My high school science teacher asked me if I could make a hiking staff for one of my other high school science teachers who is retiring in September. How could anyone say “no” to that?

I started looking around for materials and coming up with ideas, and eventually decided on laminated bamboo as the primary component. Rockler sells 36″ boards and I decided I’d use 3, ripped lengthwise and assembled, lapped and epoxied with G-flex. I did a small experiment, consisting of making a little piece of the stuff, putting it in a vise, and whacking it a few times with a forging hammer. I was pretty confident, after that, that anything that ruined the staff would also ruin the science teacher, so that’s all nominal.

My first idea was to make a finial for the staff out of bronze, cast in the shape of an ehrlenmeyer flask.

That turned out to be a non-starter because I just couldn’t bear to do it. First off, that’s a lot of bronze. Secondly, the shape of the mold would be practically designed to produce a “molten bronze volcano” with that big bottom to generate steam in, and the narrow neck to constrict it all so it shoots everywhere. Perhaps I’m just being a nervous nelly, but I decided to table that decision and come up with something else later.

Meanwhile, I continued with the compositing.

I thought Real Hard(tm) about putting a carbon fiber rod down the center (I have some golf club handles) but decided that was probably unnecessary. My decisions at this time were being heavily influenced by listening to the audiobook version of Surface Detail and mentally, I was with Demeisen, in a place free from petty concerns such as “is this too over the top?” But, screw it. Bamboo is remarkably tough stuff already. When the glue was all cured, I squared the staff up on the table saw, then knocked the edges off so it’d turn more easily on the lathe.

It was right about then that I realized I have a 36″ lathe and that’s not going to support a 54″ staff. Le oops. Time to quit for the day and let my subconscious noodle my way out of the problem. And, sure enough, it did: pool cue connectors!

The central post is stainless steel, and there’s a lot of room on the receptacle and post for glue to grab onto. That’ll do!

A bit of design fudgery later, and I cut the staff to cane length, then a topper piece that would take it to hiking staff length, and a separate finial so it can be assembled in two different modes. That way it looks like I planned all this.

Around now, I made my second mistake, which is that I forgot I have a gunsmith lathe (my metal lathe). Those are made with a hole straight through the arbor, so you can do things like chuck up gun barrels so there’s only a bit sticking out to thread them. Too late it dawned on me that I could have cut the whole thing using the auto-advance and the taper mode on the tailstock, and the whole project would have been done in 15 minutes or less.

Naturally, the metal lathe’s chuck would have marred the wood, but I hadn’t sanded it yet – I could have just marred away, then sanded it on the wood lathe, and been done. But, I was able to make the holes for the connectors machinist accurate. Another mistake: I should have parted off the excess end of the stock using a parting tool on the metal lathe. Then everything would have been about as perfect as humans can make it. That was not to be.

In fact, I assembled the whole thing and it looked soulless. Actually, it looked like a pool cue. The surfaces were gleaming polished and I thought “nobody would ever use this for hiking.” Impulsively, I took it over to the knifesmith’s grinder and textured it and adjusted the thickness of the handle at the top and a few other things. In the course of doing that, I made it so that the upper piece was no longer perfectly concentric. It feels better in the hand but I’m not sure if I did the right thing. This, however, raises a point of which I constantly remind myself: these things do not matter. When you’re making an artifact, the end user and audience only see and deal with the finished version, not whatever was in your head. They can’t hear your inner voice that is screaming, “no that’s not perfect!” they just look at it and go “looks good!” – they react to what they see. There have been many occasions where I am nearly ready to scrap a project, and I remember that it’s not compromising my values – it’s just that perfectionism is an enemy of getting anything done. If I want to make a perfect staff, I can do that on my own time and schedule.

For the finial, I decided to keep it simple-ish, and just sawed off a chunk of rosewood, chucked it up, center drilled it, and turned a sort of flask-y shape. Then, I did some polishing and gluing.

Rosewood is magic, the way it polishes right up.

Again, I should have taken that over to the metal lathe and faced it off perfectly concentric. I didn’t. I sawed it on the bandsaw and sanded it flat. That’s when you discover the difference between “what a human thinks is dead flat” and “what a lathe thinks is dead flat.” The whole project was getting more and more analog with each step.

I took a 1/4-20 3″ long stainless steel carriage bolt and sunk it into the bottom of the staff, bedded down in a puddle of PC-7. If my science teacher has to fight off a bear, or a MAGA, he’ll suffer no staff failure because of me.

And, because of my reluctance to walk into the other room and use the metal lathe, you can see the fit isn’t perfect. In fact, the PC7 in the rosewood was air-tight, and pushed the bolt out a tiny bit so that the joint wouldn’t snug down. Well, that’s easy enough to fix: some silver, flattened down with a hammer and ground flat, drilled into a washer, and that’s… what it is. I even came up with some acceptable bullshit that, maybe if they want to, they could have the washer engraved with something suitable.

Yesterday I disassembled it, wrapped it up in polartec and tied some bows, then took it down to Baltimore and gave it to my science teacher to dispose of from there. Mission accomplished!

While I was driving down, I realized that every time I create something new, I have a bunch of problem-solving and tweaking to figure out, and by the time I’ve done a couple ${whatever} I am officially an expert. Now, if I were to make a staff, I’d rough, taper and face the whole thing on the metal lathe and it would be a single operation taking maybe 15 minutes. Then it would take me an hour to clean all the shredded wood out of the lathe. Still a huge time-saver. [By the way, professional pool cue makers use a specially set-up lathe for just that purpose, so it’s basically a “fire and forget” operation] But if I never make another hiking staff, all the skills and figuring I did will just go to waste when I stop making things. I’m still not sure if that’s motivation enough to make more staves. The techniques I figured out for this staff, however, would apply fairly well to making a spear. Hooo boy!