9/12-13/09 Nine scouts, two other adults, and I, went up to the cabin for our annual planning session.

This was the third such session so the setup was familiar and efficient. We didn't bring the bus this time so we carried all the gear in three pickups. We drove two of them up to the upper roadway to unload them which was a lot easier than carrying all the gear up the hill. I had quite a bit of trouble backing back down, so that sort of offset the gains. All in all though, it was easier.

We set the kitchen up on the porch in the usual configuration and the boys did their planning and sleeping in the cabin. I slept in the trailer, as usual, and the other adults slept on the porch. One reported a mouse running across his face during the night. In the morning, the scoutmaster was startled by seeing Ernie and thinking for an instant that he was a wolf. Bert and Ernie spent a lot of time at the cabin getting a lot of attention and a few treats.

The boys did a service project to help me by carrying away all the old chips that have been piled up on the upper roadway for so many years now. They loaded up 5-gallon buckets with the chips and spread them out over the trails to the spring. It is a great relief to have those chips cleaned up. Now all I have to do is to get rid of the logs that formed the crib for the chips and I'll be able to drive up past the cabin. I'll burn those old logs up in the wood stove next winter.

On the drive up, the two boys who rode with me forgot to wear their seatbelts. A cop pulled me over and gave me a ticket for that. So as penance for their mistake, I had the two boys water all 12 sequoia trees. They thought the penalty was a little light but I told them they were OK as long as they didn't make the same mistake again.

9/15-17/09 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 11:40 and was greeted by Bert and Ernie. After lunch and a nap, I went up to the cabin and removed the two doors I had screwed to the wall to form an easel, and then carried the doors back down to the crawlspace. The scouts had left the place in good shape so I didn't have to do anything else to clean up after them.

I took the spud into the woods and removed the bark from the second log I had bucked from the Doug fir. The log was lying right alongside the one that I had pulled up to cut down the middle to make a new stringer. Then I lifted the second log up onto log stubs to get it up off the ground. It is a nice log and I don't want it to begin deteriorating just in case I find a use for it.

I got one end lifted up just by levering it up with the cant hook. That didn't work for the other end because it would just roll the first end back off. Instead, I lifted the other end with a bipod and a come-along like I had done with the first log. The second log was now several feet away from the first log which gave me access all around the first log so that I could begin the ripping process.

The first thing to do was to decide what axis I would cut the log on and then roll the log so that that axis was horizontal. Since the log was resting on pretty short stubs, I couldn't easily roll the log without rolling it completely off the stubs. Instead, it had to be successively slid and then rolled in small increments, which wasn't easy. The log is very heavy and doesn't slide easily on the stubs which still had bark on them. I ended up using a big steel bar to get the job done.

With the log positioned correctly, the next thing to do was to nail on the batter boards. On one end, I used a four-foot 1x2 and on the other end, I used a six-foot 2x4. I pre-drilled holes in the boards for the nails. That made it easy to install them and it reduced the chances of splitting the 1x2. I nailed the 2x4 on first using four 16d duplex nails. That fastened the 2x4 securely. The top of the 2x4 lined up with the horizontal diameter of the log.

Then holding the 1x2 roughly in position on the other end of the log, I fastened it with one of the two nails only. That allowed me to adjust the angle of the 1x2 by pivoting it around the one nail. The nail was tight enough so that the 1x2 stayed put when I moved it.

Next, I got another straight 2x4 about 8 feet long and set it on top of one end of the batter board 2x4 so that it stuck out almost another four feet beyond the batter board. This was simply to give me more accuracy in sighting.

The sighting process was to get the two batter boards exactly parallel, or at least in the same plane. To do that, I got down near the ground on the 1x2 end so that I could sight between the two batter boards. The idea is to get your eye in line with the left ends of the batter boards and then without moving anything but your eyes, check to see whether the right ends also line up. The extra 2x4 extension on the far end allows for sighting further along on the 1x2, which improves accuracy.

If the end of the 1x2 is a little high, it is tapped down a little and another sighting is made. If it is too low, it is tapped up a little. After several iterations of this kind of adjustment, the 1x2 was finally lined up with the 2x4 as closely as my eyes are able to detect. That will make the ripped surface of the log as close to being planar as it needs to be. Finally, the second nail was driven in to hold the 1x2 fast.

Before I quit for the day, I scraped a strip on one side of the log where the ripping cut will be made. I had to sight along the batter boards to make sure I was scraping in the right place. The scraping is for two purposes: first, it makes the magic marker line which will mark where the cut goes more visible, and second, it cleans grit off the log which makes the chain stay sharp longer and reduces the number of times it has to be sharpened during the cut.

On Wednesday I scraped a strip on the other side of the log and then strung the strings on one side of the batter boards. These strings are used for scribing the log. One string is stretched tight over the tops of the batter boards so that it is about an inch away from the log. A second string is then stretched tight over the tops of the batter boards parallel to the first string and about six or eight inches further out. Then, getting down on my knees, I lean down so that I can sight across both strings so that they appear as one string. Keeping my head in the same position, I then place the tip of the magic marker against the log so that the tip is hidden behind the two strings. Then I draw a line on the log keeping the tip out of sight behind the pair of strings. With my head in that position, I can't see the line I am drawing because it is in the plane of the strings and the strings hide it.

It is tedious and uncomfortable and I can only draw an inch or two of the line at a time, but eventually, I got a line drawn on the log for its entire 18 foot length.

Then I got luckier on the other side. I removed the strings and rigged them up the same way on the other side of the log, but this time, I could use the shadow of the sun to make the scribing a lot easier. The trick is to roll the log so that the two strings line up with the sun and together, cast a single shadow on the log. Then with the log held in that position, the scribing amounts to simply drawing a line on that shadow for the length of the log. That can be done in less than a minute with no stooping or getting on your knees. Much easier.

There was one problem, though. I couldn't roll the log far enough without having one end of the 2x4 batter board hit the ground. I fixed that by getting a saw and sawing off a couple feet of the 2x4.

The last steps are to draw magic marker lines on the ends of the log using the batter boards as the guide, and finally, removing the batter boards. The log is now scribed and ready for ripping.

I took the bar off the chainsaw and mounted the ripping chain. This chain has been used so much that there isn't much left of the teeth. There is probably a quarter or so of each tooth left but that is plenty to do this job. The teeth felt pretty sharp, so I decided they only needed one stroke each with the file to sharpen them up. I don't want to grind them down any more than necessary.

While I was gassing the saw up, a chipmunk came around and I took a break in order to feed him some peanuts.

I took the saw up into the woods and started ripping. I was pleased with how fast it cut. The saw was running well and the chain was nice and sharp. Robert Ferrel had given me the advice that the best ripping angle is at 45 degrees, which makes sense. I decided to stay as close to that as I could. So my cutting pattern was to cut the near line quite a ways with the bar at 45 degrees or less. Then I would set the teeth in the near side of the log , swing my left leg up over the log to straddle it, and then with my head down close to the line on the other side of the log so I could see the line and the tip of the saw bar, I would pivot the saw around the teeth and drive the tip along the line on the other side. This would rotate the bar back through 45 degrees and even more. I would stop before it was at 90 degrees. In the past, I used to drive it well beyond 90 degrees, but with Robert's advice I decided to cut less with each iteration to stay closer to the 45 degrees.

After I had ripped about two or three feet, I noticed that the saw was sluggish so I got the file out and gave each tooth another two strokes. I noticed that the saw was extra hot. Then it dawned on me that the thing was plugged up with sawdust. Holding the saw horizontally like I was doing, made that unusually fine cornmeal-like sawdust accumulate inside which bound up the chain and made the saw overheat.

From then on, I routinely pulled the bar out of the kerf and revved the saw in the air and tapped it on the log between each iteration to dislodge the sawdust, which came out in clouds. This seemed to help keep the saw cool and I was able to keep ripping without having it plug up and get sluggish.

I got about halfway through the log before I ran out of gas. I gassed the saw up and then went in for lunch and a nap. After lunch, I went back up and resumed the ripping. With about a foot or two left to go, Phil Leatherman showed up. He had come to get some water and heard me sawing up in the woods. He wants to do some ripping himself so he asked about my techniques. I explained my methods for scribing and for ripping, and even for lifting logs up onto the racks. Then I gave him a ripping demonstration as I finished ripping through the log.

Three gray jays stopped to get peanuts while we were talking.

I wasn't sure whether that half log was too heavy for me to skid down to the cabin or not, so I asked Phil if he would help me skid it. He agreed. I used the spud to lever the top half-log off the bottom one and have it fall onto the ground. Then I chokered the half-log with a long log chain, formed a loop in the other end of the chain, and then Phil and I pulled on the loop to see if we could skid it. We skidded it a few feet, but it was too hard. It was certainly too hard for me to do it by myself, and harder for the two of us than I wanted to work. I told Phil to forget it and that I would skid it myself with a come-along.

Phil went down to get his water and I got a come-along and most of the chains I own. I anchored a chain around a tree by the woodshed, and then strung the chains end-to-end from there to the come-along and the stringer I had just cut. I skidded the stringer down to the privy and then re-rigged to pull from the double tree near the cabin. I didn't have enough chains to reach so I included a length of cable.

When the stringer got to the mixer, I re-rigged again to pull from the anchor hook in the Grid A3 corner of the foundation wall. With that setup, I pulled the stringer to the corner of the cabin. I took a couple of breaks during the work to feed peanuts to a chipmunk.

Next, I got the extension ladder out and rigged a snatch block and a long chain to the end of the Grid F purlin. I didn't use the anchor hooks on the end of the purlin because I wanted to maximize the distance from the snatch block to the end of the porch crane boom. The plan was to use the crane and its winch to pull the stringer the rest of the way. Since the crane's hook couldn't go through the snatch block, the pull distance would be limited by the snatch block. With the snatch block in place, I took the ladder down and quit for the night.

On Thursday morning, I started out by watering all 12 sequoia trees. Then I rigged the crane to pull the chain through the snatch block and from there to the stringer. I had to use all the chains I own, but I had enough. I skidded the stringer across the upper roadway to a position directly under the porch crane. I'll gwiz it there. The chipmunk came around for peanuts during the work.

Before I quit for the week, I took the spud into the woods and spudded the bark off most of the Doug fir logs. I'm not sure whether I'll use any of those logs, but getting the bark off will keep them from deteriorating so fast in case I do want to use them later. The three gray jays visited me for peanuts during this work.

While I was working I thought about what to do with that stringer in the cabin that is all nicely varnished and now will not be used. I decided that I will use it to make a bench out on the front porch up against the wall under the bedroom window. I'll hold up the left end with a short notched vertical log section, and I'll notch the right end to fit over a projecting log end at Grid E1. That will be easy to do, it will be useful, and it will take care of that log. I left for home at 1:30 feeling good about having a new stringer..