouble. One more thing: Thor is pronounced “Tore”, just so you know, not “Tthhhor”, as Patch Adams once joked to me as he spluttered all over the place, sounding like Daffy Duck. Hammer is what I use sometimes, but actually prefer nailguns and prybars a lot of the time. Sometimes I will just pick up a rock, a board or my fist to get the job done. I once picked up a rock that I thought would make a great tool; a shim in this case to - hold up a moveable concrete form, and I looked at it more carefully as I was jambing it under the form and realized that it was a metate stone, so I have a good eye for tools, too. No?

I have been supporting myself by making fine custom furniture for over 35 years, trained in the classic mortise and tenon construction style and I learned to make mostly Spanish Colonial style pieces at first and help develop what we call Santa Fe style and then continued with all kinds of different styles, including Rustic and a sort of Arts and Crafts, modified Southwest Shaker style. At this point I have made hundreds of pieces of all kinds for many different customers. I work out of our 40-acre ranch on the Galisteo Creek outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico where I built a 3,000 square foot log shop that includes, at this point, full furniture making tools as well as full welding facilities and also a foundry for pouring bronze, doing cast iron work and cast glass abilities and also sheet copper work. I buy tools at every opportunity because I must be addicted to them.

I have designed a built numerous architectural items and have as many years of experience in the world of building structures of all kinds and milling all kinds of window and door parts, skylight parts, flooring, tiling and etc. etc. I can pretty much build a building from the ground up and have done quite a few with just myself as the sole force; using my John Deere 1010C as my back and right hand. “C” means crawler which means track machine or “bulldozer” with a front bucket. I recently bought a backhoe, so I am having fun with that incredible machine. I have an old dump truck and farm tractor and lots of attachments and such. I have a sizeable “boneyard” – junk yard to most of you, where I find most of what I need for many things.

I am a member of the Western Cast Iron Art Alliance and the “Iron Tribe” and have many years of experience in working with all ages of men and women who love to pour iron art pieces together. I have done some fascinating work in bronze and thus my foundry. I also do a lot of photography and have been in various shows of all sorts for my artwork.

I write quite a lot, including a sort of poetic style and my thoughts on numerous subjects, including philosophical and humanistic, land management or “Land Ethic”, politics and the environment and I speak a reasonable facsimile of builder’s Spanish.

That should do as an introduction, for now, and I look forward to being able to spout off on some of the above mentioned subjects in a positive creative spirit.

“The problems of today cannot be solved at the same levels of consciousness as those that created them”. –Albert Einstein