Having A Fire, Some Long Oak Poles, A Cordless Chainsaw & A Few Thoughts On Shop Space
The weather has taken a dive the last few days and although I have been staying warm enough and all that jazz I have not managed to get a whole lot done outdoors. Yesterday was sort of sunny and I had a small fire to honor the passing of an old friend and for the most part as long as I stayed in motion (and out of the shade) the cold outside was tolerable. It actually worked out really good because by the end of the day I had burned off all of the brush that I had stacked outside the southern gate that had been blocking it from the trails leading into the woods. Although I did not make much biochar with that fire I I did make a bunch of ashes which will come in handy for my efforts with the new compost mound.
A few days ago I started de-barking some oak logs with a draw knife and it is a good bit easier to do so than I originally thought that it would be. I have also been impressed with how straight some of the oak poles are and how pretty the wood itself looks once I get the bark removed. It is a whole new type of wood for me to do any sort of natural building with and I am excited to see what becomes of it all and what I will learn along the way.
Having never fire treated wood before on this scale I am leaning towards getting a propane torch to do the work with so that I can keep the burning more uniform than what I could achieve with a fire in an open pit. It would also make the fire building and maintaining aspect obsolete which would mean that I could process more logs in a shorter period of time. No matter which way that I do it the fire treating aspect is an intensive one which has me also considering just soaking the logs in a water and borax solution to achieve the same outcome (pest proofing the wood) but then I would have to dry it all out afterwards and thus further complicating the process.
While I am on the subject of wood, today I got another electric chainsaw but this one is a cordless sixty volt battery operated one. It also came with a nine amp hour battery and a charger. I dunno if I mentioned it but I recently acquired a bunch of twenty volt cordless tools and the battery that operates the chainsaw is compatible with all the other tools. The chainsaw itself has a sixteen inch bar and has toolless bar and chain adjustments which is super sweet in my opinion. I have yet to cut anything with it but it is light weight, quiet and torquey as heck so I am stoked to try it out soon. From the looks of it someone bought it new, never oiled it, made one cut with it, ran it into the dirt and never used it again before selling it. The scrapes on the plastic case, the dirt in the blade and chain housing all sort of told the story of what had been done just a single time to that saw in the hands of an incompetent (or negligent) operator. The price was fair for a reason which is always the case and overall the saw looks like it is in awesome condition and will perform well.
Anyway, my setup here is light years ahead of where it has been before in many ways and one thing that has made that abundantly clear is just having the nearby tent that acts as a shop. It makes doing anything project related so much easier and having a place to store bulky materials in the dry is awesome. Basically that tent has become a catchall and I have yet to run out of room to store stuff. It is nice to have a centralized place to work from that is convenient to access and I am looking forward to how the whole 'shop thing' evolves once I really get to building stuff.
Well, I never finished writing this yesterday and since then I got to test out that new battery operated chainsaw and whoa does that thing cut some wood. I am still unaccustomed to having that much cutting power with so little noise accompanying it and even my smaller corded electric chainsaw makes more noise than the new saw does. Within the first few cuts that I made today I had the sad realization that the chainsaw bar was not just bent but also twisted which made the cutting awkward and probably drained the battery faster than it would normally drain when cutting. I made about forty cuts in total before the battery was dead which is pretty awesome especially considering the bent/twisted bar and that the battery is a used one. Overall, I am pretty happy with the saw and looking forward to seeing what it can do with a straight bar and a freshly sharpened chain.
Lately I have been in a bit of a fog and not pushing myself to get much done each day. My sleep cycle has gotten super out of whack and I cannot seem to fall asleep early at night or get up early in the morning. I knew that sleeping in late on all those cold and rainy mornings would wind up throwing me off track a bit but I had no idea that it would become my new sleeping pattern for several weeks. I have not been beating myself up too bad about it all but spending so much time just vegging out on the internet at night and sleeping in late each day is starting to get on my nerves. I have not been feeling all that inspired to write either so I guess that it is safe to say that over the last few weeks I have gotten in a good bit of down time even though I did not think that I would get any of it this winter. On the bright side at least my setup is comfortable enough to relax in and just enjoy life a bit and considering that I am still camping that is really saying something!
I am just going to keep this one short and sweet or I will fail to get it posted tonight. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
A wee fire on a chilly day.
One of the oak poles that I have been de-barking.
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That Is All For Now!
This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here:
https://peakd.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/apocalyptic-homesteading-day-77-79
