First Rain

The first real rain of the season arrived this weekend, so I decided to make sure the stove pipe through the roof of the cabin was still weather proof. If you've read my earlier posts, you know that this had been quite a challenge, but it did seem to finally be fixed.

When I arrived at the gate, the rain was really pouring, and the road had several large rivulets eating away, so I decided to try a quick-fix diversion of the water. I managed to get it back under control, at least to a certain extent, but just ten minutes or so in that downpour, and I was soaked.

So I drove on down to the cabin, and after verifying the weather-worthiness of the roof -- not a drop coming in! -- I started a fire in the stove, stripped off my soggy clothes, wrung them out as best I could, and arrayed them around the stove to dry.

As I tended the fire, periodically flipping things over and around as they dried, I noticed that the rivulet coming down the road had increased in volume, sprouting a side branch that was flowing into the foundation of the cabin. This did not seem to be a good thing. So even though I was buck naked, I put on my water shoes that I keep for summertime swimming, and made a foray back into the downpour to divert the water away from the foundation.

Fortunately, it really wasn't that cold, maybe mid-50s, and with the exertion of digging wet gravel, I didn't feel cold at all. After about five minutes, things seemed to back under control, and I returned to my drying chores, giving my own backside its turn in front of the open stove door.

The creek was now a raging torrent, and quite a spectacular sight. Then I noticed my redwood lawn chairs bobbing around in the back-current in about a foot and a half of water, and it was clear they would soon be bobbing downstream. So I put my water shoes back on, and otherwise naked as nature, waded out and rescued my chairs. One way to keep your clothes dry in a downpour is don't wear any!

More chainsaw milling

Just had an opportunity for some more chainsaw milling at the cabin my siblings and I inherited from our dad. Several trees on the property died from bark beetles, and we hired a professional to fell them. So I decided to take a crack at cutting some timbers. I managed to cut a 16 foot 8x8 and a 12 foot 8x8, but there's still a lot of board feet untouched. I'll probably look into hiring someone with a portable bandsaw, although word is that the market for lumber is so depressed, nobody really wants to cut it. Oh, well. Anyway, here are a few shots of the project.

Loft Ladder wrap-up and Music Creekside

I managed to finish attaching the rungs/steps to the loft ladder one evening after work, so I took it up the next weekend to see how well it would fit. I also bought a couple of three inch wide milled oak moulding for the upper side of the rails, so the hand grip would be a bit smoother, and also to hide some of the gaps where I had cut the mortices for the steps on the inside walls of the rails.

Turned out pretty nice, and it set in place without any appreciable wobble or unevenness. Here's a shot.

Later that afternoon, my sister-in-law's boyfriend drove up for a little jam session with his guitar and my uke. He was in the area because his mother lives not too far away, and he thought it would be fun to check out the property and play a little music. He is a much better musician than I am, but when I'd lose the chord progression, I sometimes managed to noodle out some single note accompaniments. He seemed to know just about every classic rock song ever, including intro, verses, with clean endings. I was impressed. He also surprised my by playing an Irving Berlin tune from about 1915, after I mentioned that I liked jazz. It was a very fine and mellow time, as the creek provided backup orchestration. Maybe I should try recording it sometime.

Loft Ladder-Stairway

Because the warm weather is now finally upon us, I decided to delay the ceiling paneling project. The loft just gets much too stuffy and hot, especially when you're doing physical labor. Instead I decided to work on the loft stairway, which is really more of a ladder, but I'm planning on having rungs that are about 7 inches wide, so it will feel a bit more like a stairway, similar to what  you might find in a boat.

Of course, I want to use wood from the sinker log. I milled a couple of the 2 inch thick slabs into 7 inch wide pieces for the rails of the ladder, and then another that I could use for the steps.

The 8+ foot length was just about right to reach the loft floor. I first positioned one of the rails roughly where I envisioned the stairway, made some marks with a pencil at the angle where I thought it met the floor, and another at the loft end. I then cut the angles, and then re-positioned. This ended up being a bit of an iterative process, since the angle changed slightly once the rail had been cut. Anyway, I finally satisfied myself that the first rail looked pretty good. The second rail was easy, I just used the first as a template, and cut the same pattern on the other. The fit looks pretty good

The steps will probably be more of a challenge, since the rails are slightly warped in places. I took the pieces home, hoping to be able to work on them in the evening after work. Haven't really gotten to it yet, but tomorrow's another day.

Here are a few shots of the work:

More Panel Milling

I continued work on the panel milling project. I probably have enough to start nailing them to the ceiling. I still have plenty more that could be milled, but I'll wait until I start running low. Here are a couple of shots of the work.

Sinker Log Panel Milling (continued)

After futzing with the irrigation water, I headed down for more work on my sinker log panel project.

First order of business was actually to take a nap, but then I set up the mill to cut the slabs into consistent 12 inch width boards. This was necessary because the maximum width that the mill could cut was not much more than this. Here's a shot of the setup I used to accomplish this.

And here's a shot showing some of the boards ready for the next step.

And here's the final product, stacked and stickered.

My rough estimate is that I have about 200 square feet of paneling, and I think I'll need about 250 for the ceiling and gable ends, so just a couple more and I should be able to actually start nailing them up.

Irrigation Water and Re-sawing the Sinker Log

The irrigation district has turned on the canal water for the season, so I did some preliminary setup of my irrigation system. It's pretty rudimentary, mostly just a few hoses that I run to the various places where I've planted  my ponderosa seedings and apple trees. The apple trees just went in last year after the district informed me that they would cut off my water unless I planted an agricultural crop. I told them I had planted over a thousand conifer seedlings, but they wanted something more crop-like. So I put in a hundred Fuji apple trees. It was a lot of work digging in that rocky soil, and I lost about 25 trees before the summer was over. But I do like the idea of having the fruit trees, so we'll see if this little experiment works.

The water is measured by the miner's inch. I'm signed up for 1/2 miner's inch, which is about six gallons a minute, although I think the metering is not very precise. Here's a video showing the flow coming out of the water box.




Here's a shot of the canal.

After messing with the water and running a few hoses, I headed down to the cabin to start work on my next project, re-sawing the sinker log. I had cut it into slabs of about two inches thick, some about 12-14 inches wide, and the rest about 24 inches wide. My plan is to mill these two inch thick slabs into 1/2 inch thick boards that I can use for paneling on the ceiling of the cabin. To do this I bought another Alaska style chainsaw mill from Granberg International, the model G776-24, which has bar attachments at both ends, and allows better control over board width. Here's a shot of the mill on top of the sinker log slabs.

It took a while to get the mill attached to the chainsaw, with the adjustment at its lowest setting, 1/2 inch. But things went pretty smoothly after that, albeit slowly. The 1/2 inch setting seemed to work out pretty well, giving me three 1/2 think boards per 2 inch slab. There is quite a bit of wood wasted, due to the 1/4 inch kerf of the chainsaw, but I'll just have to accept that. I managed to mill three of the slabs in about an hour and a half. I think once I get my system down, it should go quicker.  Here's a shot of the 1/2 boards stacked and stickered.

The previous weekend my wife and I finished up the butyl tape flashing on the chimney pipe. Still pretty ugly, but not as bad as before, and its seems to be weather tight. Here's a shot.