I learned with sadness this morning of the recent death of Philippe Lafargue, my friend and collaborator for more than 35 years. I will write more about Philippe soon, but he was recently profiled in the lostartpress.com blog.
Our last in-person intersection was when the Deluxe Edition of the marquetry edition premiered in 2013, and we signed copies together at Woodworking in America. In the years since, Team Roubo was the very model of modern collaboration via the interwebz, as we would send updated versions of documents from the Virginia Highlands to Vermont to southern France effortlessly.
Michele and I will soldier on, but it will definitely not be the same.
My ongoing acquisition of cardboard for Mrs. Barn’s use in the various gardens — it is used as a weed-stopping underlayment underneath mulch — somehow led me to this video. The geek in me is often entranced by peculiar applications of the sciences, especially materials science, and this fit that bill precisely.
Ultra-light and ultra-strong panel fabrication is available in the aerospace and marine worlds, but at GREAT cost. I became acquainted with a student who worked for a custom outfitter of tailor-made airplane interiors, and the costs he recounted of both materials and fabrication/fitting processes was breath taking. Marine plywood, sometimes a couple hundred dollars a sheet, can be dwarfed in price by the composite veneered or laminated panels used in the super elegant interiors of megabuck private planes.
In addition to laying up my own plywood with some of the pile of veneers I have up in the loft, I will almost certainly try to explore this method to make panels for various applications. Sometimes amusing myself with “What if…?” questions is all the justification I need.
Things are getting closer to wrap-up with the greenhouse project, as I built the steps on the bank from the yard up to the terrace. I will probably build a second set of steps at the other end, but we are really getting close to the point where we can say we have a first-class functioning greenhouse. This was an “in process” image, the steps are now all done and a great addition to the endeavor. We no longer have to trek diagonally across a steep bank that is frequently slick with dew.
A couple weeks ago I followed Mrs. Barn’s protocol and covered the entire floor with cardboard once she had settled on a configuration for the space. This step really cuts down on weed encroachment once it is covered with a layer of mulch.
I also placed four black painted drums in the space, one in each corner. Once I install the spigot kits near the bottom of each drum they will serve two functions. First is to provide water to the plants since there is no hard plumbed water line, so these will have to be refilled by hose on occasion. Second, though, is to serve as heat sinks in the winter when the black paint and water inside the drum is heated in the winter time to keep the overnight temps moderated. At least that’s the plan. I also may wind up putting more thermal mass in the space, such as sand-filled concrete blocks painted black to absorb solar warming.
With that all done I hauled up a truckload of mulch to cover the carboard on the floor. It transforms the space visually and functionally as sometimes walking over layers of cardboard is a slippery proposition.
I will shortly add some benches to the covered-but-not-enclosed end of the structure where many plants will be kept as a intermediary space.
Our noodling between now and winter will be to get a handle on temperature controls for both heat and cold. Even though the enclosed space has a shade cloth over it the temperatures on a sunny day can get pretty extreme inside, much more than our one little 12-inch fan can handle. I’ve got another fan on order, and hope that two will do the trick. I am not pleased and cannot recommend the one we bought, but it is here and installed and works, some of the time.
The next update from the greenhouse will focus on Mrs. Barn’s experimentation with self-irrigating planters.
While cleaning up/out the big shed in Maryland I came across this big stout bedroom dresser (pic looks odd because it is standing up on one end). I vaguely remember someone gave it to me to empty out an old house and the piece is a beast.
Combined with the inspiration from BobR’s recent video on making himself a new workbench, my “I wonder if…” brain got to thinking. Can a massive but useless bedroom dresser be turned into a premium workbench? I guess I’ll find out.
I’ll be pursuing this project once I get some other workbench projects out of the way. In the meantime, I’ve got a Japanese planing beam and my Ultimate Portable Workbench to finish up.
A couple weeks ago we ventured back into Mordor to do some yard work and house work in preparation for the return of Youngerbarndottir’s family to the region, as they might need to encamp at that house for an indeterminate time.
Unbeknownst to us there had been a microburst storm a few nights earlier and we were greeted with the sight of a large chunk of maple tree laying in the yard and on the deck. While I had brought my chainsaws, this was an unexpected, uh, pleasure.
To give you a sense of the scale, the trunk snapped off about twenty feet up the tree, and the base of the snapped off section is just under 24 inches in diameter.
I have made no bones about my fandom for the Craftsman 20V product line, owning several drills, saws, string trimmers, and chainsaws. Are they the “best” performing cordless tools? No. Are they the least expensive cordless tools? No. But I do judge them to be the best value of the type. (PS- as much as I would welcome Lowes/Ace/Craftsman to support and underwrite my tool acquisition disorder, these are all tools I bought myself.)
The 20V chainsaws are invaluable for routine yard work and even more demanding work. Just before leaving Shangri-la the little chainsaw made short work of a 12-inch locust post. With that in hand I worked many hours in cleaning up the tons of maple, one bite at a time. 75% of the cleanup was accomplished with the little 20V chainsaw, including sawing up to a foot of trunk. Admittedly it took a couple of fresh batteries, but I had them on hand, so it was no big deal. For the more routine cutting the trunk into roughly four-foot boles I used my gas-powered Stihl.
Although the silver maple is somewhat of a junk tree, I decided to salvage the best of the trunk stock for some future use. I was particularly interested in two crotches which will be turned into some sort of bowls on the lathe. But first, that will require fabricating an outboard turning plate on the ancient lathe my pal MikeM gave me eons ago. That will be its own series of posts later in the summer, I hope.
For the moment the boles are laying in the yard awaiting relocation to the old goat house where they will remain protected from weather and dry out slowly until I can cut them into whatever I need them to be.
Prior to fabricating and installing the new Coanda-style cover for my hydroelectric capturing box, every couple weeks I would notice a drop-off in the water flow to the turbine. Sometimes it stopped altogether. So, I had to turn off the water at the bottom, flip up the turbine housing and remove the nozzles. Invariably the orifice was crammed solid with a crawdad body, sometimes compressed to the point where I needed to drive it back out with a metal rod. It happened so much I kept a tool right there for the task.
With the former configuration the intake was covered with 1/4″ inch hardware cloth, even then the little crustaceans figured out how to get into the capturing box and were sucked into the pipeline. A minute or two and 1200-feet later they wound up crushed at the bottom when their carcasses were too large to fit through the turbine nozzles. Hence the need for regular clean-out.
Since I installed the new cover there have been zero crawdads in the nozzles. .
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