175 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
2 comments »
My bones haven’t finished knitting back together, and the gum tree chunks are still in the bed, but on the way back from a fast food run tonight, I saw a log pile on the grass in front of the sidewalk, right on my block! I backed up in front of the driveway there, and loaded one very large trunk piece, and a bunch of other large branch pieces in right on top of the eucalyptus. I have a feeling they were out all day, and people picked through the little stuff for firewood, leaving the la...
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101 days ago
by Innovator |
8 comments »
I have always cut my green logs either on the ground or on top of other logs. Well a few weeks ago I was cutting a log and it decided it wanted to dance a little bit. Now I don’t care if a log dances or not I just don’t want it to move while I have a moving 20” chainsaw in it.
This got me thinking there has to be a way to hold the work safely for cutting. So I took to the internet looking for sawhorses for chainsaws. I did find a few commercial units but they were all listed in E...
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179 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
5 comments »
This is a bit old now, as I built these starting in late March this year, but I’m expanding them a bit now, and wanted to post some updates on that. That requires getting off my butt and posting the original stuff I’ve dragged my heels on. With the trees that have fallen over, and the random large branches I’ve managed to find here in LA, I had an awful lot of logs for a 0.18 acre lot. I recently mapped out my tiny 0.18 acre lot, breaking it into 30 equally sized squares, an...
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228 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
9 comments »
A couple weeks ago I passed some tree trimmers cutting up a handful of paperbark trees (Melaleuca quinquenervia).
I passed a few times on lunchtime errands, and finally decided to stop and ask for some free wood. I’ve been so curious for 5 years now about what’s underneath the spongy, peeling bark of these trees. You can punch the trunks and leave a deep imprint of your hand, which swells back up eventually, hiding the dent. It doesn’t hurt, because they feel like a s...
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239 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
4 comments »
This branch, found a week ago now, was a mystery for awhile, but then I accidentally identified it while looking up something about paperbark trees, which are in some ways related. Callistemon, or Bottlebrush Trees, in the Myrtaceae family, are – like many LA trees – native to Australia. My coworker and officemate, who knows about my log and tree-collecting shenanigans told me one morning that the city had roped off a big branch that had fallen. He saw it on his drive in to work.
...
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170 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
14 comments »
I got the last 2 of the 5 sections built last week, sans the corrugated roofing. Here’s how I did it, at warp speed:
This marked the first use of my new truck, for 2×4s and small ply panels from Home Depot. What a joy!
As an aside, when I cut this particular 2×4 to length…
...I made a new friend. I think it’s a fat bird.
As another side, whenever I stack up cut 2×4s like this, I get a terrific urge to build a deck, or workbench:
...
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264 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
17 comments »
I didn’t want to waste any time slabbing up some of the minilogs I cut out of the mystery branches I found last week, so Saturday I had a go at it. Very exciting. I had some split pieces, so I sanded them up on my belt sander.
I like the faint grain revealed in the piece on the left, sanded down from one like that which I’m holding:
I clamped my belt sander down to the table to use it as a mini (though relatively enormous) benchtop model:
Here’s a long piece sanded ...
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169 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
17 comments »
A bit over a week ago I found some logs outside a neighbor’s place down the street while on my way home from work on a Friday night. They were Ficus microcarpa (AKA Chinese banyan, AKA Indian Laurel, AKA curtain fig, AKA etc…). Almost a week later – a few days ago – I found another load of the same logs in the same spot on my way home for lunch. This morning while heading into work, I passed the same spot, and the biggest haul yet was sitting there. I was running a few...
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250 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
14 comments »
I was putting in the rafters on my shed roof today, when while taking a break I noticed a message on my machine from a friend. He had spotted a fallen tree, which didn’t make it through today’s heavy wind storms here in LA. I grabbed my Irwin carpenter saw – the best hand saw I’ve used so far for wet logs (I’ve tried 3 now) – and headed out in my inadequate hatchback. It’s getting traded in for a truck soon, hooray. This was the pile I found:
...
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159 days ago
by Gary Fixler |
8 comments »
As a home hobbyist in a big city, not working as much in BF as in “oh look, a log!” I decided to keep things simple on myself and go with KD DF for stickering my slabs. I have a bunch of really old, really dry stuff, and in fact tried to build some finger-jointed frames for another project I’d like to post about someday, but dropping one only a foot to the ground caused all 4 corners to shatter. It’s that dry. I figure that means it’ll be fairly inert, though who...
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