Dealing With Book Acquisition Disorder 2

My quest to house fully the family book collection has led to the decision to construct a large library in The Barn, filling the entire third floor south balcony.  Since The Barn is not yet, ahem, completely critter-proof, this calls for enclosed bookcases.  Lots of them.

Last winter I constructed several fairly simple cases that will suffice completely for the task, and this summer I have begun making the glazed doors for them.

During a recent family reunion the menfolk kinfolk pitched in to spend part of a day rough cutting and initial preparations for the stock for twenty doors.  I had a fair bit of 5/4 x 6” southern yellow pine left over from laying the flooring two years ago so that is what we used.

After carrying the 16’ boards up the hill from the storage barn we used a trim carpenter’s chop saw to cut the boards into the four-foot sections I needed.  These were then fed through my ancient Ryobi AP-10 planer to get two clean sides, then ripped roughly in half, awaiting further refinement before being ready for actually making the doors.

The little Ryobi planer hummed along perfectly for a couple hours, somewhat astounding given its age and mileage.

An especially pleasing aspect of the adventure was that my hybrid power system – The Barn is completely off-grid with hydro-solar electricity generation, backed up with generators as necessary – performed equally well.  For about two hours we had both the planer and the table saw running simultaneously and the system was unfazed.

Nevertheless I have some upgrades in the works, including quadrupling my battery storage by adding a new bank of the largest 12-volt deep-cycle batteries on the market (each weighs just under 200 pounds.  In addition I have purchased five more of the Samsung photovoltaic cells to augment the three already at work.  Two of the new panels will be dedicated to stand-alone 12v system in The Barn to run the fan in the composting toilet or for those times when I just don’t need much power, to charge the batteries of my drill, etc., or when I am maintaining or just don’t want to turn the larger system on.

I’ve got more plans on the hydro side, such as replacing some of the plumbing at the bottom end of the penstock (the pipe that carries the water from the dam down to the turbine) and the addition of a second turbine, a cross-flow turbine to augment the current Pelton wheel turbine, which I will fabricate myself.

Stay tuned.