"It Looked Good on Paper" Engineering

Chicken Tractor 1: The Coop

2010-07-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

If you are fairly computer literate and want to design something, the I recommend downloading Google SketchUp. There is a learning curve for the program, but they have videos to help you with that. This will help by allowing you to see what you are putting together before you commit materials. I used it to generate a parts list as well. The drawing is not complete, but it's complete enough for what I need it for. Converting a pile of lumber into a chicken tractor with this picture as a guide would not have been too difficult if that was all I had to deal with.

The doors open wide and at 4 feet deep, it will be easy to clean.

I was hit in the lungs by some virus so hard that by day 2 I was wondering if I needed to go to the hospital. After a week I was not ill anymore, but my lungs itched and I continued to be short of breath and cough for a full month. In addition to this, our unusually dry and warm winter turned into a record breaking wet spring. While the chicks were ready to leave the brooder at 3 weeks, they had to spend an extra week in the brooder while I continued to build.

A sliding door between the coop and chicken run allows chicken control.

I put a 2x3 piece of plywood in the front right corner to put their food and water on. Some of my available information said that chicks don't do well on the 1/4 inch wire mesh floor, so I tacked a 4x4 piece of plywood over the left side of the floor with two screws.
I was unsure whether the chickens could reach the roost, so I added a lower second one.

The openings in the doors are for nest boxes. The triangles on either side are for storage.

I ripped 2x4s in half for 2x2 purlins to hook the roofing to. I used old sheets of galvanized roofing on the roof.

On the last day they were in the brooder, I forgot to open the windows on the car until near 11 AM and nearly cooked them. Finally late that day we moved them from the now over crowded brooder to the coop. Somehow I have managed to not loose a single chicken.

I printed off a chicken silhouette I found on the internet and cut the shape out for a decorative window.

This relieved the crowding problem for a time, but I was left with a feeding problem. They were consuming and loosing through the floor an entire bag of feed every couple of weeks. Manure build up in side the coop was also an issue I could do nothing about, because I had nowhere for the chickens to go. I had to get the chicken run done.

The Tshimakain Herald

2010-07-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

I am starting a new endeavor I call The Tshimakain Herald. It is similar to many of the newspapers of a hundred years ago that would often be one man shows own and operated by someone with no journalism education or experience.

Farm versus Land

2010-07-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

The key difference between having a farm, instead of merely land, is that a farm grows something useful. Since we are not so much farmers as engineers with land, we have not really done much to make the place a farm. I am taking steps to remedy this. The # 1 issue limiter is climate. While the land looks lush, we only get about 20 inches of precipitation a year. Worse, the wet moths are November, December, and the remaining winter months. Summer time only sees about 2+1/2 inches. The temperature in turn varies across the year from 100F or hotter to -20F or colder. Some years we don't get a full 90 days between killing frosts. This limits the wild vegetation to sparse weeds. After some consideration I have come to the conclusion that the animal most likely to survive on this ground are chickens.

The smart thing for me to have done is to go to Polyface Inc. and bought and read their book Pastured Poultry Profits before I made any plans. Instead, the first thing I did was order some chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery. Actually no, I did some research on chicken breeds and their attributes. I figured the biggest challenge would be the cold, so I ordered Jersey Black Giants, which also happen to be the worlds largest chicken breed. I really should have built the brooder first, but lacking time and materials, I ended up converting the back of this old Subaru station wagon into a brooder. I cut a slot in the top of the brooder for the thermometer so it could be read from outside.
I Following the advice in the early chapters of the book, I put an inch of sawdust on the floor to absorb the ammonia from the bird droppings. This worked very well. I bought a cheap $20 thermostat and hooked up four light bulbs to it. I had to trim off a plastic stopper inside the thermostat to get it to go up to 95F, but other wise this also worked well. The temperature varied by 10F, but this caused no problems. I rounded up a mismatched pair of metal hopper feeders we had and attached them to the wall with a single screw. They also have a piece of 1/2 inch plastic water pipe attached across the middle of the feeding tray to prevent the chickens from scratching too much of their food out. A pair of water trays that screw onto mason jars fit in nicely. It was all ready for the chickens not a moment too soon.

A phone call at 7:30 AM from the post office announced the arrival of my chicks. All 26 of my ordered chicks plus one free rare chick arrived alive in their cardboard box. This is when I began to figure out that a car is the worst place ever to brood chickens. Solar heating will push the internal temperature of the car well over 100F in a big hurry. Opening the windows fixes that but the cats found the chicks in short order. they didn't get any, but I had to install a wire screen above the back seat of the car to keep the cats out. At the same time a layer of fine dust covered every surface of the car's interior. I'm not entirely sure whether the smell will come out either. I will not be using a car as a brooder again if I can help it.

According to the very helpful graph in the book, I began turning the thermostat down 2.5 degrees a day beginning on their fourth day here. After they were 2 weeks old, I turned the thermostat down 5 degrees each day. All the while I was building the chicken house. Hoo boy. That is a story all it's own. Stay tuned.

Weather Cycles

2010-01-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

The weather has been cycling between 1 to 3 inches of snow, to warm enough to melt and saturate the ground, to freeze hard. It's cycled 3 times now. The ground is highly saturated and frozen solid like a brick. We are starting a week that is supposed to have highs around 40F. This has already resulted in a lot of water that has nowhere to go. I'm considering building a bridge in the low spot in my driveway. I could just put in a culvert, but that is boring.

Economic Planning While Under a Failing Economic System

2009-10-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of talking heads telling you where the economy is going these days. Many will listen to the ones telling them what they want to hear. If you want something else, if you want someone that has no vested interest in your liking what he has to say, no monetary incentive to lie, and a reasonably good track record, I believe the guy over at Vision Victory manifesto.com has a better grasp on what's going on than anything any of the network TV news has to say. The essence is: The economy is screwed. Don't make money based plans for more than about 10 to 15 years, because the value of US dollar will have tanked by then and enough economic chaos and change will have happened by then that you'll have to make new plans based on whatever economic system reconstitutes after the crash.

He and I share similar plans for the next 10 to 15 years, but there are differences. Here would be my recommended plan by order of importance:

#1: God. Religion is a controversial subject. Many don't believe in God. Regardless of this, I will unapologetically tell you that if you don't have Him on your side, every other thing you are doing is futile. Getting him on your side requires that you do your own homework. Don't assume that conventional wisdom is going to get the job done.

#2: Skills. Develop skill sets that make you a vital organ to society. Luxury items and skills intrinsic to them are the first to become useless.

#3: Basics. Warm Dry Shelter. Clean Water. Food. Work toward obtaining a low maintenance, energy efficient house on two to five acres of land that can be developed in to farm land. Learn to farm. Learn to harvest wild foods. If you can grow food, if you can walk into the wild and find shelter, water, and food with your bare hands or with simple tools, you will have an edge over the vast majority of people that in habit the US today. It's a simple skill you can develop now that nobody else is learning.

#4: Tools. Tools for building, tools for fixing, tools for your skill sets, these are obvious. Guns and knives may not be obvious to you. They are usually seen as weapon, not tools. While they can be weapons, and some are good for little else, the type of gun or knife you buy makes a difference. If you buy an assault riffle and a sword, you are pretty mush stuck with them being weapons. A K-bar and shotgun, on the other hand, are much better suited to being tools. There are a number of things that can be made with just a good hunting/ camping knife, and a shotgun can be used for both hunting and for shooting animals that would eat your livestock or crops. Think utilitarian, not commando and become familiar with your tools.

#5: People. Surround yourself with level headed like minded people that are pursuing a similar plan that can be trusted. The hive effect is a very potent force to be reckoned with. Make it work for you, not against you.

#6: Stockpile. A stockpile of food, water, ammunition, and other consumables is impervious to inflation, but not time, so don't go crazy. Ask yourself: What are the chances of you having to move it without a car? Will it rot before you can use it? Can you stand eating the food you are stocking? Is their enough variety in your stockpile to keep you healthy? Can the ammunition be used to do what you need it to do? More than a year's supply is probably excessive. After a year, you really need to have a developed an income strategy that doesn't rely on your stockpile. If you haven't, you are in a type of trouble no stockpile in the world is big enough to fix.

#7: Investing. So, you you have a small farm with a reliable well that is paid off. It has an energy efficient house on it that can operate off the electrical grid. You have it packed with a variety of canned foods. Enough to last you and your family for a year. You have a couple of utilitarian guns and you practice with them weekly. Yet you still have income you wish to invest. What do you do with it? Gold and silver are (mostly) inert minerals. As such, their long term real value is reasonably stable just like the ground is reasonably stable. The reason the price of gold has been rising for years is because the dollar has been loosing its real value to inflation. Gold and silver have had a significant value for several thousands of years. The bad news is that in a very small, primitive, crisis economy, gold and silver is frequently valueless for the obvious reasons. You can't eat it, you can't burn it, they're just an inert minerals. Energy on the other hand is always useful, though stored energy is more difficult to store and move. The nature of the stored energy you invest will matter a great deal in a crashed economy. Flammable gases require special containers and special equipment to store and use. Liquid fuels are more stable, but still require containers and some, like gasoline, have additives that will separate and foul the fuel, but with some effort they can still be used in machinery. Solid fuels don't serve well in machinery, but are the most stable and the easiest to store and use. Fire wood must be kept dry or it will rot. Coal it hated by environmentalists, but it is probably the most perfect fuel to stockpile. It is impervious to everything but fire, it won't leak or rot if you just dump it on the ground or bury it in a hole. It will sit around a wait for you longer than you will ever need it too. Governments and thieves will break in and steal gold and silver, but when was the last time you ever heard of someone breaking in and stealing coal? Sure it happens, but it's a much more difficult and desperate act. You will need a place to store it all though, and the amount of space it will take per dollar of investment will be much larger than gold or silver, and reconverting coal into cash could be an unreliable process. Moving your stockpile will be harder as well. Still, I would be far more comfortable stockpiling coal than gold.

First Snow and the Were-Llama Flu

2009-10-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

The first snow has arrived today. It's not catastrophic, but it is on the early side and it's sticking. Snow tires aren't legal for another 3 days. Fortunately the snow is supposed to turn to rain by tonight. I'll be staying to let people re-learn how to drive in the snow. Still, I predict that El Nino will make this a warm and dry winter.

The flu has hit here again, but after 2 weeks, I think I may be getting better. I'm dubbing it the Were-Llama Flu.

The Ugly Sumer of 2009

2009-09-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

Well it's become apparent that finances will not allow me to build even the foundation of my house this year. It just as well though, as I have decided to re-engineer the foundation to do double duty. I'll write more about that later.

The good news is my new business has be gun to transform holes in the ground into swimming pools. If it continues to bring me some work, then I may just have the money to lay that foundation come Spring. In the mean time, I will begin sharing images and tips on how we have built the current straw bale buildings and other useful projects we have going on.

Ignoring What "They" Say

2009-08-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

So, do you remember the compost I put in the tires? I have an update. All 18 pea plants spouted and grew for me until I forgot to water them for a week while the daily highs were from the mid 90's to 104F and lows only down to 60F. Then the deer walked up to the house and chewed on the ones that survived. They say pea plants don't produce pods after it's above 70 degrees on a regular basis. I say peas eaten right off the vine that you've grown yourself beats anything the store sells.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 4/4

2009-07-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

Choosing Your House for Living Successfully:

Whether your income is of the Nomad Model or the Farmer Model, you can still build your own house and get something better than you can buy for the same price.

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, has built something that is very close to the ideal Nomad's house. Unlike the standard trailers you get, he has built it with the top of the line stuff. It is built to be lived in for an extended period of time, not just camped in for a few days of the year for a few years. Inside an hour, he could pack things so the don't fall about, hook it up to a truck and drive just about anywhere he needs to and would have his whole house and everything he owns right there with him. With less than 300 square feet, it will be cheap to heat or cool even with only R-13 insulation and harsh temperatures. Considering how close I came to doing more or less the same thing, I can't say the Idea is a bad one. My Idea involved a motor home optimized for my use and a small car I could tow behind it. The only issue I have with his house is I see a structure that will not tolerate extensive moving. I have seen sturdily built wooden framed constructs built on trucks and trailers, and I have seen them fail under the shaking, rocking, and torquing that they suffer while being moved. While the building was built well, I do not see holding up to a nomadic lifestyle because the wood itself will not tolerate the constant stress on the joints of the frame.

The house I am building is very much a Farmer Model house. It will probably end up weighing a hundred tons. It will be labor expensive and very immobile. This means I need a Farmer Model income. I have had the Idea of starting my own business for some time, and have been considering it more strongly since I became unemployed back in January, but now that I have been unemployed for 6 full months and have turned in over 75 resumes without a peep in response, I have gone and gotten my business license. Already I have jobs lined up. My home territory is probably limited to about 150 miles at this point, but with a job taking most of a week, I can see getting to the point where a home range of hundreds of mile could be justified with the proper equipment.

End.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 3/4

2009-07-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Hybrid Nomad Farmer Model:

People often like to think that hybrid systems would give you the advantages of both systems involved. My experience and observations indicate that the opposite is true. Hybrid systems suffer the limitations of both systems and fail to properly realize the advantages of either. The Nomad Farmer is no exception.

A Nomad Farmer arrives to find fresh fields and abundant wild herds and starts to build expensive Farmer Model living quarters and expensive Farmer Model embedded infrastructure, only to pick up and leave the most expensive parts when the local ground becomes exhausted and the wild herds migrate. More often than not, he leaves poorer than when he arrived.

There are no examples of successful Nomad Farmer Empires. The lifestyle is so wasteful, that the chances of success of any measure are sufficiently remote and improbable that Empire building by these people is never more than a dream.

I personally know two families who have spent their adult lives pursuing the Nomad Farmer Hybrid Model. Up and down the West Coast they went chasing work like modern Nomads, yet whether they rented or bought, their money was spent on housing and land that did not move with them. Stuff acquired would be tossed or stacked in epic loads on trailers and moved using great heroics. Unfortunately, I believe the biggest mistake lies in that they tried to live in these places like they were Farmers. They spent money on housing They couldn't pick up and move and acquired things they couldn't move. The result is they enjoy temporary benefits from the new location, but often ended up with less each time they moved. The severity of the problem actually increased with the increase of Nomad income, because that enabled the purchase of more Farmer type purchases.

The only success I have seen involved a couple that happened to move to California during a particularly rich time. While earning a Nomad's wage, they managed to pay two mortgages at once. This combined with selling the California house at one of the peaks of California real estate markets, was able to ultimately buy their current place outright. They have lived here for a record breaking 15 years in spite of sketchy employment. They were able to finally able to live in a full Farmer Model residence and have built the best they have ever had. The problem is, they didn't do it until they were 60 and nearly retired. Two others I know, have embraced self employment and the Farmer model early. They have suffered robbers. Boy howdy have they suffered robbers. Yet in this big economic crunch, they are doing better than the Nomad Farmers I know. They are not without their money problems, but yet they are financially better off because their Farmer Model income matches their Farmer Model acquisitions.

To be continued.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 2/4

2009-07-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Farmer Model:

The Farmer lifestyle model is characterized by permanent stationary structures that are frequently large, and equipped with many features and extensive embedded infrastructure. The Farmer model require good farm land to succeed. This perennially good farmland permits the farmers to build expensive unmovable living quarters and lots of expensive infrastructure that will pay for itself over time.

The Empires of the Farming model are numerous and have been known to last as long as 500 years under the same government. The Roman/ English/ American Empires are premiere examples.

Quite naturally, since the American Empire is a Farmer Model Empire, the commonly accepted American Dream is that of Home ownership. Even the smallest of homes are much too big to hook up to a truck and tow away without thousands of dollars of equipment, expertise, and permits. They are usually designed and built to be hooked up to the buried infrastructure built by the community to provide even the most basic features like water, power, and sewage. Frequently at least some land not covered by the house is included, and has some kind of boundary structure like a fence or at least some markers.

If you earn your money by running your own business and moving outside of your home territory will only hurt you, then you have a Farmer's style income. Then you can build a Farmer style house as you have little reason to move.

To be continued.

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 1/4

2009-07-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

While I am digging up files that may or may not be backed up, let me ramble on Living Successfully versus Successfully Living. Successfully Living means you managed to survive something. Living Successfully means you are thriving. Successfully Living is something we do every day. For some, it is a lot of work, but it's something everybody does. Living Successfully require something more. From the aspect of choosing your housing, let's look at lifestyle models of human society in four parts.

The Nomad Model:

The Nomad lifestyle model is characterized by temporary and movable structures and no embedded infrastructure. They succeed on poor land because their living quarters are cheap to build and or movable. When the grazing land is used up or the herds they are hunting move, they fold their tents and move on. They recognize that acquiring too much stuff results in waste, because it has to be left behind or will incur a substantial cost to move it. If any infrastructure is built at all, it little more than a well.

The biggest nomadic achievement is probably the Mongol Empire. It sprang from a band of nomadic herdsmen in 1206 AD and in 73 years it conquered 1/6th of the planet and 100 million people. It stretched out and touched lands from Korea to Poland. It stands as the single largest empire to be ruled by a single government ever. 15 years later it broke into 4 parts and proceeded to go into free fall.

Modern Nomadic structures range from tin shacks thrown up in a shantytown using whatever materials that can be found, to travel trailers, to motor homes. Motor homes and travel trailers come in various qualities. Most travel trailers are like the Prowler that The keeper of the mountain bought. Their frames are of wood that is stapled together, wrapped in aluminum, given maybe 2 inches of insulation, lined inside with cheap wood facing, and sold by slick salesmen who want you to think you actually like the boxy styling and ugly paint. Your better motor homes and travel trailers are made of buses and transport trucks. These have welded or riveted metal frames as well as a metal exterior. Even on these, installation tends to be skimpy, because installation is space hungry and they are usually driven to mild climates by people on vacation, not lived in for years in hot or cold environments such as where I live.

If you earn your living working for someone else, with little or no warning you could be dismissed from that job. Does your company promise lifetime employment? Lifetime Employment promises proved to be empty for many Japanese. Are you the third generation that is working for the same company? General Motors has had such workers, and many are now looking for work in the region with the worst unemployment rate in the nation. Finding another position may mean you must relocate. This places you squarely in the position of being a modern nomad. You need a house you can pack up in a day and drive away without leaving anything behind.

To be continued.

Vista Fail

2009-07-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

My Vista laptop decided not sign in this morning. After several tries, I told it to reload windows. All of my unbacked up stuff is now gone. I plan to dual boot it with Ubuntu so I have an operating system that won't just sit there when I tell it to do stuff.

This laptop, from when I bought it new, has been freezing up for a half minute or so on a regular basis and sometimes it would take 5 minutes to close a window. I think it's safe to say Vista is Windows ME 2.0. Windows ME was bad enough you'd think they would have been smart enough to not make a second one, but hey, they make 14 billion a year in profit making junk like this, why should they change?

Solar Observatory: Part 2

2009-07-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've had a rather remarkable problem using my Solar Observatory. Even though I'm working around the longest day of the year, rain and early morning fog have been conspiring to block out the sun. A curious development for a month that brings us less than 2 inches of rain.

Utility Room 1

2009-07-01T15:27:00.000-07:00

Following the Concrete Party, steady progress has been made on the Utility Room. The overhanging structure here is supported by heavy pieces of angle iron embedded under the framing.

The over hanging structure is this sitting window. The windows are all double pane second hand windows from Habitat.

The OSB is now painted to help preserve it. Next year we will put siding over it.

The nice wide space under the right half of this window proved to be a source of injury. It's a nice wide space that looks like it is a good place to pull yourself into the room from outside.

The problem is, just above the line of sight is the bottom of the window sill. I attempted to pull myself through with great conviction and got a nasty knot on my head for my efforts. Not 15 minutes later, my dad whacked his head on the same spot. We decided it would be a good Idea to put up the piece of siding before it happened a third time.

Pro Tip! An "A" frame ladder over the front walk way creates a quick superstitious burglar barrier. :)

Solar Observatory: Part 1

2009-06-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

So here is my Solar Observatory. I'm slightly embarrassed to say it cost me $42 in parts. If I had driven another 15 miles or so for the parts, it would probably have been cheaper, but with gas prices what they are...

I still need to buy a compass and an angle measuring device to make it complete. I may mount the bottom in a small slab of concrete. I haven't decided yet.

The board on top has a 1 inch hole drilled in it to allow the sun to shine into the end of the 1/2 inch pipe, while it casts a shadow onto the target board attached to the other end.

The street L at the top of the stand is greased so it will allow horizontal and vertical rotation. When it is lined up with the sun, a round spot of sunlight shows up on the target board as it does in this picture.

There is an incredible amount of flex in the stand pipe, and the tolerance of the sight is so small that it takes a bit of hunting to get it to line up. finally at 10:12 AM I got it to line up.

By 10:14 AM the angle has changed enough to reduce the spot to a half circle, and by 10:16 AM, it was gone completely.

I plan to do my measuring on or near 5 specific days.

#1: The summer solstice, June 21st.
#2: Half way between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, August 5.
#3: The autumn equinox, September 22.
#4: Half way between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, November 6.
#5 The winter solstice, December 21.

Since the spring equinox is nearly the same as the autumn equinox, I can skip those.

I'll have to find the rest of the parts for it in the next week so I don't miss this years summer solstice.

Vicious Hunters II

2009-06-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

At least one of my Vicious Hunters decided she preferred to poop in a corner instead of the litter box, so I'm evicting then during daylight hours. I heard that washing the spot with ammonia will stop them from using a spot again. Since it is a concrete floor, I just went ahead and washed the spot with bleach. When I let them back in, looked at the spot and wouldn't come within 18 inches of it. The other one ran right up against the spot and hissed violently at the spot. They are both find the spot highly offensive now. Their sensibilities have been violated.

Rainy Day and Monday

2009-06-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to a soaking rain. No, that's not entirely true. I woke up at 4 AM when my two vicious hunters decided to lick me in the face because their food dish had gone empty, but that's a separate subject. As it stands yesterday, we are 1.75 inches short on rain around here. That may not sound like much, but the entire month of June only dumps an average of 1.86 inches of rain, so this morning's rain is a good thing. This is the first rain I've received that allows me to note where the cabin still leaks. I have identified three leaks in the areas I use, so I can now keep important stuff out of those areas. Also good about this rain is that it confirms that putting the tire compost bins under the eve to funnel more than the usual amount of rain into them is working as well.

I got some more information on on Prowler Rebuild this morning from my brother, The Keeper of the Mountain. The windows are Low-E windows from Pella. I'm not sure what their specific stats are, but they aren't your grandfather's windows in that there are more good qualities to them than being able to see through them.

I'm a long way from putting windows in my place, but I've picked out the basic type of window I have in mind. They will allow solar heat to pass right through them (High SHGC), but won't let heat escape through air leakage (Low AL) or heat transfer (Low U). Since each of the four windows I have in mind will point to a different point of the compass, so the they will each have a different sun shade designed specifically for their roles in the house's function.

To build these sunshades properly, I need to build myself a simple solar observatory. While taking my local Latitude line and adding and subtracting the tropic lines to determine the sun's angle at my local solar noon has some value, the value of actually measuring the angles of the sun once an hour on 5 key points in the year is an order of magnitude greater. The summer solstice is coming up in a couple weeks, so I need to get busy with that, or miss my oportunity for the next year. I'll write more about this later.

The Keeper of the Mountain assures me that he has no intention of hauling his trailer around much. Moving it will be a rare but possible thing, not a regular occurrence. This tells me that his use of nails and T-111 are not a big deal as it won't be suffering the torquing, flexing, and shaking a travel trailer would have to deal with. At 8.5 feet by 32 feet he is able to put a lot of quality stuff in it affordably. With lots of meticulous care of the external weatherizing maintenance, this could last 20 to 30 years without serious repairs.

One of the things I over looked, is that early in his project, he performed a spring over axle conversion. This is usually done to 4x4 trucks to provide greater ground clearance. In this case, he did it to get the wheels out of his living space. Both are very good reasons to do this.

I guess if you go to the lumber yard to pick up lumber with a minivan your operation may get called "cute." I recommend going with a pink minivan and nice bows on the lumber for the complete effect.

Umbrellas and Compost

2009-06-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

I've started my third stack of tires for my composting. This third stack actually has real household trash in it. The other two are just straw and dirt. I planted 9 pea seeds in the top of each of the full ones. According to the label, they won't produce peas once the temp goes above 75F on a regular basis. Our temps went from freezing to the upper 80s inside 3 or 4 weeks. That means I should see no pea pods from these plants. Pea plants, however, are nitrogen fixers. That means they enrich the soil regardless of whether it produces pods or not. That enrichment of the dirt is primarily what I'm after, so pea pods are optional.

I sat down and worked out a typical roof truss construction for my house roof. There are several ways to do it, buy I've decided to go with the Japanese Umbrella look. At the peak, the rafters will be every 2 inches at the peak and every 24 inches out by the eve. There will be about 80 of these.

I worked up a model for an 8 foot peak and a 10 foot peak. Considering my observations of roofs around here, I think I will go with the steeper 10 foot peak, as steeper roofs tend to survive long enough to qualify as old.

Prowler Rebuild continued - Finishing

2009-06-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

The prowler rebuild marches on toward the finish line. Here you can see wood paneling installed in the bedroom. He is choosing a mixture of Hickory, Pine, and Mahogany for the place.

I want to say the star on this door indicates that it is an energy star product, but I haven't found the particulars on this symbol. Windows come with 3 different ratings. There is a rating for air leakage (AL), Visible Transmittance (VT), Condensation Resistance (CR), Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC), and U-factor. I recommend visiting mapawatt for more information and use this handy selection tool to guide you. Any investment you make on energy conserving products in you home have a better payback rate than the stock market.

It takes a special kind of awesome to put a vaulted ceiling in a single wide. To me, this almost makes up for it being a trailer built with nails and T-111.

Trash: Compost

2009-06-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

While I am neither a tree huger nor a Earth worshiper, I do value land and resources and I see landfills as a waste of both. To act in harmony with this, I am looking to handle all my trash on my own land. To do this, I am composting all my biodegradables.

The bottom tire got only one sidewall cut out. I cut the side wall out right near the tread. With the other three tires, I cut one sidewall next to the tread and cut the other one a couple inches away from the tread.

Cutting the sidewall out is quite easy. You take a 1/2 inch or larger wood drill and drill a hole in the side wall right where you plan to cut. Then you take a jig saw with a wood blade, stick it in the hole you drilled, and saw away. Keep in mind that the treads have steel threads in them and the bead of the tire has a steel cable embedded in it. These are made of very hard steel and should only be taken on out of necessary.

I placed the tire under the eve so it will receive more than the standard amount of rain water. I stuck a piece of a sheet metal in the bottom to prevent voles from burrowing up into the stack.

I started filling the tire with a shovel of straw and a shovel of dirt. This straw has been setting on the ground for over a decade. The straw has been wet for about 3 months of each year and then dehydrated for the rest of the year. The straw is in pretty bad shape, but still identifiable.

I had originally expected that it would take weeks or months to fill these four. The clean up efforts I engaged in filled it up inside a single day. I have at least that much straw again laying around. I'll keep the top tire 1/2 to 3/4 full and keep it wet and cut up four more tires.

Prowler Rebuild continued - Utilities

2009-06-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, drove his "testosterone sucking minivan" to the hardware store and bought more supplies for his Prowler. Those are his words, not mine. I drive and older version of the same make of minivan and do the same thing.

He's run the plumbing,

electricity,

R-13 insulation, interior studs,

and HVAC.

Vicious Hunters

2009-06-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

This is now a legitimate blog now. It has cats in it. I got these two vicious hunters on May 24. They are still frightened by my size, but if I catch them unaware, they are willing to suffer to suffer a petting. They have grown used to my place enough to start romping around at night.

This place is quiet enough that you can hear snow hit the ground. So when kittens charge across my carpeted plywood floor, it's loud enough to wake me up. I turned on my white noise generator on to drown them out last night. It worked up until the bolder of the two, the one with white feet, crawled up on top of me.

I have started putting their food up on the top of the fridge from morning until 7PM. The Idea is to connect 7PM to food in their minds. I want to reintroduce them to the out doors, but I want to close them indoors for the night to protect them from the coyotes until I can by a Mossberg and drop the local coyote and errant dog population a bit.

Mailbox of Doom

2009-06-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

About 16 years ago, when I lived in Lake Stevens, Washington, we had trouble with people smashing our mailbox and knocking it over. I got some 1/4 inch steel plate and welded up this 76 pound mailbox. I mounted it on a 7 & 1/2 foot steel I-beam cemented in the ground. Several people that decided to turn around in our driveway left some paint from their cars on the box.
After moving here, this box has gone through a variety of posts. The biggest risk to the post here is the snow plow. It will both knock the post sideways and up as it shoves snow up against it.

This is my latest post. It is double hinged so it will go up and down and side to side and the springs on the back will push it back.

The bad news is I didn't have any numbers on the support springs so I couldn't determine if they were strong enough to hold it up until it was installed. Worse, I came down with Cave Troll Flu right then and it sat there hanging for almost 2 weeks.

Now that I am mostly recovered, I proceeded to fix the problem. Since the Post office tells me they want it 42 inches from the ground, I stuck a 42 inch stick under the end of the box and measured the length of the springs. I cut two pieces of pipe 12 inches long and slid them inside the springs. This held the box up right at the correct height while still allowing the post hinge up when the plow goes by.

With it structurally sound, I got some paint and painted the whole thing white. The other mailboxes now look pretty sad.

House Redesign

2009-05-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

So here is my original plan for my house. It's a straw bale house design. Straw bales have about an R-50 insulating value and can support your roof if you "float" your top plate on top of your bales. Bales cost $1 to $3 a bale depending on the deal you get. That means a my 600 square foot house would cost $200 to $600 dollars for the straw in the walls. This is not a bad cost at all. That being said, I have run across a cheaper way to build.

My parents decided to build a raised garden using used tires. You can either go with the tire vase design that requires a rim, or you can stack 4 tires on top of each other after cutting the side wall out of one side. Used tires are free. We went to our local Les Schwab dealer and asked if they had any used tires we could have. They seem real happy to point us to their semi trailer full of used tires and said go ahead. It could have something to do with the fact that the US produces about 200 million used tires a year and it costs them money to get rid of them.

A Google search on tire houses will lead you to an organization called Earthships. Earthships appears to be a band of old Hippies that seam to worship the Earth a bit much for my taste, but they are not without their usefullness. Their designs tend to be on the ugly side when they start building with bottles. They stack their tires like bricks, pack them with dirt, and insert a soda can in the void on the side in between each tire. If you have clay in your soil, that will probably work. The dirt I have is more like the Anti-Clay. My soil will not pack and stick together when it dries. When it dries out it runs almost like water.

This stack is stacked like I saw in the tire trailer. This stack has a higher tire density and lacks the void the other method has. The botom row looks like it may be slightly less stable, but that can be worked out. Earthships tend to be build on hilsides. I don't have a hillside. So, I'm going to build using most of the same techniques as I would with strawbale construction. The downside is that I've discovered that the end of tire walls have some issues. this will crop up any time I try to make a corner in my wall.

To get rid of this problem, I have decided to make my house round. This introduces several engineering problems, and I've only solved some of them, but I've made my descision. I will still use 30 hay bales for key locations, but the rest will end up being tires packed with dirt. I've mapped out the location of the sink drain, so I can still work out the drywell step I am working on right now. There are a few other things I have to figure out before I pour concrete, but the drains are all I have to work on right now.

Side note: Google Chrome does not have spell check.

Cave Troll Flu

2009-05-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

You hear a lot about Swine Flu in the news lately. I came down with something 2 Sunday mornings ago and it lasted about 8 or 9 days. Since Swine Flu seams to last about 48 hours, I'd say it wasn't Swine Flu. Since I got grumpy and didn't want to communicate with the outside world, I'm dubbing it the Cave Troll Flu. That does not mean nothing has been happening around here. There have been several developments I will be sharing over the next few days.

Prowler Rebuild continued - The pros and cons of T-111-

2009-05-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

While I'm alternating between 3 different projects of my own, I received more picture of the Prowler rebuild. He is putting a peaked roof on his rebuilt Prowler. In my opinion, peaked roofs are superior to flat roofs in almost every way until you get to building large buildings. This roof will not sag down and puddle water in the middle like many camp trailers do.

The OSB turn out to be a T-111 variant. There are 2 basic types of T-111 available. Their is the plywood version and the OSB version. A Google search for T-111 confirms much of what I already knew. A lot of people start having water related problems with the stuff after it is 10 years old. Careful maintenance may get you 30 years out of the stuff, but generally you want to replace it with something better when it goes bad.

I am reminded of a wooden canopy my dad built for his pickup bed. It was built of 4x4s and plywood that was screwed together and sealed up with silicone. As I recall, it took less than a year for the vibrations and flexing of the truck to cause the canopy to leak on every seam. Wood may be flexible, but it was the wrong kind of flexing for that canopy.

I suspect this will have the same problem. As the frame flexes as it goes down the road, it will put stress and strain on the building materials and building techniques that were engineered for the non moving variety of house and will significantly age the house every time it is moved. If this is held together with nails, then it will probably be even worse.

The good news is, T-111 is relatively cheap and if water does get into the framing, it should be able to get back out, unlike the metal did in it's original construction. If he doesn't move it a lot, has no need for this trailer or is prepared to replace the siding in 10 years it isn't a bad choice. It's not like a trailer is something you expect to last.

Prowler Rebuild

2009-05-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, has made progress on his Prowler. He didn't provide much in the way of explanation, but he did send pictures.

Picture #1 suggests to me he took the oportunity to redo the wiring and look over the brakes and bearings. There is no better time to do this than when you have a bare frame.

Picture #2 appear to indicate he is laying down treated 2x4s to provide a base to work on. The sheeting is probably a moister wrap of some kind.

Picture #3 is the actual floor framing. It looks like 2x6s with 5+1/2 inch fiberglass insulation. The 2x6s should be what actually carries and spreads the weight stress of the structure. The insulation is about 3 times what you usually find in trailers. He is currently a bout 300 miles from me in a very mild climate, but if he ends up near me, he's going to benifit from this increased insulation a lot.

Picture #4 is the subflooring. The gray stuff appears to be glue. My experiences would make me not want anything to do with OSB, but it might be OK here.

Picture #5 is the wall framing. These appear to be 2x4s. I have another brother who is involved in some repair remolding of some buildings made about 10 or 20 years ago. He says OSB should be illegal. I agree. I have great reservation about seeing this stuff being used structurally like this. If he does a flawless job of keeping it dry, he may be OK though. I'm sticking by my ridiculous theory that he will end up regretting this stuff at some point.

#15 of 10: Plumbing

2009-05-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Someone once wrote that: "Of ten things that can go wrong with a house, 15 of them involve water." Today's problem involves plumbing. In the bottom left of this picture is where the water entered the cabin. While this was working, this would always freeze on us several times during the winter. After the cabin was moved out of, this finally broke. If you go around the corner to the right and pull out the washing machine, you come to Picture #2.

Embedded behind the stucco are the hot and cold water pipes. The water comes from the right and enters the cabin to the left. These faucets feed the washing machine. Hot is on the bottom and cold is on the top. When the pipes broke inside the cabin, the capped off the water with some plastic plumbing. This proved to be too close to the cold cabin and proceeded to freeze and break. I chipped away the stucco with a hammer and capped off the pipes with a metal plug and cap. I'll redo the stucco later. with the water on again, I checked all the faucets. They seem adequate for now, but the toilet has lots of problems. The float valve does not let water in the tank, the flapper does not keep water in the tank, and when flushed, the water doesn't go down very fast. It's going to need to be overhauled.

On the upside, the old hearth is removed and lights are hung with nails and wire coat hangers. It make for a passable computer room. another light hung in the bedroom, a couple rounds with the vacuum, and they are almost a home. I have the guts of a broken clock hung as art and I have more art behind the flat screen I'll hang later.

I'll need an internet connection before its officially a home though. Getting a WLAN to span 1000 feet will be an interesting trick.

I decided to leave the wires as is. The bare ones aren't live and the live ones haven't caught fire in the decade they have been there, so I'm not going to mess with them until I tear the place down.

The Last "Band Aid"

2009-05-02T19:57:00.001-07:00

I got some leak stopper for my roof. This stuff is thicker than the lap cement. I used it to seal up the can lid that is plugging my chimney hole. I then troweled the lap cement onto the remainder of the roof to seal up any little leaks. I believe it will still leak at the joint of the two roofs because the lap cement was the wrong stuff to use on the crack and rips of the steep roof. It just drained off.

This is the last "band aid" I'm giving this roof though. I don't want to spend any more time and money on this cabin than I have too. I want to be tearing it down in November.

Trailers, Water Damage, and Video

2009-04-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

So here is the trailer my brother, Keeper of the Mountain, bought. It's a 30 foot prowler.

It had some water damage.

This is not a problem! He can rebuild it! He has the technology! Better, stronger, faster!

He kept finding more dry rot. To quote him:"The more we looked the worse it got. I decided that I would keep removing wood until all of the rot and mold was gone. At one point it became silly to stop and crazy to continue. We decided to rebuild from the start and have a little fun while we were at it."

Finally, the rot was all eradicated. Of course, this lead to another problem.

So, now it's off to the drawing board somewhere between this drawing...

and this model lies an idea for the rebuild. Watch the fun videos and stay tuned.

2009-04-24T19:14:00.000-07:00

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, bought a camp trailer for $1,100 with some water damage. He decided to remove all of the damaged parts and ended up with a frame and axles. He's decided to build a cabin on what remains. With any luck, I'll get video of his efforts soon.

Domestic Avalanches

2009-04-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, the snow gets deep around here. The roofs around here that survive long enough to be old tent to be metal and steep. This allows snow to slide off instead of piling up deep. This puts ant vent pipes that go through the roof at risk. To the left here you see a deflector I put up a decade ago. It's just a piece of metal roofing bent into a wedge and hooked down with roofing screws. When the snow piles up and then slowly slides off, this splits the snow and saves the pipe.

My dad went for a stronger defector. This one is 2 years old. It's not as sharp, but is made of rebar and 1/8 inch steel and bolted to the roof with three large lag bolts.

A few feet away on my roof is another pipe a little lower on the roof. The sheet metal wedge on this one has been ripped off twice. I'm going to re-route this pipe out the end wall and patch the hole.

Last year the snow came down very light and collected four feet deep on the parents' house. It then rained and reduced that snow to about 2 feet. then the whole works came off in one shot in one night. This deflector was just a few feet away from the other one and just a little lower on the roof. It didn't completely tear it off, but it did bent it up good. These are the forces I have to design around.

Plans, Blueprints, and Architects

2009-04-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

Any time you build a house you need blueprints to plan out what you are doing. If you have money and plan to hire out help, you will probably need to get an architect to draw up a set of plans. Since I have no money and am doing all the work myself, I get to be my own architect. I loaded Gimp onto my laptop, poured myself a cup of coffee, and drew them up.

I had Kinkos print it up big, and then I started writing notes on it.I will need to install two drain pipes before the concrete is poured. The red part is what I will be building, the black part is the existing bathroom/ utility room, and the X'ed out section is an existing wall I will tear out after I get the new structure weather tight.

I marked out the spot on the ground where I will build the new structure. As it stands, a portion of the septic drain field and all of the dry well system is buried under where I am building, not to mention the pine tree. It looks like my next job is to start digging.

Concrete Party

2009-04-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

My parents, who are in their 70s, an family friend, in her 70s, my older brother, Z Mad Poet, his tiny wife, and myself gathered to pour concrete for the floor of the utility room and front hall on my parents house.

This tool is a heavy walled stove pipe with a bottom and a handle welded to it. It, filled to the brim, and eighteen 2lb coffee cans filled with washed sand and gravel make for a 5:1 ratio for our cement. The official ratio is 1 cement, 2 sand, 3 gravel, but our cement works just fine. Cement made this way costs $75 a cubic yard. We mixed and poured a yard and a half in 5 hours.

We made some calls about the cost of bringing it in by truck already made and just having it poured. It would cost about $85 a yard, but there is a 10 yard minimum.

Attack by Fire!

2009-04-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

Some messes are big enough to justify an attack by fire. This used to be a camper. I stuck a chain through the camper and tried to drag it. I came apart instead.

I took the splitting maul to it to break it into small enough pieces to move. I ended up smearing the head with aluminum and breaking the handle. Fortunately the axe and hoe was enough to complete the job. Somehow the ceramic figurines concealed within the camper survived this.

With a little used motor oil and a propane torch, it lit quite well. I threw all of the camper parts onto the fire including the "non-flammable" parts.

It burned enthusiastically. I should take a moment to say something about fire being dangerous and you shouldn't do this at home and I'm a trained professional. Truth is I'm not a professional fire handler. I've just grown up with fire as a tool since I was born and have been playing with fire since I was 8. I've never had a fire I started escape me. My whole family has this reputation of with fire. Some of my early memories are of wood stoves that had to have their lids held down to keep the fire raging within from popping the lid off and escaping. Our wood stoves frequently glowed red hot. This long experience of using fire has honed our families skills so it's quite unusual for us to ever loose control of one of our fires.

Don't let anyone tell you Aluminum doesn't burn. The glass from the windows melted as well.

After about 3 hours the fire reduced to coals and burned for another 7 hours.This relatively small pile is all that remains of the camper.

Usefull Devices and Roof Patching

2009-04-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

This wooden ladder was made from slab wood bought from a local mill.It's safer than most ladders because it has the hand rails that extend above the roof. It I attached it to the eve it would be even safer. If you build one, use screws to put the rungs on it. Even if you plan to only use it for one month, useful devices have this habit of sticking around a lot longer than intended, because, well, they're useful. This ladder is probably over 10 years old. The nails in the bottom rung pulled out on me, so I put screws in all of the rungs today.
I put the aluminum roofing material upside down and flipped it over several times while I worked with the lap cement. It does not seemed to have helped much with the mixing. It also leaked.

I took the lid to one of the empty roofing compound cans and glued it over the chimney hole with lap cement.
I found that I got better results in spreading the lap cement on the upper problem spots with the 4 foot mixing stick than with the trowel. Once I got to the lower areas, the trowel worked better. If this doesn't stop the leak, then I will be looking to manage the leak rather than stop it.

I troweled on the can of aluminum tone roofing compound. I barely got done and it started raining.

Spokane

2009-04-11T05:54:00.000-07:00

The North edge of Spokane is 30 mile from my place. By the time you get anyplace useful, you get 40 to 50 miles from my place. As a result, you don't want to just make a quick trip to Spokane for any old reason, because, for one, there is no such thing as a quick trip to Spokane, and two, it costs about $10 in gas to make the trip.

I went to Habitat again. I bought a 5 gallon can of Blackjack roofing cement for $23 and two one gallon cans of Polyurethane paint for $10. They did not have the aluminum roof stuff I used before, so I went to Home Depot for it. The same stuff that was $23 at Habitat was $76 at Home Depot. I only got one can. I'll spread it thin using a trowel instead of the broom like they recommend, but today I'll just set the can upside down.

2009-04-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

All eight post for the shipping containers are in the ground. We'll park the trailer with the container right about where the minivan is and jack them up. The post will be cut off once we know how high the trailer is.

The first foot of dirt is topsoil that will turn very hard once it dries out her next month or so. The next foot down is sand. Beyond that is sand and rocks. When it dries, the sand will flow out of your digging tools almost like water. The rock just stop your tools dead regardless of the water content.

2009-04-07T19:31:00.000-07:00

The garage was built by the same guy that built the main part of the cabin. Snow has broken the roof, so we need another one. Shipping containers will serve as part of the structure. We will jack the container up off the trailer and slip a beam under the container and set them on these posts. The posts are too long right now because we don't know how high the container will need to be to clear the trailer. once we know that we will chainsaw the posts off to a reasonable level.

Once Upon a Cabin Dank and Dreary

2009-04-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

I finished taking the hearth out of the cabin today. It was a four foot square made of 2x4s filled with old bricks, sand, and a little ash and sawdust. I don't like brick. Its functionality is too poor for me, so I stuck them in the driveway to serve as gravel.

It's dark and damp in the place. That really messes with someone prone to depression like me. After about a half hour I really need to get out of the place. I really need to get some lights in the place so I can work in there.Before I put lights in there, I need to clean up the wiring. It was originally wired with both 12 volts and 120 volts. I need to go in with my wire cutters and do some pruning. The blue plastic electrical box you see is warped from the heat of the wood stove that was in here.

Before I do that, I need to get it to stop raining inside harder than it rains outside. I think I found the leak sources in the upper roof. I'll see if I can take care of that Tuesday.

Disappointment is Drippy

2009-04-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

I'm a little disappointed with the results of the roof coating I did. At the joint between the two part of the cabin where I coated the roof, I still have massive dripping going on. I suspect it is coming in higher on the roof and running down the under side of the steep attic ceiling and then comes out where the angle of the roof changes. This would mean I would need to do something to the North half of the roof of the main cabin even though I won't actually be living under it. Now that the 8 feet or so of snow we got here this winter is gone, I might be able to find the problem.

Roof Patching

2009-04-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

Wafer Board, OSB, Oriented Strand Board; whatever you call this stuff, it's junk. There is a whole row of nails I put in this roof that just pulled themselves out of the OSB. This has contributed to the roof leaks the bedroom addition I built and I plan to move into about May 1.

The composite roofing I put up has plenty of it's own sins.In this case the material pulled the nail heads right through itself and then the wind pealed it up.

The old chimney blew apart in the wind and now lets in water as well.

I went down to the local Habitat for Humanity surplus yard and bought a damaged can of roof coating for $23. I chose a light colored variety for a reason. Once June shows up around here, it starts getting very hot. Light colored stuff will reflect the suns heat better. The solids in this can have settled to the bottom. I spent half an hour mixing this can and I still didn't get it mixed completely. The instructions say to use a broom to apply it, so I got our old broom out and used it like a giant paint brush. This worked quite well.

The first thing I did is spread it on the bare OSB and lay the roofing back down and walk on it. The Idea here is to glue it down I think I should have spread it on the underside of the roofing too, but I didn't. I'll have to see how it worked out in a couple of days.

I started a little ways up the cabin roof and worked down.

I figure I covered about 1/3 of the roof with the 5 gallon can I got. I think I will get 3 more cans. Two to finish the roof, and one for patching.

This stuff is very messy. I'm glad I opened the can on the roof.

It will cost me more to clean this broom than it will to just buy a cheap broom for the rest of the roof. I will also buy some disposable gloves as it doesn't come off the hands willingly.

I'm sure that any roofers in my audience will see something wrong with what I am doing. While I encourage you to tell me what I'm doing wrong, keep in mind I want to be tearing this down next year at this time.

What I Have to Work With

2009-03-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

These are the existing structures. The center portion of this cabin was built in 1992 or earlier. The floor in this section is sagging badly and has no foundation. The add on section on the left was built by me in 1993. It's solid yet, but the roof leaks. I plan on moving into this portion around the first of May. The carport on the right was built in 1999. This will all have to be torn down fairly soon or it will start falling down on it's own.
This is a bathroom/utility room built with straw bales in 1995. It's as solid as the day it was built. I will keep this section and add my new house to it.

Introducing the Problem Set

2009-03-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm living in an area in Washington State with 20 inches of rain a year and temperatures that range from 100+F to -30F. I need to build my self a house so I can stop living in other peoples homes. Since I'm unemployed right now and the Economy is making a great flushing sound, I'm going to have to do this on a tight budget. At least I have some land. I think I know how to do this. I have a plan, let's see how it goes.