canoehead

pm'd you, thanks

that is exactly it. it looks superb. really well thought out and executed. how well dose it work? you did exactly what i was thinking about, a cam chain system for raising the saw. i like the remote throttle, brilliant. the bed looks super stiff, the carriage looks really robust. can i ask if you have any idea what it cost in material and time? how heavy is it? is it transportable by pick up if you put a stand in the buck, and the other end on a roof rack? can you add additional rail lengths? it looks like exactly the thing for cutting another timber frame, way better than my logosol, esp the manual loading issue, and lack of overall stiffness of the mill. have you got any video of it in action? what saw and bar are you running? can't tell you how impressed i am. want. and want to build one now. you evidently have a lot of knowledge and a lot of ability, really inspirational. big thumbs up.

Nine years ago my wife and I headed out from england to portugal, to try and be as autonomous as we could. we didn’t have much money, but we had bought a piece of land with some natural resources, and I figured if carpenter/builders like me could build houses in the new world of North America, 300+ years ago, with little more than the tools they had and some knowledge, why couldn’t I? obviously, on the side of the mountain, access is entertainingly hopeless, and everything had to be carried by hand from the road side, or barrowed off site. I built the house on my own (entirely), not initially as some crazy imperative to go it alone (I worked largely on my own previously in England) but because money was so tight I couldn’t afford labour or much materials. It took months to clear and salvage the site of the existing stone buildings by hand, then hand dig the footings in rock. according to my wife, i had obsessive crafting disorder, as i had to make everything i could by hand with just site tools. i felled the trees, milled then made the frame, the shingles, the weatherboard, doors, windows, flooring, stairs, and the kitchen. If I didn’t make them, we couldn’t have them, or a house. what little money we had went on insulation, plasterboard, winging and plumbing, fixings and lumber i didn't have. (just after i'd finished putting the shingles on) Intermittently, I built things for other people, from stairs to massive timber frames, just to try and fund my build costs. (house, nearing external completion) (weatherboarding) (window trial fit) (top flight kite winder stairs, walnut) (couple of shots of the kitchen during installation) 2 weeks ago, just as I’d finished plumbing, we had the 3rd, in one summer, of ‘once in a lifetime’ fires rip thru this region. None of the fires were accidental, everyone knows the companies that plant eucalyptus forest are responsible, but no way of either proving it, or preventing it from happening again. this time, the implications were catastrophic for us. along with a number of other houses in the region, our house got burnt down. 92% of the district/county suffered. it looks like a war zone. untold miles of 30m+ trees reduced to stumps. This isn’t a political rant, or a please feel sorry for me post, I just wanted to update a thread I started a few years ago, and one I had been asked to share, but hadn’t kept up with. I just wanted to thank everyone on this site for their support whilst I built the house. You have no idea how much your kind words meant to me, how they spurred me on, how they gave me hope and encouragement when there was often little to be found elsewhere. I cannot begin to tell you how difficult the whole build was, not just for me physically and mentally, but for both of us emotionally as well. It was, until the fire, the most stressful thing in our lives. it had taken 7 years before we were finally living in the (unfinished) house. we wrote about the build and life here, in this bit of portugal in a blog, ourlifehandmade.wordpress.com We lost everything in the fire, the house, pretty much every single tool I owned (which was a lot) and all our other possessions, all the things that mattered. Its been a hard couple of weeks, we are getting through it though. I have a plan to build again, when I can find another place, and get some tools, and try and start again, although I’m not religious, it is a thing of faith and hope, the stuff of life.

has anyone built a chainsaw mill that has a carriage that rides on rails, not unlike the granberg flip and rip mill? and if you have any pictures? if you have, what mechanism did you create to raise and lower the saw, and how did you stiffen the carriage to prevent it from racking?

really impressive, a huge amount of work. like your drying rack, with the ratchet straps, great idea to keep the boards from twisting, cupping etc, and in the shade. i learnt the hard way of not doing that. that you cut tounges and grouves on all your flooring is a feat itself, let alone planing, recutting all the stock, and finish sanding. how has the floor stood up over time? has it shrunk back much? ( i only ask as i ended up with gaps everywhere with mine, even after i thought it was completely dry). really admire your inventiveness, that you built 2 mills.

with Woodworks on balcotan, have used it in canoe construction as well as general carpentry, works really well (don't get it on your hands, awful to get off, you need a tub of alchohol wipes), i'd found it in chandlery stores. have also used 'joiners mate' by geocel, available thru screwfix, which seems to be essentially the same thing. what i prefered about balcotan was it came in two different time settings for curing, which allowed you greater flexibility, one was almost instantaneous (15mins i think) the other an hour or more. the thing i didnt like about joiners mate, and to an extent balcotan, was, as soon as you opened them their shelf life was pretty limited, and unless stored completely air tight they go off in the bottle and you end up with a bottle full of solid expanded foam when you most needed glue. if you are using oily or resinous wood its probably advisable to wipe them clean/dry with alcohol wipes before applying the glue, i have also found joints to fail (like any glue would) where its been left exposed in the weather, like on garden furniture that didn't get oiled enough. hope that helps rick.

just wanted to say thanks for all the kind remarks, 'preciate it. and to answer a couple of questions, why the roof? i'm guessing that question is why the choice of material and pitch? for me its about a few things. in essence this is a no budget build. i have no money, so rather than working to afford to buy materials i'm trying to make as much as i can from the raw materials i have at hand. vernacular architecture. in addition, i can't afford to employ anyone to help, i dont know i want to either, there are various reasons for that. i have been a carpenter and general builder for over 20 years and a woodsman, i guess always, and that has dictated to an extent, my choices of material and the way in which i am constructing. i wanted to see if i could make and build a house, no make that home, from the very place in which it sits, in part because i think it is a way forward, especially for those of us who dont have much money. for my inspiration i have looked to the past, both the saxon heritage of building in england, and northern europe, and the kinds of houses english carpenters like myself went and built in north america 300 to 500 years ago. use what you have with the knowledge and skill that you can bring. invest in your ability, these were the principal ideas. so to that end i thought that shingles, and in this case hand split shakes were the ideal answer to my roofing needs. in all honesty, i don't know how long they will last, 5 mins or 50 years? i know they can last up to 80 years or so, maybe more. i had never layed them before, let alone made them. the other option was to hand make 6500 peg tiles, but that necessitates building a kiln, only time will tell if i have to go down that road? so why the pitch. well funnily enough it snowed a lot on the mountain range next over, last week. but here, not so often. the real reason is shakes and shingles benefit from being laid on roofs of a pitch of 45 degrees or more to increase their longevity, by allowing them to shed water more quickly, and that is the principal reason why shingled roofs have such steep pitches from a structural pov, in addition to that they allow a maximum of usable space in the roof. in my case the loft is the principal bedroom. a gambrelled roof may give more space but they have other issues. (not to say i dont want to build one). Morten, i used chestnut, partly because i had a load, not that i don't have pine, but as you know you have to tar pine, and it would have been a lot of tar, and more than one application over the roof's lifetime, and since chestnut is loaded with tannins and doesn't need treatment it was an easy choice. i felled the trees, cut them into lengths i could get in my pick up, or carried them out of my own woods, then cut them into 15" (350mm) long bulks (rounds) then split them with a maul (gunsfors) and club hammer into 16ths or more, then split those segments into 32nds or smaller sometimes 50ths depending on the size of the rounds with an ancient froe (from a 2nd hand carpentry tool shop in needham market, suffolk) then finished them with a small forest axe (grunsfors) rather than a draw knife. because i find the axe more versatile, easier to use, and quicker. less waste than sawing and because they are riven apparently greater longevity as you're not cutting thru the grain but riving along it. here are a couple more pics, inc the bathroom frame construction. i didn't mill the posts or short beams (eucalyptus) for the bathroom extension but i did the rafters (pine) and the long roof plate (which is walnut) and hewed the braces (olive wood, alder, chestnut, walnut), and made all the pegs (oak). rick

its taken forever, a comedy amount of time. way more than i imagined. but yesterday it was finished, and we had the topping out ceremony, or richtfest if you're german. just the barge boards, facia's, and soffits to do. i had to make more shingles, and then more when even they weren't enough, in the end it was somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000, i lost count. that's what it took to cover over 100sqm, that and over 20,000 50mm stainless steel ring shank nails, about 1 linear km of tile batten, several rolls of breather membrane, hundreds of meters of 50mm batten, 6 packs of multi-foil insulation, over a linear km of t&g flooring as sarking, more batten, i don't know how many 3" and 4"nails, and probably about a lake's worth of cups of tea. here's a couple of pictures rick

forget the draw knife, use a fine entry point narrow bladed axe like grunsfor brux's small forest axe, quicker, more efficient, and way more versatile, you dont need a bodgers clamp or anything, and easier to hack off larger sections you dont want or gnarly bits. also worth considering is a splitting maul. i found you could bisect the rounds pretty well with the maul, easily get 16ths, and just use the froe for the final splitting into 32nds or more depending. a heavy duty maul like grunsfor's you can pound with a club hammer is ideal. there's a lot less waste with riving out, and they are supposed to be more durable as you are not sawing thru the grain but splitting along it. but its way tiring, esp. after the first few thousand, you're gonna get rsi, esp on the wrists and elbows. one other thing, its worth making some, then try laying a batch, as it will give you a much clearer idea of what they really need to be like rather than just what you imagine they should be like, just from experience. it makes the whole process a bit more smooth rather than having to reject loads or adjust them on the roof constantly.

get well soon dervish. arbotech pro -4 woodcarver pretty good, not too pricey, sculpts easily, and manageable even without their plastic safety guard. rick

nice milling, nice posts, looks sharp alec. rick

oak has to be my favorite smell, particularly english oak, often after i rains i can (make that could as i dont currently live in england) make out the same aroma, its really distinct. which leads me back to one of my original questions, what causes it, anyone? i wondered if it was the earth it was growing in, or some symbiotic relationship between the tree and a host fungi. was thinking about french wine growers obsession with the earth being the reason behind the wines' success, being part of why each wine has the nose it has. which rabinia? black locust? and which walnut? i'm not getting horses. european walnut out here smells to me very earthy and leathery. yet black walnut more chocolaty. cedar fantastic, ditto spruce, less keen on the maritime pine here, sour almost rancid amonia. like your final remark jonathan, "which wood." so here's another question, do different trees, in the same location smell differently to different people? and if so why? rick

whilst running an old board of cherry thru the planer today, it gave off a wonderful honey aroma. i hadnt noticed this before with cherry. oak, out here smells like olive wood when milled. french oak i thought smelled like capers, and english oak very spicey, like curry powder. what causes this, anyone? anyone else noticed unusual aromas from woods?

wow, thank you so much for posting this. what a wonderful story, and a wonderful approach to forestry, what a legacy, what genius, what inspiration. thank you.

saw first pair this year, up very close, almost diving on me whilst dog walking this morning. first warm day for here was yesterday, saw an increase in flying insects, and wondered if this was the indicator swallows used for heading north? or is it the warm winds? do they follow insects hatching? cuckoo's been here for a couple of weeks, but no nightingales yet.