Meet the Team—Gemma From Recycling
August 2022
Every now and then we like to peer into the mind of someone from the Thor's Hammer team. We're an interesting bunch, often with an intriguing backstory, a quirky weekend hobby or a surprising aspiration.
In this instalment, meet Gemma from Recycling ✨🪚🔨
Gemma is from our recycling team, so much of her job involves preparing recycled timber (either for further processing or immediate use). Things like picking out any nails or screws that have been left in the timber, metal detecting and cutting out the bits that aren't sound, and then sorting them into different species groups.
Before coming to Thor's, Gemma hadn't done much work with timber. Her opening line in her job application email read something like "Hi, I haven't really done much like this before"... (of course she's a pro now though!).
She applied at Thor's because she wanted a part time job to fit around her Visual Arts (ceramics and glass) studies at ANU and she was keen to be a part of what Thor had created in Thor's Hammer.
Fun fact about Gemma—as a kid growing up in Bundjalung Country, in Uki, Northern NSW, her favourite game was to roll truck tyres up a big hill just to watch them gain speed and bounce on the way down 🎉🎉🎉 She used to recruit other kids to help her conquer the tyres "repeatedly and for hours."
On a personal note, Gemma is a people person. She loves people watching ("We are a very entertaining species") and she's always up for a sit-down chat over coffee/tea.
If you see Gemma out in the workshop, say hi!
Meet the Rest of the Team
As of August 2022, Thor’s Hammer is a 35-strong crew of proud Canberra locals. The team includes highly-skilled timber recyclers, designers and makers, who are skilled in both contemporary and traditional techniques.
The recycling team is responsible for de-nailing and metal detecting timber, grading and sorting by species, and grinding and brushing big posts and beams.
The dressing and picking teams pick out recycled timber orders, and load and unload the trucks which arrive with the salvaged timber, and are then responsible for the sawing and final drying of timbers, and then turning them into decking, flooring and other profiles.
The joinery team is where we make bench tops, custom designed furniture, front doors and more. And finally, our design and sales, marketing and administration department is the customer-facing component of the business, ensuring that everything continues to tick along smoothly and the workshop teams can continue to work their magic.
Gemma from Recycling. Photo: Rohan Thomson.