I have no experience but I've been doing this around the house for a couple of months and there are still flowers and nothing has died yet.
What did YOU do this weekend? (The Weekend Thread)
- Thread starter DrakkarTyrannis
- Start date
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jaxadam
Well-Known Member
I have no experience but I've been doing this around the house for a couple of months and there are still flowers and nothing has died yet.
This was our first time.
But look what showed up from Amazon today! Someone plans on keeping them alive!
High Plains Drifter
... drifting...
I need some of that food, jax.
After our recent winter storm that gave us 6" of snow and 164 hours of sub-freezing temps, our landscape plants aren't looking very good. We lost a gorgeous gardenia bush that my wife absolutely loved and almost all of our zone 8-10 plants look highly stressed or just all out dead. Not sure yet how our crepe myrtles are going to fare but I see a LOT of pruning in my future.
After our recent winter storm that gave us 6" of snow and 164 hours of sub-freezing temps, our landscape plants aren't looking very good. We lost a gorgeous gardenia bush that my wife absolutely loved and almost all of our zone 8-10 plants look highly stressed or just all out dead. Not sure yet how our crepe myrtles are going to fare but I see a LOT of pruning in my future.
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Millul
Well-Known Member
Cooking again, this time deer stew - well, shit came out amazing!
A bit of football playing (soccer, just to be clear...!) tomorrow morning should round the weekend up nicely.
A bit of football playing (soccer, just to be clear...!) tomorrow morning should round the weekend up nicely.
groverj3
Bioinformagician
Explaining to my buddy that I'm trying to write music with how time signatures work. When trying to write drum loops for him to play to, it wasn't matching up with a riff. I told him it was in an odd time signature and I needed to know how he wanted it counted. He sends me a guitar pro tab in 4/4, but it doesn't match what he played in the original recording. After some back and forth he revealed "Yeah, I just count it in 4 and make it fit." That means it's not in 4/4... Honesty though, smart dude, I think he just had kind of a mental block with this stuff and I think we made some progress.
p0ke
7-string guitard
I used to do that too before I figured out time signatures. I wrote a song that had an interlude part that was in a whole different tempo and signature, but I made it repeat just enough to fit the original tempo and 4/4, and all the notes ended up being something like 16th note dotted triplets or something
MFB
Banned
Bought a new mattress, upgraded from a full to a Queen sized and paid cash like a straight baller; there'll probably be several more furniture purchases in the future as I'm desperately trying to move out of my current apartment, and then it's another year or two before a house I think
Grindspine
likes pointy things
I tried running in a run & shoot (paintball) biathalon.
I was only able to make it half way through before I had some breathing issues due to allergies & cold, dry air. At least I showed up and tried something different. It was a bit disappointing though considering how hard I have been hitting the cardio. I was hoping to at least finish the race.
I was only able to make it half way through before I had some breathing issues due to allergies & cold, dry air. At least I showed up and tried something different. It was a bit disappointing though considering how hard I have been hitting the cardio. I was hoping to at least finish the race.
CaliA
SS.org Regular
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For the first 8 hours, I worked as a remote copywriter with employee monitoring software. Then I went to the club and danced like never before..
Millul
Well-Known Member
More cooking...deer stew this time, came out excellent!
Had a baller sunday, playing some soccer with a few friends (no contact, safe distance only...covid-rules compliant!) and then had pizza and beer out in the sun.
Closed the day with a gin tonic at a friend's house, and life felt really good.
Had a baller sunday, playing some soccer with a few friends (no contact, safe distance only...covid-rules compliant!) and then had pizza and beer out in the sun.
Closed the day with a gin tonic at a friend's house, and life felt really good.
spudmunkey
Well-Known Member
I'm putting this here, because this was SUPPOSED to have happened last weekend.
TLDR: We tried milling our own lumber from a tree in our back yard, I hit one of my screws with the chainsaw, and delayed our work by 2 days. Got a new saw, so scroll down to see pics of the 2-day (a weekend's-worth" progress).
The long story:
We had a tree taken down on Friday because it was tilting over the back of our house (the house pre-dated the tree by at least 20 years, so it wasn't a particularly "important" tree).
This mature shade tree was one of the reasons we bought this house over another, so it was a huge bummer. We hated the idea of all of the tree going to waste, especially because we couldn't find anyone who could mill the lumber in our back yard (the path to the back yard is only 2'11"), nor could we find anyone willing to move an 1,100lb, 27"wide log down that same corridor, so that someone with a trailer-mounted bandsaw mill could mill it.
So we decided we'd try milling it ourselves via an "Alaskan chainsaw mill", and drying it on our back yard.
I'll note that I've only ever actually used a 13" chainsaw about 30 years ago for a single cut with my grandpa, and then a 9" battery-powered pole chainsaw for the last couple of years.
So. After a metric-shit-ton of research and YouTubin', we bought the chainsaw mill, and the largest rental chainsaw I could find was 28", so I drove 2 hours to pick it up Friday evening.
On Saturday, we started work at 8am, to complete the last of the prepwork needed to get started on the milling. At 9:00AM, we started the chainsaw for the first time.
At 9:02am, we were done.
And by "done", I mean that I forgot that I mounted the guide rails in to the log in two places NOT with the 4" screw I was using everywhere else, but with a 5.25" screw in this spot. I hit the screw 2" into the very first cut. I didn't realize it, so I tried to force my way through, thinking maybe chain-sawing wet wood like this was just that hard. I kept pushing. And pushing. Until I glanced up, and noticed the screw head. I turned off the chainsaw, and pulled it out of the shallow kerf I had made. I got down on my knee and looked into the slot, and saw a bright shiny metal spot right in the middle.
I only had the one chain. And no local store sold replacement chains for a 28" long bar. The rental shop was closed over the weekend. The file size needed to sharpen this specific chain wasn't stocked in any of the local stores (and I've never hand-sharpened anything before, so that would have been a crap-shoot anyway). The whole weekend, the 4 hour round trip, and the $114 chainsaw rental was wasted. I returned the saw on Monday morning.
OK, so the rest of this wasn't technically "the weekend", but would have been had I not been a moron.
I found out about a closer equipment place (30 mins, rather than 2 hours) that actually had a 36" saw, the size I actually needed. So...I picked it up Monday night, and we started work Tuesday morning. I also asked for a spare chain, and we have plenty of fuel and bar & chain oil.
How it started:
(that longest log is 9'2" long. The "ladder" on the sawhorses was just there while I was constructing it from three 10ft sections of super/power/uni-strut)
How it went:
Zombie boy (with a bite taken out of it's head) says "hi"
It's just American Elm, so the wanna-be koa-looking coloring and stripes won't last once it's dried...but still pretty for a couple of hours.
The end of Day 2. One more day, tomorrow. Ran into some small engine troubles with the chainsaw. All of a sudden, around noon, I couldn't get it started. We've already refueled 4-5 times, the air filter looked OK, the choke butterfly was still working, it wasn't flooded...only thing I could think of was that there wasn't a spark when I tried to ground it on the engine block, but I know that's not the best way to check for spark. So, we lost half of today. Got it swapped out for another unit at 5PM tonight, and this is how far we've gotten so far. This is the main trunk of the tree, a 9'2" log that was about 22"-27+" wide, and one 45" x about 16-18" log. All milled to 2.5" thickness.
Tomorrow is the last day with a chainsaw, so I'm really hoping it goes smoothly. We have two 42" logs to go.
Elm is cheap, so we probably could have bought all of this lumber for the same cost as the purchase of the chainsaw mill, the uni-strut guide rails, and chainsaw rental...but we would have been heart-broken if this whole tree would have been just sliced up into pieces small enough to be carried to the street, and thrown into their wood chipper.
I want to make a headboard out of the two largest slabs, with integrated lighting, and a welded steel frame. But, since this tree was just felled on Friday, I've got about 2-3 years before I need to re-learn how to weld (something i haven't done in 25+ years) before the wood would be dry enough to bring inside, to then dry for another year or so in the garage to get it to the ~7-9% needed for an interior project.
[/coolstorybro]
TLDR: We tried milling our own lumber from a tree in our back yard, I hit one of my screws with the chainsaw, and delayed our work by 2 days. Got a new saw, so scroll down to see pics of the 2-day (a weekend's-worth" progress).
The long story:
We had a tree taken down on Friday because it was tilting over the back of our house (the house pre-dated the tree by at least 20 years, so it wasn't a particularly "important" tree).
This mature shade tree was one of the reasons we bought this house over another, so it was a huge bummer. We hated the idea of all of the tree going to waste, especially because we couldn't find anyone who could mill the lumber in our back yard (the path to the back yard is only 2'11"), nor could we find anyone willing to move an 1,100lb, 27"wide log down that same corridor, so that someone with a trailer-mounted bandsaw mill could mill it.
So we decided we'd try milling it ourselves via an "Alaskan chainsaw mill", and drying it on our back yard.
I'll note that I've only ever actually used a 13" chainsaw about 30 years ago for a single cut with my grandpa, and then a 9" battery-powered pole chainsaw for the last couple of years.
So. After a metric-shit-ton of research and YouTubin', we bought the chainsaw mill, and the largest rental chainsaw I could find was 28", so I drove 2 hours to pick it up Friday evening.
On Saturday, we started work at 8am, to complete the last of the prepwork needed to get started on the milling. At 9:00AM, we started the chainsaw for the first time.
At 9:02am, we were done.
And by "done", I mean that I forgot that I mounted the guide rails in to the log in two places NOT with the 4" screw I was using everywhere else, but with a 5.25" screw in this spot. I hit the screw 2" into the very first cut. I didn't realize it, so I tried to force my way through, thinking maybe chain-sawing wet wood like this was just that hard. I kept pushing. And pushing. Until I glanced up, and noticed the screw head. I turned off the chainsaw, and pulled it out of the shallow kerf I had made. I got down on my knee and looked into the slot, and saw a bright shiny metal spot right in the middle.
I only had the one chain. And no local store sold replacement chains for a 28" long bar. The rental shop was closed over the weekend. The file size needed to sharpen this specific chain wasn't stocked in any of the local stores (and I've never hand-sharpened anything before, so that would have been a crap-shoot anyway). The whole weekend, the 4 hour round trip, and the $114 chainsaw rental was wasted. I returned the saw on Monday morning.
OK, so the rest of this wasn't technically "the weekend", but would have been had I not been a moron.
I found out about a closer equipment place (30 mins, rather than 2 hours) that actually had a 36" saw, the size I actually needed. So...I picked it up Monday night, and we started work Tuesday morning. I also asked for a spare chain, and we have plenty of fuel and bar & chain oil.
How it started:
(that longest log is 9'2" long. The "ladder" on the sawhorses was just there while I was constructing it from three 10ft sections of super/power/uni-strut)
How it went:
Zombie boy (with a bite taken out of it's head) says "hi"
It's just American Elm, so the wanna-be koa-looking coloring and stripes won't last once it's dried...but still pretty for a couple of hours.
The end of Day 2. One more day, tomorrow. Ran into some small engine troubles with the chainsaw. All of a sudden, around noon, I couldn't get it started. We've already refueled 4-5 times, the air filter looked OK, the choke butterfly was still working, it wasn't flooded...only thing I could think of was that there wasn't a spark when I tried to ground it on the engine block, but I know that's not the best way to check for spark. So, we lost half of today. Got it swapped out for another unit at 5PM tonight, and this is how far we've gotten so far. This is the main trunk of the tree, a 9'2" log that was about 22"-27+" wide, and one 45" x about 16-18" log. All milled to 2.5" thickness.
Tomorrow is the last day with a chainsaw, so I'm really hoping it goes smoothly. We have two 42" logs to go.
Elm is cheap, so we probably could have bought all of this lumber for the same cost as the purchase of the chainsaw mill, the uni-strut guide rails, and chainsaw rental...but we would have been heart-broken if this whole tree would have been just sliced up into pieces small enough to be carried to the street, and thrown into their wood chipper.
I want to make a headboard out of the two largest slabs, with integrated lighting, and a welded steel frame. But, since this tree was just felled on Friday, I've got about 2-3 years before I need to re-learn how to weld (something i haven't done in 25+ years) before the wood would be dry enough to bring inside, to then dry for another year or so in the garage to get it to the ~7-9% needed for an interior project.
[/coolstorybro]
Last edited:
High Plains Drifter
... drifting...
All I see is a chicken looking down at the ground with a chili-pepper tattoo on his shoulder.
That's a pretty damned riveting account of your ordeal. Looks as if there's some really nice slabs in there. Very cool that you were able to save and repurpose the tree. I've cut up a lot of trees but I don't think that I've ever felled one that large. Also appears to be a fairly tight area to navigate... yikes.
Millul
Well-Known Member
So, you didn't bring down the tree yourself, right? You "only" had to mill it?
That looks like a s&it ton of work, anyway...!
spudmunkey
Well-Known Member
Aaaaaand it's done. Now we wait 2 years. (Yes, we'll be cutting off that overhang on the left...it just started raining, and we'll need to tighten the ratchet straps every so often as the wood shrinks and the straps stretch).
Ha! I see that one too.
Yeah, our lot is only 25ft wide,, and I think our back yard is 17 feet deep. It's fenced in, and the two paths to the back yard are just shy of 3ft. The morning before they started, I carpeted the flat roof area with Ram Board to protect it a little, and armored the windows and back doors with sheets of plywood. They did a great job.. they trimmed the branches working their way up, then took the main trunk, sarting from the top. We were surprised they were able to save so many of the 3+ft chunks, which were relatively straight.
We've got a long wait of this mass of wood taking up 40 sq feet of our back yard. Ha!
Oh, yeah, it totally was. It was fun, having never done anything like this before. A lot of our issues (and we had many) were due to just not knowing that much about chainsaws, and also our desire to try to retain every square inch of yield.
Ha! I see that one too.
Yeah, our lot is only 25ft wide,, and I think our back yard is 17 feet deep. It's fenced in, and the two paths to the back yard are just shy of 3ft. The morning before they started, I carpeted the flat roof area with Ram Board to protect it a little, and armored the windows and back doors with sheets of plywood. They did a great job.. they trimmed the branches working their way up, then took the main trunk, sarting from the top. We were surprised they were able to save so many of the 3+ft chunks, which were relatively straight.
We've got a long wait of this mass of wood taking up 40 sq feet of our back yard. Ha!
Oh, yeah, it totally was. It was fun, having never done anything like this before. A lot of our issues (and we had many) were due to just not knowing that much about chainsaws, and also our desire to try to retain every square inch of yield.
p0ke
7-string guitard
Went to my sister's 30th birthday party on Saturday. Her friends were surprisingly welcoming and even though we aren't exactly on the same wavelength, we got along very well. I also brought my acoustic because my sister asked me to accompany her for some songs, which went surprising well, and no-one requested any weird shit so it didn't get awkward
... and then I got absolutely wasted - I have no recollection of getting to the hotel, but according to my wife I said something along the lines of "sorry that I don't say this often enough, but anyway, I love you" before passing out while hugging her.
Then I had a bit of a hangover today, but by the time we drove home it was all gone and I was just tired. I was still alert enough to avoid 6 deer on the way though.
... and then I got absolutely wasted - I have no recollection of getting to the hotel, but according to my wife I said something along the lines of "sorry that I don't say this often enough, but anyway, I love you" before passing out while hugging her.
Then I had a bit of a hangover today, but by the time we drove home it was all gone and I was just tired. I was still alert enough to avoid 6 deer on the way though.
LordCashew
Death Punch for Cutie
What a view! Are you in wine country?
Millul
Well-Known Member
Pretty similar, aside from the walk - I'm about 900km north of "my" hills, and it was just over 0 here today, so no walk after the huge bowl of paccheri ai frutti di mare
Can't wait to be back home for a few days in 2 weeks!
If you mean Tuscany, no, I'm on the east side.
