A Misty Morning

Early this morning as I emerged from my tent the forest was enveloped in a lovely light fog.

Looking NW from my tent.

Looking SW towards the build site from my tent.

Transience

These small fungi appear in the morning on the mulch path leading to my tent.  By the evening they are gone.

A New Chainsaw

We have had to remove a lot of trees to develop our build-site in the middle of a forest.  We started out with two  rather different chainsaws.  One was a light duty electric unit by Homelite.  The other was a gas-powered unit by Ryobi.  Of those two, I prefer the electric.  It is not as powerful as even a small gas chainsaw, but it is light in weight and very durable.  It can and has cut down a number of fairly large trees (12 inch trunks) and its low mass allows one to use it all day with minimal fatigue.  The biggest disadvantage of an electric chainsaw is the necessity of hauling a generator up into the forest to power it.  It's principle advantage is its reliability.  I've used and abused it, wore out or ruined a number of chains, bent the bar, and it is still going strong.  More power and portability prompted us to buy a gas chain saw by Ryobi.  It has proved to be a severe disappointment, however.  After only a couple of weeks of (intermittent) use, it became hard to start.  It gets ridiculous when you are expending more energy starting the saw than using it to cut wood.  Nick took up the challenge of trying to fix it but after spending many hours on it I decided that we had wasted enough time messing around with it and needed an alternative.  This led us to Woodstock Equipment Co. in Woodstock, Virginia.  They are one of our sources for parts for our Kubota tractor and excavator.  They are also an authorized Stihl dealer.  They fixed us up with a new MS290 Stihl chain saw. It's bigger and heavier than the Ryobi thing it is replacing.  It also costs twice as much and is made in Germany.  We hope it will prove to be dependable.  So far so good.

Our new chain saw along with safety gear for its operation.

Here I am, ready to cut some tree.

The Buildings Arrive

We ordered two 50 by 20 foot metal building kits back in the spring.  They are delivered to the job in pieces on a flatbed truck.  The delivery date was Tuesday, August 23.  We are by no means ready to erect these buildings yet and we pushed back the delivery date as far as we could (The manufacturer was willing to deliver them as early as mid-June.)  but decided to receive them now before the price of the steel went up.  The biggest challenge we faced was getting tons of steel pieces up to our land in the woods. There is no way a 50 foot flatbed semi could come up to our build site, get unloaded, and turn around.  We simply do not have a large enough flat area for such an operation.  Our only recourse was to unload the truck one quarter mile away on Orchard Lane and carry the materials up to our land parcel by parcel using smaller vehicles. We also had to unload the flatbed truck. We rented a huge all-terraine fork lift to unload the truck and used our smaller F450 truck as well as our Kubota B21 tractor outfitted with pallet forks to do this.  On the appointed day the rental company delivered the fork lift around noon.  Three hours later the truck with our building parts arrived.  We immediately got to work unloading so that we could finish before dark.  We got the truck unloaded by 7:00 PM but most of our steel was still sitting alongside Orchard Lane.  Fortunately, Orchard Lane is quite sleepy and the neighbors are understanding and there was no problem leaving it there overnight.  We weren't too worried about anyone taking it since there were few pieces that weighed less than several hundred pounds and many that were in the 1000 pound range so no one was likely to walk off with them.  On Wednesday morning we were still tired and sore from the previous day's efforts and we didn't get around to moving the steel up to our land until the afternoon.  The fork truck and tractor are slow vehicles and it takes quite a while to drive the quarter mile to the build site so this was all a time consuming process.  Also, some of the steel pieces were as long as 27 feet and could not be carried to our land on the fork trucks since the dirt track to the build site is not that wide.  These long (and heavy) pieces had to be loaded onto our F450 truck and driven up to the site and then unloaded.  All this takes some time and by the end of the second exhausting day we still did not have all the steel picked up off the road.  On Thursday our efforts continued and by the afternoon of the third day we had all the steel moved up to our land.  Our work was not yet over, however.  The pieces still had to be checked against the shipping manifold and sorted by building number.  Also, a number of the pieces were scattered around the property (in the road, for example) and had to be stacked and organized.  This process continued through Saturday, finally finishing up just as the rains from the far fringes of hurricane Irene were starting to bring some much needed rain.  So now we have our building parts.  Now we still have to finish the roads, excavate the foundations, pour the footers, etc. etc.

The rented fork lift arrives on a roll-off.

Nick spends some time practicing before the buildings arrive.

This vehicle is larger than we actually needed but it was the only thing that the rental company had available.

The truck with our building backs down Orchard Lane.

The unloading begins. 

It was a little tight for space but this was the best spot to unload.

Bit by bit we get the job done.

Once the flatbed is gone we move the pieces off Orchard Lane.
Some of the longer pieces had to be loaded onto our F450 to get to the build site.

These long boxes contain decorative trim metal and gutters.

The F450 with a load of long structural steel beams.

Nick got pretty good at driving this monster fork truck.

As dusk falls on the third day the checking and sorting of the pieces begins.

Some of the pieces temporarily ended up in the road.

We sorted the pieces by building.
Each of these piles contain the main structural beams for one of the buildings.

In flagrante delicto

One of the more curious insects we find in West Virginia is the stick insect.  They come in various species, some green in color and some brown.  Some are quite large.  The participants in the ménage à trois in the picture below are about 5 to 6 centimeters in length.

The Hapless Spider

We had this Venus Fly Trap at home in Kathryn's greenhouse.  We noticed that it wasn't catching any bugs so we thought we would take it out to West Virginia where there are plenty of bugs.  We were quite right.  It straight away got to gobbling and had soon filled all of its traps and proceeded in a growth spurt to produce more.  It was especially gratifying to watch it entrap a yellow jacket one afternoon.  One morning we noticed that it had caught a daddy-long-legs spider, or at least most of it.  As you can see in the picture below it couldn't quite get all the legs.

Hecho en USA

I bought a pallet fork attachment for the front of the B21 tractor from EveryThingAttachments.com.  It had to be custom built because all tractors are a little bit different and also ours is a bit on the old side.  I carefully provided the engineering measurements they needed to three place precision in hopes that they could build this thing accurately.  It was finally ready four weeks after the promised delivery date.  When I went to attach it to my tractor I was surprised to find that it did not fit.  It wasn't that it was wildly off the measurements I gave them, it was more that they were so sloppy in the implementation of the construction that things did not align like the should.  First of all, the spacing between the bosses for the pins was too small in one of the four pin locations because when they welded the hubs into place they did not take care to make them flush with the frame of the support.    Even more unforgivable was the fact that the two bosses on either side of the frame were not collinear.  What this means is that I could not pass the support pin through the two hubs.  This is ridiculous.  What kind of crap quality control does this outfit have?  If you cannot fit a pin through the holes, the entire unit is useless.  I wanted to send the whole pieces of junk back to RIck Reinhart with a nasty-gram saying how unimpressed I was, but I needed the darn thing immediately so I set about repairing a BRAND NEW piece of equipment.  I ground and filed the bosses down flush to the frame so that the swing arm of the tractor could fit between.  The misalignment of the two holes of the bosses was a bit more problematic.  If I were home in my shop I could have milled and lapped the ferrules into alignment.  But I was 120 miles from my shop in the woods!  I "solved" the problem by using some very old worn out pins that I had on hand.  With a little creative filing I could get the old worn out pins through the brand new misaligned bosses to make the thing work.   It's a bit wobbly but it functions. 

 A personal note:  I really, really want to buy stuff made here in the USA.  I try all the time to find good domestically made stuff.  However, I see no reason why I should pay top dollar for domestically made equipment if it is not going to be any better than the crap that comes from China or Mexico for less money.  Come on guys!  If we are going to be real players in the economic future of the world we got to be a lot better than the guys getting paid 50 cents an hour in the third world.  If we don't, pretty soon we too will be guys getting paid 50 cents an hour in the third world - and we'll have to learn Chinese or Spanish as well.

One of the poorly welded bosses showing the protuberance of the edge beyond the support bracket.

The repaired boss after grinding and filing in the field.

Beware this logo - these are the guys who actually made this piece of junk. 

Made in USA to "Hecho en China" standards.

I got it to work but I had to repair a BRAND NEW piece of equipment.

Building Roads

In order to develop our land we need to put in a fair length of road.  The main roads need to be wide enough and firm enough to accommodate fairly large vehicles such as cement trucks and well drilling trucks.  On flat land this is quite easy to do.  Generally all that is needed is a few truckloads of gravel spread appropriately.  If the soil isn't muddy you can sometimes get away without the gravel and just have dirt tracks.  On a hillside things are somewhat more involved.  For some parts of a road on a hill it is almost as easy as flat ground.  If the road can lead directly in the direction of the slope then you can just put down gravel like on flat land.  The dirt alone option is not usually viable on a hill, however, since even a little rain can make a dirt slope slippery.  On a hillside, unfortunately, only a few parts of any road are going to lead straight up the slope.  It is always necessary to traverse at an angle to the slope or parallel to the slope.  In this case you have to make a platform that is level to the left and right of the road path.  One way to do this is to cut into the hillside on the uphill side of the track and pile the excavated dirt on the downhill side.  This is a fairly quick and efficient way to build such a road.  Sometimes, it is not possible or desirable to cut into the hillside.  In forested areas you may not want to cut into the uphill side of the track if a tree is there.  The excavation would damage the tree roots and partially unearth the tree which could destabilize it.  In this case you must bring in fill dirt and build the road up at the downhill side.  This is fairly easy if the left to right slope is fairly gentle.  For a road on a steeper slope, however, you must be careful make sure that the fill is stable and won't slump away under the weight of a vehicle.  That is to say you need to make a hard shoulder on the downhill side.  A good way to do this is to build up a retaining wall of fairly large rock before adding fill dirt.  This is a bit of work but the result is a nice stable road.  Often these two techniques can be combined.  That is , you can cut into the uphill side a bit and finish to the required width with rock and dirt.  On our land we have lots of rock so the hard shoulder technique is both economical and attractive.  It is a fair amount of manual labor however since each rock has to be placed by hand.

This road was originally cut only wide enough for a tractor.  We are widening it to accommodate a well truck by building up a hard shoulder using rock fill. 

This is a close-up of that same section of road.  Each rock you see was placed there by hand.  In the background you can see where some dirt has been added to fill in the shoulder.  Later gravel will be added to the top surface.

 

The completed rock edge can be attractive with a natural look as well as functional.

In this completed section of road you can see the hard rock shoulder and the gravel surface layer.

Preparing for the Arrival of the Buildings

We are erecting two pre-fab metal buildings each of which will be 20 by 50 ft.  Both buildings will have a full lower level (basically a walk-in basement) for a total of 4000 sq ft of space.  These buildings are delivered on a series of pallets on the back of a flat bed truck.  The buildings are basically like a big erector set.  You put them together with screws, bolts, and a bit of caulk.  The buildings are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday, August 23.  We are not ready to use them yet; we have not even dug out the foundation yet much less put up the lower level walls.  However, if we wait any longer for the delivery the supplier will have to charge us more because the price of steel is going steadily up.  So we will just have to store the pallets until we are ready to use them.  This would be no big deal on flat land, you would just set them on the ground off to the side and out of the way.  On the other hand, when you are building on a hillside there is no convenient "off to the side" place unless you make one.  So we had to make one.  We chose a place next to the road we are constructing leading up to the build site.  We dug it level using the excavator and the tractor and put down a layer of crushed stone.  The size of the area should accommodate all the pallets.  A flatbed truck is 53 by 8.5 feet.  Standard pallets are 4 feet square allowing two rows of pallets on the truck.  Most of our pallets will be four feet deep but up to 12 feet long to hold the steel building panels and beams.  Nevertheless they will still fit the long way on the truck and does not affect the area calculation.  Our pallet storage area is 34 by 13 feet.  That gives about the same area as the truck.  Our plan is to put the pallets in three rows rather than two so everything should fit nicely.  We will find out next Tuesday if our math is accurate.

The graveled area to the right of the car is our newly completed pallet landing area.

Another view of the same area.

In less than a week this area should be full of building parts.

This is looking uphill from the pallet area showing the road that is under construction which  leads to the build site.

Water: A basic necessity

One rarely thinks about water in town where unlimited quantities are available at the twist of a tap.  Out in the undeveloped wild, however, things get very basic.  We do not yet have a well.  A well is one of the very first things we wish to acquire but it cannot happen until we have a road onto the area of land where the well will be drilled.  Until then, every drop of this basic oxide of hydrogen has to be carried in from northern Virginia 120 miles away.  We initially were doing this in 5 gallon buckets (5 at a time) but soon realized that we needed a more efficient way to get larger quantities of water to the land.  I am not even talking about drinking or cooking water.  Potable water can be easily obtained from local grocery stores in 1 gallon jugs for reasonable cost.  Wash water is another matter.  A typical shower in town can involve the use of several dozen gallons of water.  When you have to bring in water in 5 gallon jugs, a shower becomes an extreme luxury.  The washing of hands can be essential for maintaining healthful sanitation, however.  To help bring water to the wilderness I purchased a 60 gallon tank to transport water.  Showers are nevertheless a brief and frugal experience but at least we can get through about a week of use out of a single tankful.

The 60 gallon polyethylene tank mounted in the bed of my pickup truck

Nick prepares to pump the contents into the holding tank of the trailer.

3/8 inch PVC hose connects the tank through a pump to the trailer

We bought this 12 volt diaphragm pump from an industrial surplus dealer.

We pump the water directly into the holding tank of the trailer.

Bug in a Bottle

I had just finished drinking a beer when a very large hornet, attracted to the sweet scent of imported Belgian brew, decided to buzz around seeking the origin of this aroma.  I had set the bottle down on the picnic bench and to my great surprise, the bug landed on the lip of the bottle and crawled right in.  It fell to the bottom and could not get out.  The sides of the bottle were too slippery for it to crawl out and the interior diameter of the bottle was too narrow to fly out.  Angrily, it buzzed and clawed at the bottom of the bottle.  It occurred to me that I could help it out by inverting the bottle, but I was a little concerned about exactly what its attitude would be upon emerging from this confinement.  So I decided to let nature take its course and allow this particular creature to win the insect version of the proverbial Darwin award.  After all, I didn't coerce or invite its exploration of the interior of the bottle, it went in entirely of its own volition.

At least I had already finished the bottle.

The six-legged monster was at least 3 cm long!

Summer Drought

Our land is normally quite dry in the summer.  It lies on the lee side of Sideling Hill and consequently gets only a fraction of the rain that falls further to the west.  This year has been a bit worse than normal.  Although nowhere near as bad as the heat and drought hitting Texas this year, the dryness has caused some difficulties in our efforts at developing the land.  The biggest problem has been the dust that is produced when we dig.  In places, the soil has become a two inch thick layer of material which we have been comparing to Moon dust.  Merely walking on it or especially driving the equipment over it produces clouds of dust like a fog.  We have resorted to the wearing of respirators whenever we work on excavation.  Also, the dryness has made it dangerous to have open fires to burn the brush we regularly produce when we cut down trees to clear the land.  I have instituted the rule that we cannot burn except on days after a rain or during a rain.  Since it has barely rained for the past four weeks, we have slowed our brush clearing efforts because piles of dry brush are in themselves a fire hazard.  I really do not want to be responsible for burning down my own forest.  Hopefully as we move into the late summer and early Autumn the rains will come more frequently.

No, this is not the footprint of Buzz Aldrin in the regolith of Mare Tranquillitatis but my own footprint in the dust of West Virginia.

This stream-bed on our land contains a raging torrent of water over a foot deep in the spring, but here, two months later, there is not a drop of water to be seen.