Counting Calories_ Processing
Sunday, October 11, 2020, was the day I personally transferred the most energy between myself and whatwas to ultimately be a chair...
The total for the day, 4,511, subtracting my normal consumption of 2,500, yielded 2,011 Calories.
On any other project I would have hopped into my van and driven the 8 miles each way to pick up the log without giving it a second thought.
But this wasn’t any other project, and the use of my bike rather than my car on that singular day had already saved me more Calories than what I would later find I would put into the chair in total.
Over the following three weeks I would rive, shave, scrape, drill, steam, and weave, all using only energy I either personally consumed via food, or extracted from chairmaking scraps via carbonization in a TLUD stove.
In observation of the need for steam to bend the backrest, I sought means to use to tread the lightest. Heading down a biochar rabbit hole, I discovered the 1G TUCAN, a modified TLUD stove which could be made from a soup can and a paint bucket. It would allow my wood scraps to create generous amounts of heat, all the while turning to biochar, capturing carbon which would have otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
Screengrab of a video demonstration of a 1G TUCAN stove is from Paul Wheaton’s Youtube channel.
The Red Oak tree cut down to make way for a patio would have ultimately been turned to wood chips had I not intervened. One little section of it became chair. The shavings and unusable bits left behind by the froe and drawknife turned to biochar all the while powering my wood steamer.
The creation of this char sent me down a new path, as evidenced in Something for Us, Something for Earth, which I continue investigating to this day.
The char created during Counting Calories was mixed with compost and fed to my yard in Cranston, Rhode Island. Fingers crossed that carbon will stay trapped there, helping the yard flourish while remaining out of the air for hundreds, if not thousands of years.