It's officially our busy season

We're swamped. No two ways to put it. [UPDATE: more photos of the assembly process posted at bottom.]

As many of your know, we make hardwood drinking tankards here at home. We've been making them for - oh, going on seventeen years now.

This is our busy season. My poor husband has been working twelve or more hours a day. We have three outstanding (wholesale) orders and two back-to-back retail shows we're going in July (some of the few times we venture out and do a show ourselves - the rest of the time we just sell wholesale). We're pulling a huge production run, about 300 pieces, which we seldom do but time is running short and we have to get stock made.

So tonight's task was to tape tankards. Here's the two crates full of staves which my husband spent the whole day planing, cutting, and angle-cutting on two sides.


One crate taped up.


The second crate taped up. Now they're ready to glue together into the body of the tankard. (We'll do that tomorrow.)


Here's some tankards at the next state of development, with the bodies glued together and the bottoms on. These are still wet (glue) and need to dry overnight.


Here's three crates' worth of tankards that are ready to sand.

Finished up around 10 pm (Saturday night). A quick blog post, a quick review of the internet news, and I'm off to bed. I've been up since 4:30 am.

I'll update this production run as we get further along in the process. Both of us are pooped but there's little time to rest during the busy season.

And no, don't ask. We're exclusively wholesale, so I don't know where you can buy one. (smile)

MORE PHOTOS

Don and I spent several hours gluing up the stacks of taped tankard parts. Here's a tankard body laid out and ready to glue.


Once the glue is applied, we wrap the tankard in surgical hosing, which is strong and stretchy and holds things together until they dry.


The start of my pile of glued-up bodies.


Don's pile. He stayed home from church to work, so he got an earlier start than I did.


Gluing up is always a messy job.


Here's proof.