The Barn on White Run

Things are getting closer to wrap-up with the greenhouse project, as I built the steps on the bank from the yard up to the terrace.  I will probably build a second set of steps at the other end, but we are really getting close to the point where we can say we have a first-class functioning greenhouse.  This was an “in process” image, the steps are now all done and a great addition to the endeavor.  We no longer have to trek diagonally across a steep bank that is frequently slick with dew.

A couple weeks ago I followed Mrs. Barn’s protocol and covered the entire floor with cardboard once she had settled on a configuration for the space.  This step really cuts down on weed encroachment once it is covered with a layer of mulch.

I also placed four black painted drums in the space, one in each corner.  Once I install the spigot kits near the bottom of each drum they will serve two functions.  First is to provide water to the plants since there is no hard plumbed water line, so these will have to be refilled by hose on occasion.  Second, though, is to serve as heat sinks in the winter when the black paint and water inside the drum is heated in the winter time to keep the overnight temps moderated.  At least that’s the plan.  I also may wind up putting more thermal mass in the space, such as sand-filled concrete blocks painted black to absorb solar warming.

With that all done I hauled up a truckload of mulch to cover the carboard on the floor.  It transforms the space visually and functionally as sometimes walking over layers of cardboard is a slippery proposition.

I will shortly add some benches to the covered-but-not-enclosed end of the structure where many plants will be kept as a intermediary space.

Our noodling between now and winter will be to get a handle on temperature controls for both heat and cold.  Even though the enclosed space has a shade cloth over it the temperatures on a sunny day can get pretty extreme inside, much more than our one little 12-inch fan can handle.  I’ve got another fan on order, and hope that two will do the trick.  I am not pleased and cannot recommend the one we bought, but it is here and installed and works, some of the time.

The next update from the greenhouse will focus on Mrs. Barn’s experimentation with self-irrigating planters.

Stay tuned.

A picture of the Fortress of Solitude right around the time I started the blog.

I forgot to mention that I hit the 2,000 milestone for blog posts last week.  Not as many as many, more than many more.

My first post was on the 6th of June, 2013.  What a long, strange trip it’s been.

I do wonder how long I’ll keep it up, but there are no plans to pull the plug anytime soon.

While cleaning up/out the big shed in Maryland I came across this big stout bedroom dresser (pic looks odd because it is standing up on one end).   I vaguely remember someone gave it to me to empty out an old house and the piece is a beast.

Combined with the inspiration from BobR’s recent video on making himself a new workbench, my “I wonder if…” brain got to thinking.  Can a massive but useless bedroom dresser be turned into a premium workbench?  I guess I’ll find out.

I’ll be pursuing this project once I get some other workbench projects out of the way.  In the meantime, I’ve got a Japanese planing beam and my Ultimate Portable Workbench to finish up.

Stay tuned.

One bite at a time, of course.

A couple weeks ago we ventured back into Mordor to do some yard work and house work in preparation for the return of Youngerbarndottir’s family to the region, as they might need to encamp at that house for an indeterminate time.

Unbeknownst to us there had been a microburst storm a few nights earlier and we were greeted with the sight of a large chunk of maple tree laying in the yard and on the deck.  While I had brought my chainsaws, this was an unexpected, uh, pleasure.

To give you a sense of the scale, the trunk snapped off about twenty feet up the tree, and the base of the snapped off section is just under 24 inches in diameter.

I have made no bones about my fandom for the Craftsman 20V product line, owning several drills, saws, string trimmers, and chainsaws.  Are they the “best” performing cordless tools?   No.  Are they the least expensive cordless tools?  No.  But I do judge them to be the best value of the type.   (PS- as much as I would welcome Lowes/Ace/Craftsman to support and underwrite my tool acquisition disorder, these are all tools I bought myself.)

The 20V chainsaws are invaluable for routine yard work and even more demanding work.  Just before leaving Shangri-la the little chainsaw made short work of a 12-inch locust post.  With that in hand I worked many hours in cleaning up the tons of maple, one bite at a time.  75% of the cleanup was accomplished with the little 20V chainsaw, including sawing up to a foot of trunk.  Admittedly it took a couple of fresh batteries, but I had them on hand, so it was no big deal.  For the more routine cutting the trunk into roughly four-foot boles I used my gas-powered Stihl.

Although the silver maple is somewhat of a junk tree, I decided to salvage the best of the trunk stock for some future use.  I was particularly interested in two crotches which will be turned into some sort of bowls on the lathe.  But first, that will require fabricating an outboard turning plate on the ancient lathe my pal MikeM gave me eons ago.  That will be its own series of posts later in the summer, I hope.

For the moment the boles are laying in the yard awaiting relocation to the old goat house where they will remain protected from weather and dry out slowly until I can cut them into whatever I need them to be.

Prior to fabricating and installing the new Coanda-style cover for my hydroelectric capturing box, every couple weeks I would notice a drop-off in the water flow to the turbine.  Sometimes it stopped altogether.  So, I had to turn off the water at the bottom, flip up the turbine housing and remove the nozzles.  Invariably the orifice was crammed solid with a crawdad body, sometimes compressed to the point where I needed to drive it back out with a metal rod.  It happened so much I kept a tool right there for the task.

With the former configuration the intake was covered with 1/4″ inch hardware cloth, even then the little crustaceans figured out how to get into the capturing box and were sucked into the pipeline.  A minute or two and 1200-feet later they wound up crushed at the bottom when their carcasses were too large to fit through the turbine nozzles.  Hence the need for regular clean-out.

Since I installed the new cover there have been zero crawdads in the nozzles.  .

A big step forward.

After a long stretch away from the shop I often find the best way to ease into the swing of things is to clean and (re) organize my work stations.  And, as a result of my habitual untidiness and in-and-out forays into the barn, there is always cleaning and organizing to do.  Unlike my longtime friends MikeM and MartinO, I am not by nature, temperament, nor habit a tidy person in the shop.  Their studios look like something staged for a photo shoot, but in fact that is how they are.  It is only one of the many things for which I admire, respect, and resent them. ;-)

This past week I spent a few days working on the Waxerie.  Unfortunately, I did not take a quick picture before I started, but the corner sorta looked like the Junk Monster had vomited in the space.  After intensive cleaning and organizing, with a new plywood work surface on top of my map case full of veneers, mother of pearl, and other exotics, I am pretty pleased with myself.  We’lll see how long I can hold the Law of Entropy at bay.

I’m not sure which work station I will work on next, but there are more than a dozen to go.

Your life might be governed by some kind of “X”G phone network Operating System but I’ve got you beat — for the foreseeable future my life OS will be 12G.  To whit,

Greenhouse  (wrapping up final details but already in use by Mrs. Barn, who is experimenting on the best way to lay out and use the space)

Garden (more of a Mrs. Barn thing)

Grandson #1

Grandson #2

Grandson #3

Grandbaby #4 (due in November)

Going here

Going there (mostly to Mordor as all four grandkids and their parents are now living within minutes of each other there)

Going back home to Shangri-la for rejuvenation

Getting the barn organized in preparation for

Gragg chair-making private tutorial this autumn

If you think this sounds like it might be Ghaotic you would be correct.

Unlike the midwit poltroons, grifters, and outright treacherous curs in gubmint elected and unelected, I yearn for “regular order” of routine days in the shop and evenings reading or watching something while massaging Mrs. Barn’s feet, knowing that regular order may never return.

And that’s a Good thing.

Although I’m not back in the shop full time or anything close, I did sneak in a couple of sessions to make and install the new cypress lid for the hydropower capturing basin.   Last winter I saw that something had torn the living starch out of the previous hardware-cloth-over-frame lid, rendering that element useless in filtering out the debris.  It was probably a bear, but I really have no idea why a bear would feel the need to tear up the box lid in the middle of a vigorously running stream.  The box itself was uninjured, perhaps because it holds about 500 pounds of rocks.

My first step for the new lid was nailing down the side strips to the workbench, then began nailing on the slats spaced two washers apart.  This will result in a roughly >1/16″ opening, large enough for the wicking of water through the lid but keeping out the debris and crawdads.   I nailed it all together from both sides with copper slatters nails, driven into pre-drilled holes.  Once the unit gets saturated the wood will swell and clinch the nails solidly in place.

This particular structure is known as a Coanda Screen, although they are usually manufactured from stainless steel rods and screens.

A hike up the hill to clean out the debris from the capturing basin and setting the new lid in place and the system was functional once I made the penstock re-connection that I disconnect when winterizing it.  I added another 500 pounds of rocks on top to discourage any four-legged vandals.  We’ll see if it works.

Over the summer I will spend a few days working on the penstock incline, building rock berms to flatten out the swales so that maybe, just maybe I can keep it running all winter long.  Enclosed water lines can supposedly keep running down to -17F if there is minimal turbulence.

But for now, after a week of vigorous rain (~3″ total) it’s pounding out the power.

Back to finishing up the myriad details for the greenhouse.

Exactly ten years ago I was experiencing the most exhilarating and exhausting week of my life, the culmination of years of research, writing, and travel; it was Studley Exhibit Week.

It started with packing up of the Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench ensemble at its home, loading it onto a dedicated truck with armed driver and escort, and unloading it at the end of a long day’s driving in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, just a few miles from the Handworks event in Amana.

A dedicated team of volunteers (and vendors; the original lighting contractor bailed on the project three weeks before the opening) made the whole thing possible as the installation came together.

That evening I hosted a special reception for all the Handworks vendors who would be otherwise unable to see the exhibit.

On top of everything else the Lost Art Press crew arrived with cases of the book, almost literally hot off the presses and straight from the bindery.

The event garnered favorable feedback except for those who were miffed that there was a ticket price for the small event.  Apparently, they were unaware of budget items like the cost of dedicated, secured transport ($6k), insurance (a thousand dollars a day), facility rental, exhibit fabrication (almost $2k just for the tool cabinet exhibit case alone), and much, much more, all of which I was paying out of my own pocket.  Thanks to the unbelievable generosity of a friend of the project the books all balanced in the end.

Despite the frenetic pace of those days, robbing me of many of the memorable moments, I still get warm-and-fuzzies reflecting on those moments I can remember.

Ten years!  Goodness, how time flies.

As I continue working on the multitude of details getting the greenhouse ready, Mrs. Barn’s flower garden, carved out of the rocky hillside next to the cabin, has erupted in an explosion of colors as the poppies have burst onto the scene.  In a couple months the daylilies will emerge, and in between will be a host of other rainbows of flowers I know nothing about beyond appreciating their beauty.  To say that she revels in the beauty of nature and especially flowers would be an understatement.  Today is our annual Mrs. Barn’s Birthday Safari to Millmont Gardens to load up with beautiful plants.  She has free reign to get whatever she wants, the space in the back of the CRV being the limiting factor.

As for the greenhouse itself, we have begun to finalize the interior layout and some seedlings are underway.   I have removed much of the construction supplies and tools, bringing a sense of order to the space.  Lately we have been scouring the University of Youtube to garner the best information on building self-watering planters.

We have passed through asparagus season, having freshly-picked shoots with almost every meal for more than a fortnight.  The bed is now proceeding to the “bush” phase and in short order the asparagus bushes will be 8-10 feet high.  She says this is the key to an established perennial asparagus bed, and since it has worked here for two decades I rely on her judgement.

I can just now glimpse returning to the workbench on the horizon.  First project is to make a new, sturdier cover for the hydro capturing trough that a bear (?) tore up last autumn.

The folks at The Babylon Bee did it again.  When you contemplate the difficulty of consistently creating great satire in this clown-show world, you know these guys are the best.

I have long been a fan of Dorian Bracht’s Youtube page, following as he makes mind blowing joinery exercises.  Now his book is out and sitting on my pile of stuff to read, having arrived during our recent eon of travel or I would have taken it along to read.  The time will come when I can spend time at the bench and reproduce his work.  Unfortunately that time is not yet here.

After what seems like a century we are back in Shangri-la, having logged thousands of miles in traveling for the past two months.  We were home twice to swap out luggage but otherwise we were elsewhere.

It began with our arrival in DC for the very birthing day of Grandson #3.  Three weeks later we went to Alabama for the third birthday of Grandson #1 and first birthday of Grandson#2.  Then back to DC for GS#3’s baptism, a grand week we got to spend with our co-in-laws.  My co-father-in-law and I are twin sons of different mothers.

While in Rochester our hostswe squeezed in a visit to the Eastman House museum. This was a charming veneered French-style chest, although almost certainly late 19th or early 20th century (I did not take it apart to confirm that thought). I was especially taken by the “knotted banding” pattern.

After another brief stop to swap out more laundry we wrapped up our journeys with a trip to Rochester NY where I made six presentations to the Rochester Woodworkers Guild — Principles of Furniture Conservation, Case Studies in Furniture Conservation, How Furniture Conservation Affects My Current Furniture Making, demonstrations of various conservation techniques, a review and demonstration of parquetry techniques, and finally a conservation/restoration clinic based on the pieces the attendees brought with them for that purpose.

Now back home with summer trying to ramp up we are back at it big time.  Mrs. Barn is feverishly working on her gardens and I am hard at work on the greenhouse, finishing the installation of a greenhouse fan, draping the structure with a shade cloth our newest son-in-law gave to us when it turned out to be too large for their patio space, and sealing up the perimeter to protect from the voles that are the bane of Mrs. Barn’s gardening life.

The shade cloth was something we had been wondering about as the inside temps were in the 80s when the outside temp was in the 20s.  Now that the sun and outside temps are much higher the issue came front and center.  I do not like high temperatures anyway, but when I was working inside the greenhouse in 110-degrees I broke out the shade cloth and affixed it in place.  Combined with the fan that lowered the inside temps to a manageable 85 degrees.

Even though the 1/4″ hardware cloth covers the entire floor out to the walls, I made a second hardware cloth “flashing” to be ground-stapled on top of the continuous layer then crown-stapled to the walls. The tricky part is forming it to the posts, which usually required another piece or two to be cut and fitted.  If voles get past this a number of Rat Zappers will be awaiting them.

As for vole-proofing the space, that began at the very beginning of the construction phase several months ago.  I covered the entire inside space with 1/4″ hardware cloth, and now was the time to tie it all together with new pieces at the bottoms of the walls and posts.  One more day of that and it will be time to move on the laying out the inside configuration.

I hope we get to stay home more from now on, but that may be a vain hope.  In two months the family of GS#1 and GS#2 will be moving to live within five miles of GS#3.  I’m guessing that Grandma and Grandpa will be burning up the roads between here and there.

I am anxious to get back into the shop to work at both the bench and in my writing chair, but that might have to wait a little longer.

My most recent conversation with long-time friend “retired” broadcaster Brian Wilson is now posted on his Substack Brian Wilson Writes or his podcast Now For Something Completely Different.

It’s a pungent discussion of the social/political status quo.  You have been warned.

Enjoy.  Or not.

DCW

If I am known for anything in the realm of shop work it is that I am an enthusiastic advocate for two arcane tools; the polissoir at the finishing bench, and the toothing plane at the woodwork bench.  I find myself grabbing one of my dozen toothing planes almost every time I am preparing a board for whatever comes next, as toothing planes are magnificent for the task of making a board flat/planar (but not smooth).

I have long asserted that we are living in a Golden Age of hand tool makers, and one of them is my friend Steve Voigt.  Sometime last year I asked Steve to make me a custom toothing plane.  As a result of our correspondence about the plane, I sent him three of my favorites to use as guides for his work.

A few days ago I received two packages from him, one with my three and the other with his new one.  I’m like a kid on Christmas morning, anxiously awaiting the time soon when I can really take it for a test drive.

Stay tuned.

Our Mondo March Marathon of Travel is now in the rearview mirror, we are back home in Shangri-la where Spring has definitely sprung.  Were home exactly two days last month in between visits to grandsons old and new (and their parents, of course), an exhausting trek for these two geezers.  The final push of 700 miles in one day was just about enough to put us in traction.

But now we are home and (mostly) recovered and the chores of spring are in full bloom.  Flowers are popping up all over the place and Mrs. Barn is feverishly getting all the garden beds ready for her ministrations.  This is her version of being “in the shop.”

I, on the other hand, have gone to the shop only long enough to package up my Donsbarn.com store orders.  This will likely continue for another fortnight.

I have spent a couple days working in the greenhouse installing the new thermostat controlled solar powered ventilation fan.  We’ll see if it is adequate to the task; the day before I started working on it the space was well over 100 degrees.  Yesterday the fan brought it down to the mid-70s, but it was a cloudy day.  I’m thinking I will have to augment the fan with a shade cloth.  I’ll now spend a couple days finishing up the window framing before proceeding to moving in mulch and soil and building the main raised bed.  I am looking forward to now getting fresh vegetables year-round.

Being Spring time it has been my time to re-activate the hydroelectric system. Every year I check the line to repair any winter damage which results from trees falling on the 2” PVC penstock. Normally this occurs at the beginning of March but since Grandson #3 was born on February 28 and Grandsons #1 and #2 have birthdays in mid-March…  This year there is much less damage than normal but I am taking the opportunity to reroute a few stretches of pipe in order to flatten out the inclined line of the pipe.  Near the bottom and alongside the pond I disconnected, pulled out, then rerouted a 150-foot section, moving it up about three feet but weaving it in behind several trees.  Ever try to “sew” with a 200-pound piece of thread?  I am very pleased with the result but that one little step took more than two days and my shoulders still ache.

Next week I will do the same thing for three sections before reconnecting it at the top and harvesting the watts.  If I can get the incline straight enough, with no swoops and swails all the way to the top, I can (theoretically) keep the system running almost all year long.  Maybe all year long in reality.  The final project in the coming weeks will be to construct a Coanda cover for the penstock intake.

One problem to be solved this year involved re-setting the debris catcher on the top of the pond drain stack.  Heavy ice in the pond this winter pushed it aside (sorry, no picture of that) leaving it sorta in place but pretty womperjawed, hanging off to one side.  To set the strainer on its axis I had to strip down to my skivvies and shoes and venture neck-deep into the 50-degree water.  Brisk.  But, I got ‘er done.

That all said I can hardly wait to complete these necessary tasks and get back into the shop with the multitude of projects awaiting me there.  Tool cabinet parquetry and fittings, full and 3/4 scale Gragg chairs, writing, editing, writing editing, and more of the same.

Stay tuned.

Although I have yet to see and touch it in person, my long time friend Jersey Jon sent me this picture of his new copy of the new Roubo on Furniture.

It’s not R2D2, it is R2V2.

As always. it is available over at Lost Art Press.

I interrupted grandpa mode for a bit and engaged my friend of almost 35 years, Brian Wilson, for a freewheeling conversation on social/political the status quo.  If pungent conversation about forbidden topics intrigues you, you can find it over at the Substack “Brian Wilson Writes.”  I’ve been told that it is unseemly to discuss politics, religion, and economics.  Hit the trifecta here.

Enjoy.  Or not.  You have been warned.

It will soon be 12 years and almost 2,000 blog posts since donsbarn.com made its debut.  In chatting with Webmeister Tim yesterday he informed me that the original platform had not been updated since the beginning and was beginning to show its age.  In fact, the basic platform Jason built for me is no longer supported, but is still working!  Well done, Jason.  Nevertheless the site is occasionally having the burps, hiccups and sneezes that geezers often get, requiring periodic troubleshooting by Tim to get things back to running more-or-less smoothly.

All that to say that Tim will be constructing a new web site platform and that transition to “live” will occur some time next month.  With luck the site will remain visually unchanged.  The new site will be, well, new, and with greatly expanded capabilities I hope to begin exploiting.  At the same time, I will be reworking some of the foundational documents, maybe giving more of the donsbarn.com back story.

If it all goes well the redesign and migration should go smoothly once underway.

Stay tuned.