Guitar Gyro

A friend of mine played for years on the local rock band circuit.  At some point in a performance to which  I was not witness, he apparently channeled Pete Townsend and the result was that his well worn Alvarez guitar received new ventilation in its back.  I had briefly seen the guitar before the incident and, for some reason, I recalled that this was a "Yairi" model, meaning that it was a high-end instrument, hand-made in a sequestered village shop in the mountains of Japan.  Yes--a Japanese Master named Yairi in a small village workshop--the stuff of movies.

Although the band since disbanded, I had recently heard that my friend was thinking of returning to the scene (music scene, not crime scene), and it made me think of the ill-fated instrument.  Not having seen it since its brush with death, I did not know the extent of the damage.  But I figured that rather than let it languish in his garage and eventually get  thrown away, it might be worth a try for me to at least dissect it and learn a little about lutherie, with the possible outcome of resurrecting the instrument.  After all, if it was a Yairi, the woods alone were undoubtedly worth trying to salvage.

Well, I got my hands on the poor thing yesterday.  Clearly, my friend had not been playing Guitar Gyro, but Guitar Grinder.  I did not expect to receive it in two pieces, one of which has a nice rattle when you shake it.  This should be quite a challenge.

Since I made no promises regarding actual success in repairing this thing, or a time-line, I'm under no pressure.  And, it turns out, to the best of my internet research enhanced knowledge, it is not a Yairi.  But I must admit that I am nonetheless both excited to get started, and baffled as to where to begin.  This should be fun.

Furnace Fun

Had a furnace issue recently.  It makes perfect sense, of course, because this particular furnace is nearly four years old and has only given me trouble once before.  I was due.

The house has two furnaces: one for the basement and main level and one for the upstairs.  This is good because apparently furnaces are like Jaguars:  you need two so you always have an operable one while the other is being repaired.  These are high efficiency furnaces, which necessitates a power vent--the Achilles heel of furnacedom.  Because these units are so efficient, they combust the natural gas more completely and also extract more heat from the exhaust gas, so, without getting too technical, the result is liquid water in the flue pipe.  This water drains back down the pipe, by design, through the draft inducer blower housing and down into the floor drain, after passing through a number of hoses and plastic fittings.  Therein lies the problem.

As a safety feature, there are magic switches that know when everything is not ducky in the furnace and shut things down.  These switches are so magically endowed as to sense even the slightest little problem.  In other words, they are as moody as a teenage girl.  If the condensed vapor (liquid water) does not completely drain out of the inducer blower housing, the inducer fan blades pass through the water, consequently slowing their speed, causing the blower to draw more power in order to keep up.  The magical sensors see that the blower wants more power and throw a hissy fit, shutting everything down.  You wake up cold.

The fix is simple; you just have to clean out the fittings and hoses.  What, you may ask, could be clogging them up?  I have it from an actual trained technician that the offending matter is dead bugs.  Having cleaned out black gunk from the hose fittings, I can neither confirm nor deny this.  The matter is simply unrecognizable  to the naked eye in this form.  I will say, though, that it is tenacious.  I had cleaned out the fittings and hoses only days ago, leading me to think that a beast of a different stripe was afoot  this time.

Observing that the furnace was igniting and burning for a period of time, then exhibiting flame quality issues and ultimately limiting out, I was gunning for the gas valve.  Logical, right?  I mean, I just cleared the drain lines.  And besides, if the inducer housing was full of water, the furnace should never ignite at all, right?  I consulted an expert.  At first, he agreed that the gas valve was the culprit.  But on further discussion, he suggested that it might be that the sensor in the inducer housing was PMSing--flipping open and shut, overly sensitive to the realities of everyday blowing conditions. In my world, this kind of erratic, unpredictably humanistic behavior from inanimate objects is perfectly normal.

Preparing to do internet-galactic battle with online appliance parts vendors, I donned my minor's cap and delved deep into the bowels of the furnace in search of the "Secret Magic Talisman" that would ensure victory.  This "Talisman" is protected by various traps and camouflage designed to obfuscate it's secret location to even the most stalwart homeowner.  I  had inoculated myself against treacherous conditions by imbibing an ancient elixir of hops and barley.  Emerging unscathed, I heard a muffled cry from my favorite red flannel shirt, mortally wounded...brave soul. The red shirt always gets it.  No time to mourn--I started for the computer with my prize: the serial number.

But something clicked in my head.  It wasn't a blood vessel.  This time.  Like Obi Wan, a voice came to me: "Abuse the furnace".  So I kicked it.  But there was more.  A lifetime of implausible circumstances flashed before my eyes with an accompanying score by John Williams: new replacement parts bad from the factory, dropped screws lost in pants cuffs, pinhole leaks in new copper plumbing, beads of solder that looked just like dropped ball bearings, bad ground connections--lots of bad ground connections; the images taunted me.  But the message was clear--do not rule out the absurd.  Yoda chided me: "Do or do not; there is no try".  I bitch-slapped that little Muppet.

But I could not deny that, as often as not, the problem lies in a previously ruled out scenario.  So I checked the hoses and fittings again.  This time, I took a critical elbow fitting completely out of the furnace and down to the shop.  Blowing through the fitting produced an air stream out the other side, but it was a little weak.  So I fired up the air compressor and decided to put 120psi through that little orifice.  Sure enough, what must have been the mangled body of a very crusty bug shot out the small end of the fitting and pinged a piece of sheet metal leaned up against a wall.  "Inconceivable!", I said out loud.  And that was it.  After all that, the problem was that I had done a half-assed job of cleaning out the dead bugs in the drain line.

It occurs to me often that when something as common and predictable as a bug can stop the furnaces of the world, that perhaps the engineers are a little arrogant when they decide on tolerances.  I mean, what is the point of making a drain line orifice so small that a dead bug can clog it, especially when the clog results in a failure of the entire system?  Just asking.

The Mill

Having referenced the "mill" a few times, I thought I would post a picture and short explanation of how this tool came to me.

As you can see in the picture, it is your standard issue vertical mill, or "Bridgeport" as they are commonly known by the dominant manufacturer (like Kleenex).  Honestly, until recently, I was only vaguely aware of what this type of machine could do, since I have no machining background except in having built many buildings and additions for tooling shops over the years.  However, my father spent decades in a research environment that afforded him many opportunities to teach himself some basic machining skills and, now retired, often laments his loss of access to milling and other machining equipment.  Additionally, my brother is also self-taught in basic machining work, being an engineer and also working for years in that environment.  As for me, my experience was limited to machines for wood.

I really had no desire to acquire a mill; I knew little of how to use one and therefore couldn't really see what I would do with it.  And, in my home garage-shop, like most, space is at a premium.  I knew enough about mills to know that they are heavy and bulky and if I had one in my shop, it would be set once and never moved again.  Since I am always moving equipment around (you'll recall that I mount everything on casters), the thought of an iron behemoth looming over me and collecting dust (a lot of dust) wasn't too appealing.  Still, Dad occasionally pointed out to me how various routing functions I was performing, or he was doing in his home shop, would have been so much easier with a mill.

I mentioned this to my brother one day and he told me that he had several mills at his business facility that were in long term storage [read: sitting in the parking lot under tarps], and likely to never be used again, as the technology is pretty outdated these days.  I mentioned that I would like to acquire one, thinking that the logistics would make it improbable, but feeling like I had at least addressed the possibility.

A turn of events changed a lot of things for my brother and it seemed that, as Luck was shitting on him, she was shining on me.  For in a shifting, swirling tide of excrement, a mill managed to bob to the surface and find its way across many miles to my construction yard.  I had no idea of how handy this would be.

Well, the mill lived in my warehouse for a good while, because I had no room for it at home and no idea how I was going to move it.  The thought of renting a forklift was just unappealing--spending any money at all was unappealing.  So there it sat, all summer, under a blue tarp on a wood skid.  At the time, the warehouse was full of other junk, so it was in the way, but not alone.  But I knew I couldn't let it languish in limbo forever, so I finally made up my mind to move it to my shop one day.  By myself.

I still don' really know what this thing weighs.  Guesses had ranged from a "lot" to a "whole lot".  Ultimately, I figured it weighed right around 1700 pounds, because that is the capacity of the lift gate on my stake bed truck, which seemed to be at maximum capacity when I tried to lift the mill about 2' off the loading dock.  I don't think that the lift would have made it from the ground all the way up, about 4'. 

In order to move the mill from the warehouse to the truck, then from the truck to its place in my shop, I had to come up with a dolly with +/-1700 pound capacity.  This exceeds most dollies' limits.  And, I had to lift the mill up onto the dolly, then back off again.  By myself.  I'm guessing that Archimedes never tried to move a 1700 pound mill.  The solution came in the form of four pieces of angle iron and four 3000 pound capacity steel wheels I found at the surplus store.  I simply used four grade five bolts as axles, two on each end of an angle.  The remaining two pieces of angle would be bolted across the two pieces with the wheels, to form a dolly that I sized to fit the base of the mill exactly.  The wheels were of the appropriate diameter as to allow me to cut the wood skid out from under the mill with a sawzall while shoring it up with blocking and bolt the dolly around the base.  Having carefully sized the blocking, I was able to nudge the whole thing off the final block and onto the ground, dolly attached, with a spud bar.

I then rolled the mill right onto the the dock and onto the lift gate.  At this point, the biggest challenge was in not letting this thing get away from me.  Mass in motion and all that.  As I engaged the lift, it didn't move at first, but the rear end of the truck groaned as it squatted about a foot.  Eventually, the lift gate and the truck bed met in the middle, and I rolled the thing up onto the bed and over the axles and strapped it down.  Not wanting to know what effect this mill would have on traffic, I went ahead and strapped it down with actual rigging.  If this thing got to rolling on the bed of the truck, I imagined it would roll right through the stakes and squash a car like a soda can.

The drive to my house was easy.  Once again, building my house near the office paid off in simple back roads and low speed.  In my younger days, the trip would have been about a pucker factor 5, because I would have been driving too fast.  At my current rate of wisdom acquisition, I suspect that I will be one of those old men poking along at 25 MPH in every situation.  Hard to believe how reckless I have been, looking back.

So, I backed up to my garage door, unstrapped the mill and rolled it onto the lift gate.  All this "simply rolling" may lead one to think I wasn't working too hard.  Imagine pushing something as hard as you can to get it moving, then stopping it before it rolls two inches.  About ten times.  I took solace in the fact that if the mill fell off the edge of the lift gate, I'm fairly experienced with concrete work.  What's the worst thing that can happen?  Crater.  I stood on the lift gate, steadying the mill with one hand (silly, I know) and grasped the control lever with the other.  I engaged the lever to "lower", and we went down like Wile Coyote.  The lift gate apparently had enough surface area to spread the load onto my driveway adequately so that it only gouged the concrete instead of cracking it.

I rolled the mill into position in its new home and there it sits still.  I can easily move it if I want to, because the custom made dolly is pretty much permanent.  It fits nicely in its little corner with enough clearance for the bed to move in all directions unimpeded.  Now all I had to do was figure out how to power it, since, of course, it has a 3 phase motor.

That's Snow Fun

Since the last few posts have been about the white menace, I thought I should make something fun to balance things out.  My good friend called me Friday and invited me to his place to go sledding with the kids Saturday.  I thought this was a great idea and was looking forward to it.  Unfortunately, my wife had already made plans with the kids so I had to beg off at the last minute.  But the idea stuck.

So I spent Saturday afternoon building a sled.  I had an old pair of skis from my high school days that had managed to dodge several dumpster rampages over the last 25 years.  I have actually used them as recently as a few years ago, but mostly they have occupied various corners of various basements, garages, and closets the better part of the quarter century.  I even attempted to sell them in a garage sale and they failed to bring the $15 I was asking.  Remembering what I paid for them-- in hard earned high school cash in a pre-China-dominated economy--I think I would rather throw them away than sell them for $15 anyway.

I wanted to make a sled using the skis for runners.  And even though I was willing to throw them away, or sell them for $15, I did not want to damage them in the conversion.  So I machined two pieces of maple (leftover cabinet parts) to fit into the bindings exactly.  The mill was very handy for this.  I used maple because it is very strong and not grainy, so I figured it would not split as easily as oak.  I made two cross struts from some Douglas fir leftover from the porch columns that I had shipped in from California when I built the house.  I re-sawed the fir into two 2" thick pieces and cut an arch shape on the band saw, just to take a little weight off and add a little to the look.  I machined two 1-1/4" deep dadoes into the struts with the mill to receive oak frames.  The oak was leftover from a recent church addition and was already stained.  I sanded the stain off with my handy-dandy Telex sander--worked like a charm.  I was a little concerned with the red oak splitting under stress, which is why I machined the dadoes so deep--to get extra glue surface area.  The top is made of cedar leftover from the gate of a dumpster enclosure at a medical office building.  Everything is glued with only a few nails to hold the top while the glue set.  The whole shebang clamps into the bindings as one unit, so the skis are still usable for their intended purpose, or if I ever need $15.

The kids and I spent Sunday afternoon at the local sledding hill and had a blast.  All three of us can fit handily on the deck and it zips right along.  I also found that it makes pulling two children up the hill reasonably doable.  Good fun.

Shovels and Ladders

Friday afternoon was winding down into evening.  At 4:30, the office thins out and I usually can get a couple more hours in without the phones ringing or other interruptions.

The phone rang.

It was the storage facility manager.  We handle property maintenance for this facility, and one of the tenants said he heard a loud "bang" and his roof started to leak.  Nice.  There is proof of order in the universe in that these things always happen at 4:30 on Friday, after all the "technicians" have gone home.  Einstein may have solved his Unified Theory had he only known where to look for evidence.

Having been in this business for a long time, and given the description of the location of the problem, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened, and it was not a pretty thought.  As luck would have it, this occurred directly between my own personal unit and the taller building adjacent.  Some quick mental calculations led me to the conclusion that the roof had collapsed on my side of the wall, taking down the wall flashing, due to a snow drift that built up against the higher wall.  This is common (snow drift, not collapse).  Knowing that the lower building was in existence first, it was unlikely that the roof was reinforced  for a heavier show drift condition when the larger building was added later.  I've seen this before.  The best part was that the tenant was a piano restoration company; you can guess what was in the unit.

I had a pretty clear image in my mind of working well into the night as I drove the too short trip to the storage facility.  The only bright side I could think of was that my own stuff, probably buried in the avalanche, was mostly outdoor furniture, and was probably not ruined.

But luck was on my side.  When I got to the scene of the crime, there was no visual evidence of a roof collapse.  It turns out that the complaint was greatly exaggerated.  That almost never happens.  My diagnosis was partially correct:  there was a big drift up against the leaking wall.  And the lower roof was not reinforced when the upper roof was built.  So the lower roof was sagging enough to tear loose the flashing, but not collapse.  I knew that there was no way to repair this in the snow, but I had to at least relieve the pressure.  So you guessed it: I got to combine my two favorite tools into one job--a rare occasion.  I got to use a ladder and a shovel at the same time.

I set up my folding ladder (I keep a folding ladder in my truck for just such occasions) on the icy, snowy pavement and leaned it up against icicle laden gutter.  The storage manager held it from slipping out from under me and threw up a vintage snow shovel once I was securely standing on the ice and snow covered metal roof.  For the uninitiated, there is nothing known to man more slippery than ice and snow on oily metal (think Chevy Chase on the oiled up saucer in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation).  The drift was about 3 feet deep.  I began shoveling the snow off the roof with a shovel that was akin to a license plate nailed to a broomstick.  About ten minutes in, the tenant who had called in produced a nice plastic scoop shovel, which greatly increased that rate at which I was approaching a heart attack.  As I worked, huffing and puffing the cold air into my already compromised lungs, feeling the burn in my chest and drowning in phlegm, I thought about how lucky I was.

Channeling Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, I ran through my initial assessment and, compared to the reality of the situation, this was quite a mild outcome.  No roof collapse is always good.  I had a ladder and someone to hold it, keeping my brains securely contained within my skull.  Definite plus.  A shovel was provided, and even an upgrade arrived, saving me from having to procure one after a record snowfall.  Bonus.  I was able to shovel the snow off the roof and leave it where it hit the ground, as it blocked only my own unit, and I knew that I would not complain to the manager.  Sweet.  And, the roof was only about 9' high, so my acrophobia was not at issue. Best of all, the few times I fell on my ass, I did not slide off the roof edge. 

So in retrospect, I have to say that Friday must have been my lucky day.  Truly, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds".  Should've bought a lotto ticket.

Belt Sander Conversion

I am the caretaker of a hand-me-down belt sander from my father.  It is an old Sears model with a 4" wide belt and in good working order.  It's vintage is such that requires both hands and one's undivided attention to use.  And it is heavy.  I have stripped and refinished wood floors with only this tool (although the floors were in a rental unit and admittedly, the flatness was of little concern).

Not finding the tool useful very often, I decided that its heft lent to a more stationary than hand-held use, so I mounted it in this little jig and it works pretty well.

This adds to my previous sander project, the Telex conversion.  In remodeling a medical building, I found a couple of little treasures.  First, a medical gas cylinder that was just the right size for my MIG welder, so I had it re-certified for Argon and now own my own little tank for free.  Second, there was Telex computer equipment that was obviously outdated as it was left behind by the previous tenant.  I gutted the cabinet and mounted it on casters (I mount everything on casters).  I installed a small 120V electric motor in the cabinet and sourced a roller, pulley and belt from the surplus store.  I cut a specifically sized hole in the top of the cabinet for only the top portion of the roller to fit through.  I covered the roller with adhesive backed Velcro, and bought Velcro backed rolls of various grit sandpaper.  The Velcro was astonishingly expensive.  The belt simply wraps from the pulley around the roller.  This works OK, though I will someday install a separate pulley on the roller, too--if you let the work piece rub against the belt, it sometimes will knock the belt off the roller.  With sandpaper wrapped around the roller, you have a nice surface sander, about 14" wide.  I have the exposure set up to take very slight passes so as not to dig into the wood.  It works well and the dust is trapped in the upper compartment of the machine.  I put a little removable door where the disk drive used to be so I can vacuum out the trapped dust.  I wired the switch to turn on the motor and one side of the outlet--the other side is always hot when the machine is plugged in.  This allows me to plug a shop vac that is activated when the sander is activated, or use the hot side as a convenience outlet. The original cooling fan is still installed and I wired it to come on with the switch as well, so the motor gets ventilation in the cabinet.  I still need to tune up the roller exposure with the top and brace the top better so that it is dead flat, as it takes a little more bite on one side than the other.  But in concept it works well.

Snow Removal Update

I went back to the yard office this morning to let our fleet mechanic know that we would need the bobcat and snowblower at a jobsite tomorrow to dig the snow out of a walk-out basement under construction in order to keep working on the foundations.  He had the snowblower under wrench.  He had sucked another Welcome mat into the tines this morning.

What is wrong with people?

Well here is the text of a fun little letter I had to write today. One of our clients decided to hold $20,000.00 retainage because one of their low life employees saw an opportunity for some paid vacation by making a Worker's Comp. claim because paint fumes made his/her tummy hurt. I wish this sort of thing was shocking and unheard of:

 Microsoft Word - Retainage Letter Rev 2-11-10

Snow Removal in Half Hour Increments

Living in south-western Ohio my entire life, and working in the construction industry, weather has always been kind of a "whatever" thing. As they say around here, "if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes and it will change". So I never got too uptight about a little snow. As in, shoveling it. In my experience, it eventually melts and I could never see the point in wasting a lot of time and energy doing what nature will do on its own in a few days. Driving a 4WD vehicle helps with this philosophy.

Sometimes, though, we get enough snow that it really can't be left alone. This is especially true now that I have young children that have to get to school and a minivan with Japanese ground clearance. As luck would have it, this past Friday, we got exactly that much snow, and were expecting several guests in the 60 plus age bracket Saturday evening.

As a former construction laborer in my "apprentice" years, and a long time homeowner, there are 2 tools that I am loathe to use: ladders and shovels. I woke up Saturday morning resolute in my decision that the only way to deal with the white menace must involve internal combustion. Having the proper equipment would surely cut my time working on this to nearly nothing, and I could get some work in on the "troll" before guests arrived.

So I drove to my office/construction yard, which by design is only a few miles from my home, and found the gate to be well embedded in a 3 foot drift. Not a good start. I climbed the fence and waded to the yard office to get keys for the Bobcat and dump truck. I started the dump truck to let it run while I would "quickly" plow the snow away from the gate. Having 2 Bobcats was lucky, as one had a flat tire (I swear I had those tires foam filled) and the other had forks on it instead of a bucket. Choosing to change the bucket instead of the tire, I started the Bobcat to let it run. There was a pickup truck parked in front of the dump truck, buried in another drift, so I started to dig it out while the Bobcat warmed up. Then while the pickup warmed up, I got back to the Bobcat and realized that it was nearly out of diesel. No problem, we have a diesel tank in the yard--I'll just fill'er up.

It took about half an hour to get the bucket mounted and plow my way back to the diesel tank. I cranked on the pump for quite a few minutes until I realized that it was empty. I decided to gamble on having enough fuel to get the yard plowed enough to get the dump truck and trailer out. About another half hour or two later I had the path to the gate cleared and most of the yard plowed. I began to suspect that either the fuel gauge was inaccurate, or some sort of Hanukkah thing was happening with the diesel. Knowing that the dump would never pull the loaded trailer up the slight grade to the main parking lot in the snow, I pulled it out empty to load the Bobcat up on plowed and level pavement. Then I set about getting the snow blower.

The snow blower was kept in the nice warm yard office, so it started right up. "This will be easy", I thought, "so I might as well clear the office walks so the crew has one less thing to worry about Monday". I very quickly found the Welcome mat buried in the snow. A nice heavy rubber Welcome mat will pretty much stop a snow blower dead when it gets sucked into the tines. About a half hour later I had cut the mat into pieces and extracted the pieces with pliers. I finished blowing the snow, but the blower didn't seem to have much power. I would have thought a 7 HP motor would do better with less than 2 feet of snow drift. But I managed to nurse it along to finish the job.

By now I was well learned in the effect that throwing snow into the wind has on a beard. Looking like Jeremiah Johnson, I loaded the Bobcat and snow blower onto the trailer to finally get to the job at hand--clearing my driveway. I stopped and got diesel on the way. When I got to the house and unloaded the snow blower, it wouldn't stay running. After a few hardy pulls, I had ripped the starter rope right out of the motor. About a half hour later, kneeling in the snow, I had re-wound the starter rope, using a knife, a propane torch, and a pair of pliers. I managed to get the thing started and running well enough to get it up into my garage where I could work on it out of the snow. Conscious of the time, I prioritized clearing the driveway and the street enough to allow for guest parking.

A few half hours later on the Bobcat, I had managed to clear the cul-de-sac and my driveway without damaging anything. I then set about the task of getting the snow blower running properly to clear the walk. Turns out that the crew had been using the blower with the choke on full to keep it running. I thought this was odd, since we have an on-staff mechanic who keeps the fleet in pretty good running order. I managed to tweak the carburetor back into the realm of normal and got the walk cleared. Took about a half hour.

I then loaded everything back onto the trailer and returned it to its proper place. Got back home in about a half hour. Took a shower and got dressed in about a half hour, just in time for guests to arrive.

Thank goodness for time-saving machinery.  It would have taken all day to shovel the drive by hand.

The "Troll"

Well, here is the "Troll". Total cost is about $8 for the casters from the China Depot (Harbor Freight). I took a piece of scrap steel from a building project--the galvanized angle--and welded a piece of unistrut I had laying around from another project. Then I took apart one of the 2 double casters I bought and used sex-bolts left over from door closures as axle studs. I just drilled the 3/8" hole and hammered them in, hoping the knurled ends would hold them in place. It turned out to be a bit of a tight fit, so I welded them in place, too. The wheels are set up to put the angle very close to the ground. Too close, in fact, because when I tested the whole thing with a 12' sheet of drywall, the slight imperfections in the slab over 12' caused the board to rub the floor. I fixed this by gluing a piece of scrap Corian (I had laying around from a kitchen remodel 4 houses ago) to the top of the angle in order to raise the board up about 5/8". The double caster is mounted higher so that the wheels don't contact the ground until you tilt back the handle a bit. In all, it works as intended.

Improved Log-splitting ax

Having tried a variety of log-splitting tools--axes and mauls, not machines--I have yet to find one ready made with the right combination of weight, handle length and material, and edge. I have a 16 pound all steel model which is completely useless unless you need a boat anchor. I clamped it in my mill and tried to shave some metal off while reshaping the steel 30 degree isosceles triangle into something that had a prayer of penetrating a log with less than hydraulic force, but in the end, it is still too heavy and the too-short steel handle will transfer all of the force directly to your spine. No good.

Inversely, the various fiberglass handle mauls I have are the equivalent of trying to whip the log into submission. It feel like half the force of your swing is absorbed into the handle on impact. No good.

I also have a nice Finnish model with a very excellent bit, but its light and the handle is some silly molded plastic tube. And the Europeans must like to stand very close to the log, because the models Ive looked at--hand made and very expensive--all seem to have short handles, like 30" or so. Very uncomfortable for me, even though I am not tall. I like a long handle so when it glances off a log, there is a little leverage giving you a chance to steer it away from your shin. Plus, I think head speed is where the force is generated, which is why I like a very specific weight range, so as to get good speed and force without wearing myself out.

My current thinking is that a good sharp axe head weighing about 5-6 pounds with a 36" hickory handle is the best for me. I can swing it until the handle breaks or I have enough wood, without getting too tired. And the handle is easy to glue back together, usually. I've improved the standard axe, which is a bit light, by welding a wedge on either side of the bit so that a good swing will drive the log apart further than the standard bit will. This is especially useful when the bit gets stuck in the log but doesn't split it. A 2 pound sledge with a 24" handle can be used to drive it through with one hand, while holding the axe handle and the log steady with the other. I call this the "windmill" technique and it works well for me.

This is the prototype version, or I guess "beta" or maybe "beata". Having a donated axe bit without a handle, a handle without a bit, and a couple small pieces of tool steel, I decided to put this together. The bit eye was a little smaller than the handle I had--odd--so I had to whittle it down in the band saw. It was homeless because my "windmill" technique is hard on cheap axe bits--I had cracked the original bit through the eye and the welds did not hold--I think because the casting was really poor--couldn't have been my welding. So I cut the tool steel into 2 wedges with a angle grinder and cut-off wheel and welded them to the bit. You can see that I didn't take too much time with the layout, as this was deemed experimental. It works pretty well, so I may take the time to do a nicer job on the next version.

Drywall Hanging Tools

Well, the great deal I found on the drywall lift has had a glitch--they are "temporarily out of stock" expecting more lifts in late February. Hmm...wondering if the deal is going to fall through in February--sounds suspicious. However, I can keep busy hanging lower wall boards and small sheets until then. I also have plenty of wiring and insulation to do in other areas.

This weekend, I am going to make a modified "troll" for moving and hanging the 12' panels by myself. Even with the lift, hanging and moving low wall panels is difficult because the lift doesnt hold the board low enough--not designed for that. A "troll" is a simple dolly comprised of an angle at the floor on 2 wheels with a handle. By placing the board upright in the angle, you can wheel the board where you want it. I will modify this by adding a third wheel perpendicular to the 2 wheels and mounted slightly higher on the angle so as not to impede rolling the board in line with its length. The third wheel will help to position the board against the wall by tipping back on the handle slightly, which will also lift the board slightly to bring it tight to the bottom of the already in place upper wall board. I'll post some pictures.

Finishing the Basement

Currently working on finishing my basement. Having designed and built the house about 3.5 years ago, I figured I had taken enough time to recuperate and should get busy finishing things up. Plan is to add a bedroom, finish the bathroom, a studio, storage room, and Recreation room. basement is about 2000SF +/-, so it will take a while.

Starting with the bedroom, I have framed the walls, insulated, and started to hang drywall. I rented a drywall lift last weekend and it worked just ducky, so I have found one to purchase with free shipping and it should arrive soon.