With the wire frame tunnel in place it was time to frame out the ends. It was not as easy as I had hoped given that the perfect semi-circular arc was not, well, perfect. Nor was it even symmetrical for both ends. Mostly a semi-circular arch, but not perfect. That meant that every stick had to be custom cut and fit before assembling with deck screws. plus, the pile driver/local rocky dirt combination meant that the posts themselves were out of perfect by about an eighth of an inch. All of that compounded to make sure the assembling of the end framing was a tedious process.
I did have the advantage(?) of lots of recycled windows and doors. When you have replaced all the windows in two houses, you’ve got plenty of inventory. There are two doors at each end, one screened and the other glass. All of the windows will be openable as screened awning windows once the weather is right in the early summer (our “frost free” date is May 30).
Notwithstanding the fact that the arch at the east end of the space was 2″ off-axis due to whatever factor — lunar forces, prevailing trade winds, inherent torque in the raw material — it was an easy enough problem to rectify once I recognized it.
Compounding all of the tedium was that we were at the time of year when I lose usable working light by about 4PM, at least “usable” for these tired old dysfunctional eyes. But after about four days of effort the ends were framed and mostly glazed. I say “mostly” because we are awaiting the arrival of the solar ventilation fan to get installed before everything gets buttoned up.
With beautiful autumn weather in the air and the hillside bush hogging (mostly) completed, for a couple days I turned my attention to the last remains of the shack that was once someone’s home a hundred years ago. My brother, nephew and I dismantled and salvaged a great deal of the lumber from the building nine (!) years ago before I was so rudely accosted by a wheelbarrow and the whole project was interrupted. By the time I had recovered fully from my broken hip it was late winter and the inspiration to finish the task had passed.
Flash forward to now.
As I was wrestling the bush hog around the site recently, I thought the time had come to finally clean up the mess. I had hoped that there might be some last vestiges to salvage, even if for nothing other than firewood, but that was not the case for 99% of the detritus. It just all needed to be piled in the truck and hauled to the burn pit at the dump.
Three heaping truckloads later all that was left were two large timbers. These were the only elements worth salvaging, and even then it was just for firewood. It’s a real shame, as they were still bearing the axe marks of the men who made this home probably around 1900 or so.
While working on the greenhouse I brought down my favorite sawhorses but found the ground to be too uneven to use them. Perhaps I should have chosen my Butterfly Sawhorse instead. In a moment of inspiration I realized I could create a stable workstation by simply screwing the two horses together at a right angle to create a rough triangle configuration.
As I assembled the “tunnel” of the greenhouse from the cattle panel fencing I noted a lot of wiggle in the structure, even after tying all the sections together with zip ties at their edges. Yeah, yootoobers swear it can withstand fierce winter weather but my friend Floyd over on the east side of the county, and whose greenhouse was absolutely the inspiration for this one, indicated that our occasional heavy snow (~18″) caused him some problems. Being the over-builder that I am, I decided to add curved ribs inside the tunnel to beef it up.
My first step was to configure to tunnel to be symmetrical which required aligning the center of the arched panels with the center line of the overall structure. Using a simple plumb bob I pushed and pulled the sections to be at least along the same center line. I’d hoped that this combined with the rib-building process would make all the arch curves identical.
With string lashing to keep the arches aligned with the center line, along with diagonal wooden braces, I set about the task.
Using my little table saw more than I have in a long time I sliced off a pile of 3/16″ strips to build the laminations. For the most part simply clamping the strips to the underside of the arches imposed a semi-circular arc, and this was enhanced by the continued build-up of the laminations.
A combination of spring clamps by the bushel, T3 glue and a multitude of crown staples the ribs began to take shape. The enhanced structural robustness became increasingly clear as the glue dried, which took about three days given the moisture content of the PT SYP lumber strips and the weather itself.
All in all it took me almost three days to get the 10-layer ribs finished, but they are now in place for the next step, framing in the ends of the tunnels and adding doors and windows.
Seriously, the structure is now strong enough that I could crawl all the way to the top to staple the fence grid to the ribs.
My recent conversation with retired broadcaster Brian Wilson has been posted for his Now For Something Completely Different podcast. It’s a bit more pungent than usual, as it is an election post-mortem. If you are enamored (or outraged) by my observations on the society around us, check it out.
Recently my friend JD came for a visit, bearing a crosscut slab from a cherry tree that fell across his driveway. He wanted to turn it into a small tea table to hold his cup of morning coffee out on the porch.
I thought I might be able to smooth and flatten it only using planes, but the amount to remove (~3/4″ of very hard end grain) was simply too much. So, I spent a couple hours sawing to get the two faces coplanar.
After that I did most of the work with my trusty #5 set up as a foreplane, followed by a companion #5 set up as a smoother.
Some vigorous work with my user-made scraper, picked up somewhere along my path, and I was done.
So a few hours of good fellowship and labor it was ready to go home with him for attaching the legs and finishing. At first he was dismayed at the “washed out” nondescript appearance, but I assured him the rich cherry color would soon return. Since it will be out on the porch for his morning coffee he will finish it with some thinned polyurethane for the greatest penetration and protection. I’m awaiting the finished pictures myself.
The conceptual core of this greenhouse design is an arched tunnel made from heavyweight metal grids, known as “cattle panels [fencing].” In fact that is what the product is used for, to fence cows in or out, and it is robust enough to withstand the rubbing of cattle against it. Even our little feed-and-seed hardware store in the middle of the least populous county east of the Mississippi has a stack of it out in the yard, and since the dimensions are 52″ x 16′ I was glad they could and did deliver it to the greenhouse site.
Unfortunately I failed to get a picture of my pile of eight panels, but here is one lying on the ground. They are #6 gauge so plenty stout.
These panels are not heavy but they are unwieldy. Think of trying to handle a full sheet of 1/4″ luan plywood in a windstorm. Once I got the hang of handling these panels and setting them in place on top of the knee walls it went fairly quickly. I first strung parallel lines on top of the wall sills, then drove in nails along those lines. The nails were proud about an inch to “catch” the ends of the fence panels as I placed them where they belonged. In an hour or so they were all in place.
I drove fence staples all along the bottom edges of the panels then joined the panel edges together with zip ties along the joints to yield a single 30-foot panel from the multiple individual four-foot panels.
This is going to be a marvelous addition to the homestead.
Most folks building this style of greenhouse simply drape it with plastic at this point, assuming (correctly) that the arched configuration could withstand all manner of problematic weather. I know this to be true but it felt a little flimsy to me, so I decided to build structural ribs to enhance the robustness of the arch.
Three Saturday’s ago I went to our friends Pat and Valerie for their annual apple butter day. It’s a local tradition that we have gladly glommed on to.
Great fun and fellowship abounded.
At the start, apple chips are just dumped into the copper cauldron and stirred with a canoe paddle.
There is a lot of standing around while we watch the person with the paddle. This is where the tall tales and gripes about taxes emerge.
As it cooks down more apple chips are added and the stirring switches to a custom designed stirring paddle.
Hours later it is all cooked down and ready for adding the spices and sugar. Occasionally they make a batch of sugar free apple butter, that is the stuff we like. But this was a sugared batch.
Once that is all cooked and stirred some more, Pat conducts an “all finished” viscosity test by depositing a dollop on the underside of a sauce pan. Too runny? Cook some more. When it is ready it gets canned in jars.
At this point my job was to carry the cases of still-hot jars into the sugar house for later labeling and, eventually, selling.
The big highlight is that after all the work is done, Pat’s sister breaks out the bin of fresh, still-warm biscuits we use to scrape the residue out the cauldron. The moaning of delight commenced.
There is no part of this video that I did not find captivating. The blend of traditional excellence with modern technology is simply sublime. It appears to be “manufactured housing” and if so, there is much we can learn from it.
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