A Round on The House

That's what they call it when you put a layer of logs on ..."a round". It's expected we will be putting on 14-16 rounds, plus purlins, stairs, rafters, posts and the like and that's about 70 logs. That's a lot of peeling.




Luke is doing most of the peeling with his brother. Tough work.

So the first round is on. I've been told that this is the most important round, as if you screw this one up you really have no chance of recovery.

The corners are formed with a chainsaw then smoothed with a disc sander. It goes faster than I thought. They form about 4 corners per hour, but only get up maybe 2 logs per day.

After the log is laid, the ends are trimmed.

john is about the most comfortable guy I have ever met with a chainsaw in his hand. Unlike most other woodworkers he even has all his fingers.

I got totally dissed by this goat on the way home. I yelled insults at him, and asked if he wanted a ride but got totally ignored. He was like an embarassed teenager getting dropped off at school by his doating mom. Goats, hmmm???

Naked Wood

There are few jobs in this world that I would say "I can't do that." So far, for reasons I won't go into here, I think only dental hygienist has fallen into this category for me. Anything else, and I'll give it a go. I mean how hard, dirty, boring, complex, smelly, cold, hot, wet can it be.

I've cut ice on a research vessel in the gulf of Bothnia off the northern coast of Finland.

I've repaired cars in a garage with no heat.

I've shovelled gutters of cow manure after plaitting their tails.

I've knelt in fish guts while I've cut out tongues.

I've picked capelin on the night shift.

I've been a tire buster at Canadian Tire.

I've worked in a mine.

I've worked in an ice tank.

I've even worked at Shell.

And one summer I had the pleasure of cleaning out a de-commissioned dairy in St. John's (remember the old Sunshine Dairy plant next to Colonial Garage). Years of milk souring in the pipes we were hauling out in 25 degrees, made for an odorous two week assignment.

But I'm sure I could not pull this off.

Logs come at a butt end diameter of 16"-17" and need to be cleaned of their bark. This is a hand process. I'm told you get a dollar for a linear foot and if you are a good peeler (not to be confused with a good stripper) you can make over $100 a day. That basically works out to 2 - 2.5 logs per day. I got 70 logs so thats about a months work for one person. When I drove up on Saturday I noticed about 20 logs peeled. John later told me that he, his son and another hired hand had been at it all week. Only 50 to go.

When John asked me if I was up there to give him a hand peeling I told him there was an old dairy nearby that had been shut down a few years back and I had promised a guy I'd help him rip out all the piping.

Peter

Some Assembly Required

Glad Someone Else Is Managing This

So a couple of weeks ago I get the call from Dave. "The logs at the mill are not good enough. We'll have to get them off the wood lot in Donald." No worries I thought, how hard can this be. I clearly underestimated the effort it would take to get these cut and out of the woods.

The drive to Golden on Saturday was pretty benign. Leave here around 5:30am. Watch the sun rise in the rearview mirror somewhere near Lake Louise. Very pretty.

For some reason there was a plethora of wildlife sightings on this drive. I saw a herd of elk, couple of bald eagles, a herd of mountain goat and too many deer to count. Deciding I wanted to make good time, I didn't stop to take any photo's. That will no make for good blogging, but I am sure that there will be more wildlife photos to come.

Stop for construction outside LL, stop for a coffee in Field and in town by 9am. 10:30 I find myself in Dave's truck on the back road of a back road about 30km past Golden in a town called Donald. Nice town, at least I think it is a town. It is definitely a place, or was a place, of this I am sure. It has a sign on the road. I don't know of anymore evidence I need. If you look in Wiki you will find that Donald was an original CPR crossing and is now listed in the list of BC ghost towns. So basically a bad spot for night life. Good spot to get logs though.

So we pull into a cleared patch on the side of this woods road and voila, about 100 logs, just sitting there waiting for some log builder (John) to go pick out the best 70 or so.

The way the wood lot works is pretty cool. They do selective logging so you get to only cut the trees that you need. So they do the first selection in the woods and the final pick on the ground. The benefit of this is that it is much quicker to lay out the logs since you have already had them hand picked in the woods anyway.

Big trees though.....