From a tree to your doorstep.

Every wooden thing in your house was a tree once, and it made stops on the way to you. Walk one backwards, then walk ours, and see how many stops anybody can actually name.

How long

About fifteen minutes.

You need

One wooden thing that belongs to you · A pencil and a piece of paper

Messy

No.

1. 1

   Step 1. Pick one wooden thing.

   A spoon, a pencil, a block, a picture frame, a chair. Anything made of wood that you can pick up or look underneath.

2. 2

   Step 2. Draw five boxes down your paper.

   Write one word at the top of each box: tree, mill, shop, box, door. Draw an arrow from each box to the next one. That is the whole road.

3. 3

   Step 3. Look for clues on the thing itself.

   Turn it over. Look for a sticker, a stamp burned into the wood, or a label that says where it was made. That is the shop box, and sometimes the only one you can fill in from the thing alone.

4. 4

   Step 4. Ask a grown-up about the others.

   Where did it come from, and do they know what wood it is? Write down what they actually know. If they are guessing, it does not go in the box.

5. 5

   Step 5. Write "not known" in every empty box.

   Do not guess to fill it. An empty box with “not known” written in it is a real answer, and it is the answer grown-ups most often skip. The door box is the one you can always fill: you know that one.

6. 6

   Step 6. Now read ours.

   Same five boxes, for the maple in our toy airplane. We have 4 blanks of our own. They are written in, not hidden.

Our board, stop by stop.

The maple in the body of the Jumbo, our toy 747. Each stop says what happens there, what we know, and what we do not know yet.

1. 1

   The tree

   A hard maple grows in a forest for a long time. Most hard maple comes from the sugar maple, which is the Wisconsin state tree.

   We know: What kind of tree. Hard maple, for the body, the wings and the wheels. The nose and the four engines are black walnut and the pegs are yellow birch, so a whole airplane is really three trees.

   Not known yet: Which tree, and which forest. The shop buys the wood, and nobody has picked the shop yet.

   Cut down, cut into logs, and driven to the mill on a truck.

2. 2

   The mill

   The log is sawn into flat boards. Then the boards go into a kiln, a big warm room that dries them slowly, because a fresh log is full of water and wet wood changes size as it dries.

   We know: How much maple moves. Dry a flat-sawn maple board all the way to bone dry and a board 100 millimeters wide comes out about 90. A kiln stops before bone dry, so the real change is smaller, but it is never nothing. That is why a shop wants dry wood before it cuts anything.

   Not known yet: Which mill. Same reason: that is the shop's choice, and there is no shop yet.

   Sold by the board foot: one foot long, one foot wide, one inch thick.

3. 3

   The shop

   The boards are cut, carved to the shape on the paper templates, and glued together with wooden pegs called dowels. No screws, no nails, no metal anywhere. Then beeswax and mineral oil rubbed in as the finish.

   We know: The drawing. It was signed and released on 5 September. Three Wisconsin shops were asked on 3 September what it would cost to build.

   Not known yet: Which shop. The drawing changed after the question went out, so every shop has to be asked again before one of them can say yes.

   Checked on our bench before it goes anywhere. The first one, T-01, is tested hard on purpose, and No. 001 does not leave until T-01 has passed.

4. 4

   The box

   The airplane goes into a brown two-piece box with a picture on the lid, painted like an old airline poster, and the same picture inside the lid as a poster you keep.

   We know: What the box looks like, and what goes in it. The drawings say the airplane should weigh about 0.7 to 0.8 kilograms. That is a calculation, not a weighing.

   Not known yet: How big the box is, and what it weighs packed. Nobody has packed one, because there is nothing to pack yet.

   Taped shut, labeled, and handed to the carrier.

5. 5

   The doorstep

   For a customer, a UPS truck carries the box to the front door. The first airplane does not ride in a truck at the end. It goes under a tree in a living room.

   We know: When. Airplane No. 001 is due under the tree on 25 December.