Encouraging safe firearm donations and buybacks.

Creating useful, beautiful tools to nourish and renew us all.

John LeJeune and Mike Roughan volunteered to spend the day working with more than 2 dozen teenagers from Worcester in a program labeled “Guns to Garden”. The goal was to convert gun barrels to trowels. John and Mike’s role was to help the youngsters make handles for the trowels.

John and Mike brought their handmade Shave horses to allow for a safe an effective tool to shape the handles from an assortment of green hardwood blanks. While wood lathes were available (and demonstrated) the safer alternative using drawknives to shape the wood blanks. Below are photos of Mike and John overseeing the shaping of the handles.

The all day event included time in the woodshop as well as time in the metal shop shaping the gun barrels into the trowel blades. Special techniques used during the day was drying the green handles in the microwave and heating the trowel socket so that once the wood handle was inserted and the finished tool was quenched in a water pail, the tool was complete.

Below is an end of the day photo of the staff, volunteers and youngsters showing their satisfaction with time well spent.