Some people spend half their lives trying to find something they like, but Bill Cerny got into woodworking early on.
Cerny, 78, founded the Edwardsville Woodworking Club 30 years ago and has crafted thousands of pieces from a variety of woods. She owns On the Natural Edge, a business that sells handmade furniture and accessories.
I grew up in the village, went to the village school and started splitting and chopping wood for the house. Cerni said.
"When I was in high school, we ran this board through a planer and a nut came out, and I knew where all my nut trees were because I was chasing squirrels. I knew all my trees and it really made me plant in the driveway."
After high school, Cerney worked at the Mechanics Planing Mill, now located in Glen Carbon after moving from Edwardsville. He was a carpenter at the time and got a job at the Shell refinery in Wood River where he worked for over 30 years until his retirement.
However, even when working full-time, carpentry was already a priority for Cerny.
“Some kids ride bikes or motorcycles or participate in endurance races or hunt deer, but the most important thing to me is the woodworking,” Cerny said. "Retirement is when you have to leave the job you want to do and you've already started working there. What you see here, I've been doing for the last 30 years."
After Cerny and his wife built a home in Edwardsville, he designed and built the interior. Most of the furniture in the house as well as the kitchen floor are made by him, and the house is full of accessories and decorations made with different types of wood.
He already had a sawmill and several woodworking buildings in his backyard. These buildings are filled with lumber, things he's already built, and yards of lumber he's been storing for future projects.
One of the latest projects by Cerny and his club friends is a giant sycamore tree on the site of the former Fusek family nursery on Troy Road in Glen Carbon. The tree that was removed to make way for Orchard Town's center had already cut off a large branch.
Club member Sherry Hickman brought the tree to the attention of Czerny, who was able to have the logs delivered to his home to be cut into planks and small pieces.
"Sherry told me about the Sycamore organ and I told her I'd be interested in getting one," Cerny said. "Talk to the owner and the contractor and let me go down there and look at the tree. The branches were huge and I couldn't do anything about it myself."
"My neighbor, Nick Demetrolius, who owns Arbor Management, and I talked to him and they brought me some wood. When Nick was building his house, I had all the baseboards, kitchen cabinets, 17 doors and all the rest, and I did the flooring. We deliver the wood and make the furniture for him. We're very close.
Once Cerney found the sycamore, several club members came to help him look at the stump. In turn, he gave them pieces of wood and told them to craft one item for themselves, while he crafted another to sell to the club.
"I want people to be interested in doing something with the club and I try to get them involved in little things," Cerny said. “If they keep doing it and their interest grows, they will build other things.
"I know for a fact that I will never be able to use or sell all (the sycamores). They have already done us good, but there is more to come. I still have three stacks of firewood from that tree."
In addition to creating some of the most beautiful woodwork Cerny has ever seen, the sycamore pieces provide a link to local history.
"The trunk was five feet in diameter, and when that tree started, it was probably a tree because there was no house or anything," Cerny said. "It's been slow growing, so I'd say 100 years is too young for this tree to live. In the neighborhood of 500 years, it could be more."
According to Cerny, the plane trees are also a good example of the differences in woodworking and carving techniques.
"You can cut wood in different ways, and quartz saws produce different results than flat saws," Cerny said. “For a flat saw, you take a round log, you saw it and peeled off the bark to make a plank with a straight edge, and each of those planks had a cathedral shape between the grains.
"With a quarter saw, you take a piece of wood and flatten it lengthwise. You take that quarter into a circular shape, put the bark on the sawmill, and cut the middle like a scrap piece. You put that into the header and in each plank you will see it will be a quarter saw. The cortex has medullary rays running radially from the center and if you look around and you will see it is parallel.
"If you plan a 12" wide board and let it dry, it can be 11" because it compresses that way. The load is applied to the circular rings (in the center of the tree trunk) and the longer the circular rings, the greater it is the load and causes the board to warp, warp or bend.If you can see this then the hoops are going through the thickness of the board and you will not have the warping.it will squeeze through the O-rings.
Czerny adds that quartz saws are not suitable for construction lumber.
"With an I-beam, if it's quarter sawn, it can easily fail because the grain goes crooked," Cerny said.
For more information about the club, visit Edwardsville Woodworking Club on Facebook.
For more information about On The Natural Edge, visit www.OnTheNaturalEdge.com or email wcerny44@sbcglobal.net.
