Ever since donsbarn.com went live I have been receiving notes about the display of the page on mobile devices. The issue was that the menu on the left did was not reduced on these devices, in effect obscuring the page itself.
To solve this problem Jason added a button at the bottom of the menu which will allow those viewers to reduce the menu and allow for viewing of the page content. It is a bit clunky as a solution, and in the future we are hoping to add a dynamic feature to allow for automatic reconfiguration amenable to mobile devices.
Stay tuned.
Don
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.
I am not particularly a “tool collector” but I am not adverse to acquiring items that will make me better at what I do, or to expand my capacity in the shop.
In the recent run-up to the French Oak Roubo Project I spent a fair bit of time tuning up and outfitting my carpenter/timber-framer’s tool tote that has served me well for over a quarter century for working on my home and barn.
Obviously, one tool integral to carpentry of almost any kind is a framing square, but a typical one is as ungainly in the tool box as it is useful on the job. In recent years I learned of a type of square known as a “take-down,” which allows the two blades of the square to be separated into two slender pieces. While this form is not especially rare, I was having trouble finding one I could afford so a couple months ago I asked Patrick Leach to be on the lookout for a nice “user” example to toss into my tote.
Last month Patrick wrote to say he had found one and shipped it down to me. It arrived the day I left home for our family reunion preceding FORP, so the timing was perfect. Patrick indicated the problems with the square – one side of one blade had a bit of surface rust – but indicated it would be the excellent “user tool” I had requested. Given the price he quoted I did not hesitate to purchase it. In fact it was much more than a “user quality” tool, it was a never used, still-in-the-original-scabbard square!
Sure there was that bit of rust, but it cleaned easily with a light buffing. I knew it had never been used because the dovetailed tongue that connects the two together had never been fitted to its mate, so the square could not even be assembled for use. A couple minutes of light surfacing with a fine diamond stone was all it took for the square to fit perfectly.
Into the tool tote it went, and it was used heavily in Barnesville by several of us there laying out the timber frame-style joints of the Roubo bench. The only thing I will do from this point is to possibly re-blue the formerly rusted areas, and to sew a new canvas sleeve to replace the original surrey-cloth scabbard, which will go into the preservation storage it deserves.
My name is Don, and I have Book Acquisition Disorder. In the midst of relocating for the first time since finishing college, this is a pretty weighty and voluminous problem.
I am of a generation and tradition that likes to possess books, lots of books, and to actually read them. (Well, I used to read a lot, before my eyes started going south I would typically read 200-500 pages a day.) To make things worse (?) whenever I head off down another rabbit trail — I am not ADHD, I am merely hyper-curious — I make a point of obtaining as much as possible that is written on the subject. The result? An estimated 2,000 books (?) about artistry, craftsmanship, chemistry and materials science.
When emptying my office in December after almost three decades working in the same facility it required four pickup truck loads to transport all those books the The Barn. Add to that inventory the huge pile of my books from home, probably even more than at the office, and you get a sense of the scale of the headache.
Compounding the problem is the fact that Mrs. Don has the affliction to the same degree but on entirely unrelated topics for the most part, so between the two of us we have a big problem on our hands.
The only practical way of dealing with this particular challenge is to transform a chunk of the barn into a full blown library, more precisely, the entire south third floor balcony. When finished the space will include almost 300 feet of shelving for books, with a single-slab trestle table measuring 16’ x 30” x 2” in the center of the space made from a ~150-year-old Eastern White Pine board I’ve been saving 30 years for just this moment.
Creating the Barn Biblioteca will take several months and many blog posts, so stay tuned.
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