Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502200021
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER|
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Maxwell "Mack" Reynolds spent his youth perfecting the fine art of whittling.
Growing up in a West Virginia coal camp, "we were kinda poor," he recalls. That's when he learned to compensate for his family's lack of money by cashing in on his rich imagination. Hold a stick of wood before most folks' eyes, and they'll think kindling. Young Mack could look at the same item and foresee a toy train or a rifle.
"I could make anything I wanted. Once you picture something in your head, you can go 'long with it," he explains.
Reynolds was born with a creative genius, and he's spent his life experimenting with it. The results are a diverse brood of brainchildren, all displayed about his compact home in northwestern Montgomery County.
"I'll be honest with you," he says, tugging at the brim of his cap.. "I've made all kinds of stuff in my lifetime. I could take a good, sharp hatchet and build a battleship."
Reynolds' tastes tend toward the whimsical. He likes to handcraft musical instruments, fiddles in particular. He'll find a pine knot in the woods and carve it into a snail, or smooth a stick into a walking cane.
What really grabs your attention as you drive along gravelly Norris Run Road is Reynolds' largest flight of fancy, tethered to the ground in his yard. It's a bright yellow, handmade airplane. "Folks wonder how in the world I got it in there," he giggles.
A small, wiry man, Reynolds doesn't look his age of 72. He joined the Army Air Corps during World War II and became fascinated with flight while serving in Burma as a "kicker' - the one who booted parachuted supplies out of the airborne plane's hatch.
"I always wanted to fly," Reynolds says. So, three years ago, he built the airplane's wooden frame and covered its fuselage and wings with aluminum. He put dials, a joystick and wing flap controls in the cockpit, and rigged a lawn mower engine to the propeller.
"Get the young'uns in there, fire up the engine, they'll grab the stick and they're flyin'," he grins. "It'll pull you all over the yard. I thought about putting a wind sock out there." With a more powerful engine, Reynolds feels confident that the airplane would "raise right up" and become airborne.
Flying the contraption wasn't his goal, however. "I just did it to have something to do."
Reynolds - who worked at various places around the county as a handyman until he retired - followed much the same philosophy when he built his other primary yard ornament.
Originally, the small, red, stilt-perched building was intended as his grandson's playhouse. "I didn't have a tree big enough for a tree house," Reynolds explains. Yet, it sat beside a small, mountain stream that spilled into Norris Run, a location that set his mental wheels spinning.
"Why not put a water wheel on that thing?" he asked himself. Taking to his workshop, Reynolds built such a wheel and a mill race, painted "The Lil Wheel House" on the front, strung a line to his house and produced enough juice to fire up his Christmas lights.
Dreaming of self-sufficiency, Reynolds summoned a representative of Appalachian Power to examine his domestic power station. "He said if I hooked it up I'd have to keep it going. Once you start, you couldn't stop. I don't know why."
Content with its possibilities, Reynolds let "The Lil Wheel House" be. The electrical box hooked to the wheel "got wet and blowed up on me," he says, and now the structure sits idle.
Throughout his other experiments, music has been his on-going past-time, and building instruments has made his imagination real. Reynolds' experiences playing gospel music led to the invention of what he calls a "guitar-mandolin" - because that's what it is. He built a uni-bodied, double-necked hybrid that has a mandolin on top and an electric guitar below.
The utility of this odd-looking musical ax is that the musician doesn't have to switch instruments to play the different sounds. Reynolds has made four of them and sold three, two to professional country musicians.
More traditional is his approach to building fiddles. Reynolds searches the steep, wooded hillsides on either side of Norris Run for the ideal material, a wood he calls "curly maple," unique for its wavy grain pattern. It's both light and sturdy, and Reynolds can make a fiddle from it in about four weeks, if he works steadily.
"I don't machine them out. They're supposed to be made by hand," he said. Reynolds uses a "gouge," a file and his razor-sharp hatchet to fashion the body. A fiddle made by machine "don't have no sound," he believes. "You got to know how to put the sound in there. I use my fingers to hull it out, while other guys use some big ol' machine. All you get is a box."
Reynolds will also carve a bull or buffalo head on the fret head and sell the finished product for a modest price. "They got good sound and everybody that buys one says so," he asserts.
At the moment, Reynolds is in sort of a midwinter lull in his production schedule. While he is waiting for hunks of maple wood to dry, he's helping his wife, Dot, with her ceramic business, which is quite active.
What's next, he can't say, but some notion will surely come along. "I got a whole lot of patience."
by CNB