2/4-6/03 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at noon and it was 35 degrees and sunny. There was a little less snow on the ground than when I left so it seemed like spring was already coming on fast. I had moved into the trailer and just finished my lunch when Earl came by. He said it had snowed 5 inches, but then that got rained on right away. We went up and looked at my ripping and gwizzing operation. I asked Earl if he remembered falling that big tree I was harvesting and he said he remembered it very well. I ended up getting a lot of good wood out of it -- from its 22 inch butt to its 8 inch top.

After Earl left, I decided to rip four planks out of this last log instead of the three I made from the others. This one is 22 inches in diameter on one end and 20 inches on the other. Making four planks will still leave plenty thick slabs for treads.

I set up the strings and scribed the first slab. Then I ripped the slab making a very nice cut. I skidded the slab down to the gwiz station and then scribed for the first plank using my new scribing machine. That worked slick and fast. I got a start on ripping the plank before I quit for the day.

On Wednesday, I finished ripping the plank, but I overdid it a little. I ended up making my back very sore. I probably didn't take enough breaks but just kept stooping over stressing my back. The cut seemed to go slowly and it took two tanks of gas to complete it. The plank was easy to skid to the gwizzing station, though, because it had been a pretty cold night and the snow was still frozen very hard. The plank slid easily over the frozen snow.

After lunch, I used the new scribing tool to scribe for the next plank. On the other logs, I turned them over at this point and cut the slab from the other side. This time, I decided to cut one half of the log before I turned it over. The next cut was right down the center of the log and I figured it would be higher off the ground this way, and the log would be easier to roll so I could adjust the angle a lot easier than if the bottom side were flat. I also thought about the accumulated error in using the new scriber twice in succession, but I figured that the time I would save would be worth whatever extra errors I would introduce.

I started ripping the log, but Mother Sow decided to act up. I was really stressing my back and my shoulder by pulling on that starter cord so much. It was exasperating. I was thinking that maybe there was a little water in the gas, or maybe the saw was just being overworked. This cut, which I started on the 20 inch end of the log, was the full length of the chainsaw bar, and at the butt end, was two inches beyond it. With my back hurting pretty bad, I decided to go to the trouble to change saws.

I went back, swapped the ripping chain for the crosscut chain on Mother Sow, and then swapped the gwizzard for the ripping chain on the .032 saw. Then I went back up to rip.

What a difference. The .032 started right away and it would keep running at an idle for minutes. Mother Sow will hardly idle at all. The .032 also has a lot more power so it did a lot faster job of ripping. My back was really sore, but I ripped about 3/4 of the cut before I quit for the day. I couldn't know how the cut was coming along after about half of the log because the bar was too short to poke out the other side of the log. I just kept alternating sides, cutting two or three inches at a time from each side, hoping I was cutting in the same plane all the while.

The round bottom of the log paid off big time because each time I switched sides, I would just roll the log so the side I was working on was up, and then chock the log with a piece of wood. Since a half-log will naturally roll so the flat side is horizontal, I could use the log's own energy and momentum to carry it from one position to the next. I would just pull the chock out and as the log started rolling the other way, I would give it a little extra nudge and as it maxed out the other way, I would quickly stick the chock back on the other side. With my back so sore, I tried to use every trick to avoid any extra work.

While I was in the building changing saws, I was visited by my three jays. Scruffy looks a lot better and he is using both feet about equally. He looks lopsided, though because there is a bulge on his underside above his left leg -- the one that was sore. I tried a couple times to feel the lump, but he didn't ever sit still in the right position long enough for me to do it.

On Thursday morning, my back felt a little better. I went up and finished ripping the plank. I was very disappointed at how bad the cut was. For the last third of the log, when I couldn't see where the bar was, the cuts from the two sides were as much as 3/4 of an inch off. Since this cut made the widest surface on two planks, I want to use this side of both planks if possible. The surface on the top plank came out very nice because the bar had gone down deeper than it should on the cuts from both sides. So all of the error was on the bottom surface. I think I can still use the bottom one, although I will have to gwiz off a lot more wood than usual. What I decided to do is to scribe the rest of the log so as to make this bad plank an extra 3/4 inches thicker. That will give me enough extra wood to fix the problem.

I skidded the new plank to the gwiz station, and again, because the snow was frozen solid, it was very easy to skid. Next, I rigged chains and a come-along and used them to roll the half-log over so I could work on the other slab. Since that was about all the stress I wanted to give my back, I decided to quit for the week. To help relax my back, I walked up to the spring to check it out. There wasn't a breath of wind and it was beautiful and sunny. I don't go walking in the woods if there is much wind because of the danger of falling trees and branches. The temperature was still about 25 degrees, so the snow was frozen hard and it was easy to walk right on top of it anywhere. It was a very pleasant walk. The spring looked good and there was an extra high volume of water coming out of it.

When I got back, the jays came around for peanuts again. When I went in for lunch, they all came to the trailer for more peanuts and I took a couple pictures hoping to get a shot of Scruffy's lump. We'll see what I got when the pictures are developed. I left for home at 1:20.