 |
This Shot was taken late
in July 2003
|
|
The little blue building in the background is
a solar lumber kiln that Mary and I built by ourselves in 1990 (with the help of
a big concrete truck for pouring the footings.) In the foreground men lay the foundation of a lumber storage barn that should house all the scrap lumber in the shop, all the stacks of furniture-grade lumber we have had air-drying over the years and some tools. The barn is to be attached to the old kiln as you can see in this drawing. Here's a crude video clip -- it takes a good minute or more to load, even with broadband -- of some of the tough excavation the site needed. We hit three kinds of rock: sandstone (easy), limestone and/or dolomite (harder) and granite (AWFUL)! The noisy tool is called a "hoe-ram" and called by some people, a "chipper." They're almost as good as blasting. Below-left you see the finished holes. Below-right, the first half of a pour.
|
 |
 |
|
The three sticks of rebar coming up out of the
pour in the pic to the right, above, help to bind the lower half of the pour,
which fills the rough hole, to the upper half. That top half is shaped by one of
those cardboard tubes you see in the photo at the top of this page. Below, the 20-foot tall 6" X 6"s are going up.
|
| In the picture above, Mark, with his back to you, has his left hand on a half-built retaining wall. It is just over four feet here and it's now topped out at nine feet. Made of heavily braced 4" X 6" pressure-treated timbers laid thin side up and spiked together with rebar. See the massive braces below. | |
 |
 |
| This, above, is one of three pressure-treated 6"X6" diagonal braces. the 4"X 6" uprights lag-bolted to the 6"X6" serve to stiffen it. | The close-up, above, shows a point I designed to vector some of the strength up; to block the diagonal in place. Is this thing over-built, or what? |
| You know, civil engineers are kind of like cops: you can never find one when you need one. Here I've got a master civil engineer (so much nicer than those impolite ones, I think) in the family: my son. So where was he when I needed him for this project? In Iraq! | |
 |
Rafters almost done. By
avoiding the use of trusses we got a lot of storage on the third level of
the building. We made the roof taller than the architect's plans in the
drawing. We'll put a trapdoor and a block and tackle as well as the existing pull-down attic stairs. |
 |
 |
 |
| Sheathing going on. We'll Tyvek it for Winter, so that the siding can season. | Rick cuts tracks for brackets. ...hot sparks a flyin', fourth of Julyin'.... | Some of 448 "stickers" for allowing airflow through the 170 once-inch siding boards. |
| Each of
those pointy black brackets will hold more than 400 lbs. There will be 680
on this floor alone.
It's mid-October 2003 in the shots above and below and it's getting chilly. Leaves are falling in earnest and the woods are changing color. |
|
|
 |
|
Misty morning siding delivery of the lumber barn's first new-sawn oak. Even though the logs had some age on them this stuff should dry till spring at least if air-dried. |
Siding for lumber barn is barn's first load on Oct. 20, 2003. If our solar lumber kiln were ready we could dry at least half of the siding there now and get it all up this year. |
This page has gotten too long. To continue the lumber barn's progress, click here.
Here's a drawing of what we intend it to look like. We have made it taller than Architect Tim Watson wanted. Maybe two feet taller? His proportions were prettier. Mine are more useful.
