First mowing of the season

First mowing

I mowed a lot of the place, but some wasn't in need (back toward the mountain) and some was too wet.  The cub cadet really moved though.  Blades nice and sharp and was able to go everywhere on those hills!

The orchard really needed it.  Was too tall in many places.

Much of the black walnut area was "field" grass so it was a challenge.  It will get easier as the grass comes under control.

Lots of field grass here too.  

I don't plan on mowing all these areas forever, only as long as the trees are too small to fight with the grass!

New tool sharpener attachment

The "wide blade" attachment for my worksharp came in last week so I got to try it out over the weekend.  Overall it is well made and seems to keep the tool in good alignment (possibly  even better than the "under the disk" default method)!  Also, it is  nice in that it comes with some templates for determining the bevel angles and for setting the bevel angles.  The basic worksharp only allows for between 20-35 degrees (if I recall).   The only problem I have noticed so far is kind of unavoidable:  big blades take longer to sharpen!

Look at all those angles!  15 to 60 degrees!  The big planer blade I was doing was a 15 degree bevel so this capability really helped.

Saw-milling 

I continued to work on milling up the old tree trunks laying in front of the barn.  I don't really need the lumber right now, but those logs are rotting and in the way! Also, I could really use more wood chips for mulch for all the new trees.

I was surprised to find a decent sized locust log in the pile.  It milled into some nice boards and some good wood stakes.  It had degraded a bit, but not near as bad as many of the oak logs.  Most of the oak that I have milled this past weekend had the sap wood all rotted out.  I was able to get some 5x5's out of them, but little else.  Oak is not great for fence/arbor posts, so I ordered some copper napthenate solution to treat them with.  I wish I had more decent sized locust trees!

Locust boards from 4(?) year old log!

I thought about using this locust log to make a post, but the pattern of insect damage really didnt work in my favor.  

I brought the rough sawn boards over to the shop to clean them up with the 19" bandsaw.  I have a carbide tipped blade on it and it goes through this lumber like butter!  

Pretty Spring Flowers

We stopped by Mom's place for a visit.  Her flowers were really out in force!

New lights, new workbench table legs. Tree layout and planning/ordering

Dust room "door"

Before I started any more wood work I wanted to get the door to the dust partition set.   I found a neat "zipper" product online, but it wont get here in time, so I just made a temporary door for now.  Just a piece of plastic attached above door with a wood strip attached at the bottom to weight it down and closed.  Later I intend to tape this door closed and put a zipper door in.

Not beautiful, but effective enough for now.

Shop Lights

Since the dust partition blocks the light from the LEDs over the metal tool area, I decided to install the remaining 6 LED lights that I had in the workshop area.  This had always been my plan, but now I had to put them up since its so dark now!  I had to go out and buy an extension cord and some fixtures to accommodate these lights.  A lot of fiddling around, but I got it done.  Each of these lights has a single drop down chain/string to turn them on and off.  Not my ideal solution, but it gets me up and running this weekend!  I need to get this shop rewired sometime.

I had to put one of these lights above the garage door - above the rafters to avoid getting hit by the garage door.

WOW!  It sure is a lot lighter in here!

New workbench base

Since I have decided to build a new workbench base for my new work bench top, I had to find some suitable wood.  I went out to the sawmill barn and found some useful lumber.

Found a 17 ft 5x6 and a 17 ft 4x4.  Rough milled oak.

Its a bit curvey/warped, but I am using short lengths, on the order of 34" long.

Quite a bit of checking at the ends, but I have long enough pieces that I can just cut this off.

Cut to length

Jointed and planed to dimension (S4S)

I treated the bottom end of the legs with danish oil to protect them from absorbing water from the concrete floor they wil be sitting on.

More checking than I prefer, but it should be ok for legs.  The danish oil went into those cracks to hopefully that will stop and powderpost beetles.

I trimmed the bottoms off with the chop saw as best I could.   They seem to stand straight, so I guess its good enough.

Jointer knife replacement

Last fall I put a good size dent in the jointer knifes about halfway (centered) in the blade.  This makes it impossible to flatten anything wider than 4 inches (even 4 is pushing it really). I had purchased the replacement blades last year but simply never got around to installing them.  I knew it was going to be an affair! I used youtube a lot to get some help with this.  I even checked the tables for proper alignment while I was at it.  All in all it took almost 5 hours of fiddly work!  Ugh.  But I used it to mill the table legs above and it worked so nice!

For future reference, I removed the springs under the blades because it just makes life hard - they claim that those springs are to help when you are using a magnetic setting tool, but I don't see how that would help - that magnets would hold the blade in position.?  Then I used some of my metal working tools - an indicator and stand - to check the knife alignment and height.  It was loads of fiddly adjustments but its done!  I am seriously thinking of getting a shelix head for this jointer!

Aligned, sharp, and beautiful!

And while I was at it...  the planer!

After having put a couple pieces of end grain material (saw offs from the workbench glueups) and blowing up my planer I noticed that the planer produced these marks on the surface of the boards.  I tried eyeballing the cutter heads to look for damage, but I couldn't notice any.  So I simply put pieces of wood through the planer and backtracked where on the head the defective cutters must be to produce the defect.  I found them and rotated them (I even marked some! sigh - should have marked all of the ones that I rotated)   While reseating one of the inserts, it blew up!  It literally shattered and threw pieces everywhere!  I made sure to turn my head when reseating the rest of the inserts!  I got the planer to a point where I couldn't find any more large defects in the resulting boards.  Some advise rotating all of the cutters in a row when doing this.  I don't know how that helps and seems like you would be wasting a lot of use of the inserts.

They look ok.  But your really can't see the defects with the naked eye I guess.

Tree layout and planning

While I had already ordered many trees from coldstreamfarm.com, I still needed to complete my orer from the county conservation district.  Mostly I was waiting to see how much space my chokecherry and choke berry shrubs would take.  It finally stopped raining enough for me to get out and do some layout marking in the field on Saturday (?)  It was muddy work, but I got it done.  All the new hazelnuts, choke cherries and berries, cherry trees, and a good idea where the apple trees and apricots are going.  I think I have all of the trees planned out now - I figured I needed 16(!) sour cherry trees - 3 to replace the ones that died in front and 13 to plant near the barn lane - I will try to keep them "up" out of the wetter spots along there.  All in all I am ordering over $1,000 in trees and plants this year!! Its going to be a busy spring planting!

Vacation Wrap-up

Well, vacation is over.  this post covers some of the things that happened during the last week of 2016 and the first week of 2017.

Chili 

Enjoyed making some chili with ALL home preserved or harvested ingredients!

My own venison from my recently harvested buck!

Beans that I canned last January.  I used Adzuki beans and Kidney beans. They canned great!

The final pot of chili!  It tasted great!!

Workbench top build

I decided to "frame" the 22" wide hickory section of my workbench top with oak so that I didn't have to mill up any more of my "finished" hickory boards/planks.  Remember that this project started when I took a look at the hickory mill ends and decided that it would be such a waste to just burn them (I didn't want to chip them up for mulch because I am not sure if hickory would should be used for mulch - hickory is in the walnut family which produces chemicals that retard the growth and germination of other plants!)  So anyway, I decided to recycle some of the old oak boards that I had laying around the place.  I have already recycled a number of these old oak boards for a canning shelf and for the base of the workbench.  As I started milling the old oak boards I noticed quite a bit of powderpost beetle damage.  I remember seeing lots of damage to the canning shelf lumber too.  I sealed the canning shelf with polyurethane as a finish and that seemed to stop most of the beetle activity.  However, the legs of the workbench have on-going powder post beetle damage (I see piles of dust under the legs!)   Therefore, for this workbench top, I was extra-picky to try to remove any damaged sections of the oak that had powderpost beetle damage.  I went through A LOT of the old oak boards to get the wood that I needed, and even then I still have some with powderpost damage.  I will finish the workbench with some kind of oil treatment and hope for the best!

This is one of the last hickory glue-ups.  I did 3 of them. one 11 inches and two 5.5 inches.

A total of  5 glue-ups were done - this is the last - an oak glue up, about 5-6 inches wide..

After the 5 laminated pieces were complete, I had to carry them out to the shop to plane them!  The 5 inch  wide ones weren't too bad, but the 11" one was quite a challenge!  

First step was to cut the 11" section in half to fit it through the planer!

My re-saw bandsaw did this task quite well!  I put up my roller tables to handle this heavy beast.

After cutting the 11" incher in half I then proceeded to plane the laminates (6 now) so that I had "good wood" and even edges to do the final glueup

Again, I used the roller tables to support the pieces 

They planed up quite nicely!  

I really should have put one edge through the jointer to make sure they were all square, but there was no way to handle these things through the jointer!

All laid out on the floor - ready to move to the workbench top for final glue up!

The final glue up!  I laid all of the laminate sections on top of the workbench and arranged them as best I could to get them square and aligned.

The workbench without a top.  It sags significantly in the center!

Glue up underway.  Clamps in place.

It was pretty cold that night so i placed this space heater on top.  I don't know if it helped or not, but the glue-up worked!

The next step, after allowing the glue to set and removing the clamps, was to "plane" the table top smooth, level, and flat.  I did this using a router sled on some wooden rails.  While making the router sled I discovered that my jointer blades were a problem for flattening boards over 3 inches wide - there was a nick in the blades from last years projects that caused the center of the jointer blades to not cut.  Therefore, when I ran a wide board though the jointer it would wobble significantly!  I burned a day of time learning this lesson!  Since I couldn't flatten a board using the jointer I just found a piece of OSB that was pretty flat and used that.  I made a couple of side pieces edge-straight (the jointer did work for edges) and then glued and nailed the sled together.

Router sled.  OSB with jointed oak sides

I made a couple of rails from old oak(?) I found and jointed.  I aligned them using the "cross string method"

The router sled runs on these rails.  The router bit height is adjusted to the lowest part of the table top and then moved across the table until the whole surface is routed to the same height.

Here shows after the first couple of passes

it works!

DONE!  I had to use some hand tools to get the edges, but that was easy.

Level and flat!  (actually, its mostly flat - if you look close there is a slight "sag" in the center that I think was caused by the sled sagging when the router was furthest from the edges.)

Sweet!

After flattening it, I sanded it a bit and patched a few mistakes and some glue-gaps.  Then I used some Watco Danish oil to finish it.  I only had time to put on one coat of oil so far.  I will do another the next time I am at the farm.

Before danish oil

After danish oil!

Pretty!

I also trimmed off the rough edges.  I used the hand held circular saw and then a hand saw to finish up.

At the upper right of this picture you can see the boo-boo I did.  Just at the end of routing it flat the router sled slipped off the rails and the router gouged out a section!  GRRR  I used some wood filler on it.  

Whew!  After doing all of this, I am thinking that maybe I should redo the base of this workbench! 300lbs is a lot for these legs.  The table does move (wobble) when you force it....  and I am not done adding weight yet.  I need to added the vices yet!  There is only 4 "board based" legs on this bench. Thinking I might replace these with 6 solid wood legs.

Faucet Replacement - sink repair

The kitchen faucet went out at the Silver Spring house.  The under counter part that held the faucet in place rusted out.  So i went shopping for a replace faucet.  I got one that had the long gooseneck with a sprayer built in.  This seemed ideal until we realized that we have a portable dishwaser and needed a ordinary faucet nozzle to fit the dishwasher adapter to!  I thought about it awhile and decided to add another simple faucet to the same sink - this simple faucet would then server as the dishwasher adapter faucet.  Instead of using the base plate to cover the old faucet holes I just used some plugs.  I think it turned out pretty nice!  The only problem now is tat the hot water feed line leaks a bit under the sink,  We have a bucket there now.  I am hoping that it self-seals; they often do.

Dishwasher adapter on left, fancy sprayer on right.

We put the dishwasher one on the left to keep it from splashing the clean dishes in the rak to the right of the sink.  However, the gooseneck makes the splashing so bad that even  on the left the splashes reach the clean dishes!  We will have to figure out something..

Miscellaneous

I finally got around to making some elderberry liqueur.  Well, I started it anyway.  It needs to sit for about 6 months.  I haven't added the sugar or lemon yet.    I made about 2 quarts.  I followed a recipe on the internet that called for 1 quart vodka, 1 pint elderberries, the peel of one lemon (with white stuff removed) and 1/4-1/3C sugar.  

It looks really pretty!

I also made a couple pies.  I am trying to "eat out" the freezer a bit so that I can fit my venison in (its in mom's freezer now).  While going through my freezer i found a container of blueberries that I picked the year before, so I grabbed them and a couple pints of canned apples (I am also trying to use my older canned goods) and made these pies.  They were quite good!

Apple-blueberry pies. 

More trees coming for the new year!

I went ahead and submitted an order with "Cold Tree Farms" for the following:

(placed on January 4, 2017 9:39:35 PM EST)

Item	Sku	Qty	Subtotal
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) - 1-2'	WABL12	25	$27.50
Northern Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) - 6-12"	PECA612	4	$18.60
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) - 1-2'	GINK12	25	$37.00
Chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) - 1-2'	CHOK12	30	$51.30
Choke Cherry (Prunus virginiana) - 1-2'	CHCH12	25	$51.25
I saw that the Fulton County Conservation District has also put put their tree order sheet for next year so I need to put that order together too.  I really should plan out where I am going to put all of these trees!