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.