Construction Journal Entry Week of 5/13/07

5/15-17/07 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I got a late start and arrived at 2:30. After moving in and having lunch, I made a log storage rack up in the drainfield area for storing the logs I just harvested. Then I skidded the smaller three of the five logs over and placed them on the rack. I used a rope and one pulley to skid the smallest two just to see how well that would work. It was a lot of hard work pulling the rope and it was considerably harder pulling the bigger of the two. It would be even harder for bigger logs so I used a come-along and chains to pull the third one. It was a lot easier, but it probably took a little longer.

By the end of the day, I had three logs on the rack and I was very sore and tired. The shower felt really good when I went in. A single gray jay visited me and took peanuts from my hand four times during the afternoon.

On Wednesday, I spent the entire day skidding the remaining two logs, which were the biggest ones, to the rack. I used a come-along and chains to pull them. I also needed to use the cant hook to help move them and to get them up onto the rack. I was happy to have those five beautiful logs on the rack. Now I needed to figure out what to do with them.

I hadn't yet done any detailed design on the deck and staircase but I had considered a lot of options in my mind. Now I could look at the logs I had and do some planning on how to use them. Since I had plenty of wood, I decided to make the deck planks out of half logs. That way, each rip cut would yield two planks. If I cut more than one plank from a log, I would have to make one rip cut for each plank after the first one. I was all for minimizing the amount of ripping I would have to do.

Ripping two logs would give me four planks which just might be enough if I used the biggest logs. I measured the length I needed for stair stringers and found that these 15-foot logs would be plenty long. So I decided to use two logs for that. That left one to either rip for two more planks or to use for something else. I didn't make that decision but I decided for sure that I wanted to rip the butt log and the next bigger log.

A pair of gray jays visited me in the woods all day long. Most times just one would show up, but on several occasions both of them would come at once. I think it may be a nesting pair and the female was spending most of the time in the nest.

I was beat again when I went in to shower. I was also feeling a sore throat coming on so I gargled and sniffed salt water before I went to bed to try to prevent getting a cold.

On Thursday morning I could hear gnawing in the trailer ceiling again right above the table. I thought I had fixed that problem by squirting ant spray up there. Unfortunately I brought the ant spray home so I couldn't spray them again until I got more spray.

After breakfast, I went to work and dragged two short old logs to the drainfield area and used them to make a ripping rack. Then, using a come-along, chains, and the cant hook, I moved the butt log up onto the ripping rack. Then I got two boards, some nails and a hammer, a mason's string, a marking pen, and a scraper and proceeded to scribe the butt log for ripping.

The butt log has a considerable bend in it and I had to decide how to rip it. I could rip it so the planks were also curved. But then I would either have to mate the curves and have curved planks in the deck, or rip them on the edges to straighten them out. That would be extra work and waste wood. Instead, I let the log sag with the curve bowing down by gravity, and scribed it with a horizontal line so that the planks would be nearly straight on the edges. That meant that one plank would be thicker in the middle and the other would be thinner in the middle, but the log is big enough that that won't matter.

I used the scribing method I had developed earlier after much trial and error. This involves drawing the line on the log by sighting across two tight strings. The strings are held out away from the log by two parallel boards that are nailed to the ends of the log. The two strings, and the tops of the boards are in the plane of the ripping cut. Before I drew the line, I scraped the log down to clean white wood where the line was to go. This makes it easier to see the line and it removes grit that dulls the chainsaw teeth. I got the log scribed and quit for the day.

The two gray jays visited me all morning again and a Steller's Jay got up enough nerve to take some peanuts from the porch deck while I stood there. I also saw a bird with a pale orange breast, black wings, head, and back with prominent white spots on the head and wings. He was trying to get food out of the bird feeder, which was empty, so I filled the feeder for him. I left for home at 2:00.



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