TRACTOR!

If we are to judge a week in terms of the number of long term aspirations finally achieved, this one was pretty spectacular. I'll rewind about five years to take up the tale...

Ever since I developed a fascination for homesteading (my catch-all Americanism for a self reliant lifestyle on a bit of land - growing stuff, building things and generally going against the grain of modern life) I've hankered after a tractor. Why? Just think of the jobs you could do with one! Mowing, lifting heavy things, pulling logs out of the woods, splitting those logs with the hydraulics, towing trailers, scraping earth in about a dozen different ways, dragging things - I could go on. I really wanted a tractor.

However, the realities of living in a small terraced house in Berkshire meant that, had I bought even the teeniest of teeny tractors, I wouldn't even have been able to get it into our postage-stamp sized garden.

Fast forward to our current (and amazing) home. Loads of space (and jobs) for a tractor. For reasons that I'm yet to quite fathom, a proper tractor seemed to slip out of my mind - perhaps the excitement of moving pushed it down my list of dreams! I bought a great little John Deere ride-on mower which has more than paid for itself - our land is mostly grass for now - but it was a bit of a one trick pony. It could mow, and tow a small trailer, but not much else. Plus, it used a lot of fuel in it's 18HP petrol engine.

So thoughts turned to a tractor again. The catalyst was having the last order of oak for the Barn - those beams are HEAVY - moving and lifting them was possible, but only just. A strained back at this stage would pretty much cancel our wedding this summer (no back equals no barn building equals no wedding venue) - so I decided to act.

After a number of months of searching (and a poor attempt by somebody to scam me out of two month's wages on eBay...) I found the perfect little tractor at a dealership in the Midlands.

She is a Kubota BX2200 - a little 22HP three cylinder diesel, but a proper tractor nonetheless. It has hydraulic transmission, a mid-mount mower deck, three separate hydraulic circuits, a rear linkage that will lift half a ton, mid and rear PTOs and is ready to be road registered. It only has 500-ish hours on the clock - barely run in for a Kubota.

The first attachment I've bought is a set of folding pallet forks - primarily for oak beams but also to be used for logs. Here she is earning her keep - moving a big pallet of freshly split ash logs down to the house.

I've also used the tractor to move the oak beams about on the slab - it's great being able to pick up three beams at once and lift them straight onto the saw horses for processing.

The barn is racing along - helped by a bit of process management advise! All the working drawings are on my Macbook, so whenever I needed a dimension I had to walk from the slab to the house and check on the drawings. Why I didn't think to print some working drawings sooner I'll never know! Anyway, I've now got a load of laminated and dimensioned plans like these to refer to;

This was the bit I finished this weekend - the covered storage are accessed from the garage. With another couple of dry days forecast next weekend, I should be able to finish about half of the uprights for the building... watch this space!

From Forest to Fence

Thanks to my future brother-in-law Luke for the title to this blog entry - seeing as he helped with the manual effort I think he has earned naming rights!

In our apparently never-ending quest to make our boundary dog proof, we needed to sort out the cleft rail fence close to where we park the cars. This lovely new fence had replaced a horrid old half-round effort that we inherited from the previous occupants; although it was much prettier, dogs could still jump through from both directions.

Spurred on by the success of the resaw jig I'd make for the bandsaw, another trip into our permissive woods was in order. The chainsaw started first time after a couple of months of inactivity, and five minutes later we had these Ash logs - both about a foot round and three feet long.

Onto the resaw jig, and through the bandsaw they go...

...before they are planked into 10mm thick boards.

The quality control is still somewhat lacking - it is quite hard to keep the log upright and against the fence - the natural drift of the bandsaw will try and push things out of kilter. Anyway, this was perfectly good enough for some three-inch wide boards for the fence.

Every third board was left a few inches longer, and they were fixed with stainless steel screws - the fence looks marvellous, but most importantly it is dog proof! An added bonus was the off-cuts, which burned beautifully and kept the house heated for the evening. Not a bad day's work!

A Timber Re-saw Jig for the Bandsaw

This is such a great bit of workshop kit - I can't remember the last time I was so chuffed with a few bits of plywood!

Last summer I bought a Bandsaw - I needed one to cut the gentle curves in the braces for the Barn, as making all 28 by hand would have taken me years.  The bandsaw has already paid for itself - you can buy curved braces off the shelf, but at £50 each it would have got expensive very quickly; far more expensive than buying a machine and making them myself. As ever, I decided to buy a slightly bigger and better model than was strictly necessary - my mantra of 'buy cheap, buy twice' won out, and actually made the bandsaw purchase even more versatile and better value, since I could do more with a larger model.

Something I'd always wanted to try was cutting my own planks from logs. Wood isn't cheap - if I could scavenge some decent lengths of oak and ash, cut them into boards and plane them to shape the bandsaw would save even me a good chunk over buying wood from a merchant.

To plank a log, you need to be able to cut two flat, straight edges at 90 degrees to each other. This will allow the log to sit flat on the table of the saw and against the guide fence at the same time, ensuring consistent boards. You can then resaw the log to any thickness you need.

To make these flat faces, I had to make a jig. There are loads of plans on Pinterest - most were quite comprehensive, with sliding clamp sections and T Slot profiles to fit the bandsaw. Beautiful bits of work, but perhaps a bit more complicated than strictly necessary. I decided to deliberately go as simple and low-tech as possible, using up some bits of scrap plywood from the shed, a bit of glue, some decking screws and a handful of pocket hole screws.

Here is the (free) jig;

This is set up for a very short log - I nicked a bit of cherry from the log pile just to try it out. The clamp on the right is fixed; the one on the left can be moved to fit the length of the log. The clamps can be set about four feet from each other - but there really is no limit to how long they could be. The log is held in place by the decking screws on either clamp.

Here she is in action;

The log is held by two decking screws per end - they only need to be driven in enough to stop the log moving. Once you've cut one square face, the log is rotated 90 degrees (newly cut face down) to cut the second face.

Now you've got two square edges, the guide fence is set to whichever thickness you fancy, and the log can be planked...

This was just a quick-and-dirty trial, but I'm going to head into our 'permission' tomorrow to recover some fallen ash logs to plank and turn into fencing staves.

Like I said, a very satisfying use of some old bits of plywood!

Final Oak Delivery

So, the last delivery of green oak arrived this morning - containing everything I need to finish the timber frame for the barn. I found the whole process extremely easy, mostly because I was at work and missed all the excitement! Kristy was a champion, directing LGV drivers, telehandlers and generally being a great site foreman. I stopped short of criticising her for lack of safety boots, helmet or high-vis jacket - she took some great pictures which made up for her Health-and-Safety shortfall.

This was a picture of our drive at 0745hrs this morning - the telehandler and driver were provided at very short notice by Dickie, the chap who did our groundworks.

Some well-deserved advertising and a link for the fabulous Venables Oak - they have been SO helpful throughout, tolerating my repeated phone calls and panicked changes to my order. They fitted delivery around us - even changing the driver's schedule so that we were home. Great people to deal with!

Here is part of our order - a pack containing 55 square meters of oak cladding for the barn - there is just shy of £1000 of cladding on the telehandler's forks!

And here it is - one flat-pack 85 square meter barn in kit-form. Upright posts on the left, facing rafters and wall plates in the middle, internal-garage-storage-bit and doorframes on the right.

To save working space, our amazing neighbour Brooksy let me borrow a bit of space in his farmyard for the oak cladding...

...and the tie beams. These are real monsters - over 7 meters long, 7 inches square and weighing a quarter of a ton each.

Kristy's brother Luke is coming to stay for a few days this week, and the plan will be to stack the cladding with timber stringers to let it air, before we start making some more sawdust - and building the barn! I'm hoping we can also start making the apparatus I'll use to move the monster beams about - a clever devise called a Logging Arch, not dissimilar to this;

...which can then be used to bring home logs from our local permissive woods. 

Too many projects on the go!

January Catch-up

No blogging recently, as you may have noticed. Lots of work though - both around the property and to earn money to spend on the property!

I'll keep it short - a picture tells a thousand words...

I plucked up the courage to drag the chain mortiser out of the workshop, and tackle the log store for the Barn. This was my trial-run - I ordered the oak early so I had something to play with practise on. As it turns out, this is pretty straightforward - as long as the mortises are made a little bigger than they need to be, which saves loads of assembly-and-disassembly to fine tune the components.

Buoyed by the success of the first corner, I moved from 'beginner' to 'intermediate' oak framing, and had a bash at the centre of the log store. This is quite complex, with five components to line up and pin.

This stuff is SO HEAVY - I learned a great lesson putting this little part of the frame together, which is to lift the oak by hand as little as possible. To this end, I built a little trolley with swivel wheels to move the beams, spin them on their axis and run them around lengthways - which I couldn't do with the sack truck. I could also do with a facility to lift the beams to saw horse height, but haven't found a good solution to this yet - short of buying a pallet pump truck which would be used for a few weeks and then be redundant.

I enlisted Graham from next door to help stand the log store up - it is a massive psychological boost to see something up and in place! We even stood the frame on the granite staddle stones.

Driving the oak pegs into place is the most wonderful job - the joints pull together so tightly if they have been cut properly. I know these pegs look loose - this is the back side, so the taper of the pegs is apparent. The other side is the 'weather' side which are really nice and tight in their holes to keep the water out. The pegs are lubricated with linseed oil before they are driven so that they can draw the components together effectively.

When I wasn't framing, I had to pop a quick paving slab base down just outside the larder window...

...onto which some lovely chaps then popped our new boiler!

Having an external boiler makes a lot of sense for us - we gain a lot of space in the kitchen, it is much more efficient than our old boiler and there is pretty much zero chance of a faulty boiler causing carbon monoxide poisoning. It also saves us a real headache when routing the flue through the roof of the planned new extension - so an external machine was a no brainer. It is a Worcester Bosch system boiler, which means almost all the workings are in the boiler housing, so we gain airing cupboard space as well.

Finally, I bought a length of oak worktop from eBay, with the intention of building a little study in the nook in the spare bedroom. Half has been used for the desk top, and the rest will make some little floating shelves for books and baskets. The worktop I bought was exactly half the price of a new piece - driving ten miles in the Defender and spending half an hour with the belt sander saved £60.

The next significant date is coming this Monday - the remainder of the oak for the Barn is being delivered. I am envisioning a HUGE pile of timber - no doubt the reality will be even bigger. They are delivering all the rest of the structural timber (including five wall ties at 6.5 metres long) and the oak cladding. Next week is going to be BUSY!

Oak Framing - Soleplates

Since the last update a fortnight ago, I have made more sawdust than in the rest of my life put together. Quite literally wheelie-bins full of the stuff.

Remember that big pile of oak that was due to be soleplates?














Mostly done!

The weather has been really good for December - I've only lost a day or two this month to rain. The original plan was to spend most of the winter in the workshop and emerge in the spring to do all this work, but the looming deadline of our late June wedding has encouraged me to press on.

The oak is a wonderful material to work with - I'm learning loads and have only made one small 25mm error which I should be able to rectify (or hide). I realise now how much I learned on the Oak Framing Course I attended in the late spring - there is no way I would have attempted this project otherwise...

There are some fairly complex joints (for an amateur anyway!) like this corner tie joint.

There will be an upright post sitting in a mortice on top of this joint, with an oak peg holding the whole lot together.

I bought a huge handheld planer, which cleans the saw marks perfectly and skims away any slight stains which the oak has picked up. It really shows the beauty of the wood as well.

I've done five complete bridle scarf joints as well - these took a lot of head scratching and double checking before I found the courage to cut the first one. Now I have some live models I can rattle them out in about an hour. I think I'm being a bit fussy about the finish and standard of the joints - but it is really satisfying when they close up tightly.

This is yet to be planed - which will clear up all the marks, stains and pencil lines, as well as improving the fit of the joint. These will also be draw pegged together. 

There is a big pile of braces which have been marked out with shoulders cut - but I'm saving these for when the winter weather inevitably arrives.

Oak Framing - The First Day

A really significant day this week - the first delivery of green oak* arrived from Venables Brothers, a sawmill in Shropshire.

A sight recap for new readers - we are building an oak framed barn of about 80 square meters in our garden, in which we are planning to host our wedding reception this coming June. After the wedding, it will be converted into a double garage, workshop and garden room. I'm building the whole thing - how many people get to build their own wedding reception venue?

I deliberately scheduled the delivery to arrive when I was at home - but Sod's Law kicked in and the wagon arrived before I was home. Kristy did a great job helping the driver offload everything...

That little pile doesn't look like much, but it this stuff is HEAVY. Green oak weighs approximately 1 ton per cubic metre, so even the very shortest lengths in this picture are about 35kg each. In all, I ordered 1.3 tonnes of oak, but the sawmill will oversupply if there is any doubt about the structural qualities of the timber - meaning we have more like two tonnes of oak here... For the next delivery I'll be hiring a fork lift truck - that order will contain five lengths that will weigh 300kg each!

A quick check of the order, and it was stacked in piles dependant on use - I have ordered enough to do all the soleplates (the oak that sits on the small brick walls at the building's perimeter), all the curved windbraces (or knees if you are a boatbuilder - to stop the structure racking under wind load) and the log store that will be closest to the house. They are stacked with air gaps all around to prevent fungal growth as the oak is stored.

These are the braces - cutting and shaping these will probably be the most labour-intensive part of the build...

These are all the soleplates - when I have cut the end joints and mortices ready to accept uprights, they will be fixed to the brick dwarf wall with stainless steel studs epoxyed into the concrete slab, with a damp proof membrane under them.

I also finished my sawhorses this week - I need to buy a bit more timber to make a fourth small horse, and I have two much taller horses which are the same height as my Superjaws clamping sawhorse.

The next post will contain some really exciting things - mostly sawing, mortising, cutting joints and making sawdust!



*not green in colour, but green as in unseasoned. The oak is sawn to size soon after the tree is cut, which has three effects - it is cheaper to buy than dried oak, it is MUCH easier to work, and it is still full of water and therefore HEAVY!