I'm going to change the name of this blog

I'm going to change the name of this blog. I can't believe how long it's been.

 I wanted to have some pics to share before I posted again, and of course, lack of bandwidth and access have kept me from posting anything.

Anyway, I have been doing stuff for the last 2 weeks.

I call this one 'Steampunk Rustic':











Okay, I'm skipping along pretty quickly just to get it done. Sorry for the lack of details:
The building of Eagle Spirit Door (bedroom)

Kreg Jig Hint #1, use paraffin on the drillbit. Goes much more smoothly.

Step 1: into the planer.

Step 2: out of the planer. Reset, Repeat, over and over and over and over again. I spent days planing this hemlock.


Speaking of planes, Tracey and I were up the local Re-Store (one of our favorite spots) and I found this old rusty plane for $5. It was literally a chunk of rust. But I gambled the $5. Got it back to the homestead and carefully managed to work it apart.



I managed to get something like a surface on the shoe after a LOT of work. The shoe was broken and welded, and will never be flat again. You can see the weld to the right of the slot. The frog is a style I've never seen before. It's def a Bailey style plane, but it's not a Stanley #4, or #5, or #6,7,8 or 9 either. In fact, I'm not sure it's a Stanley at all.



After a few hours of work, I eventually got a serviceable plane. The blade needs to be re edged, but it works. Sadly, I broke the handle while sanding it, but I'm pretty sure it was already going. Looks and feels like walnut to me. But it works.
Okay, moving along;



One of the pieces of hemlock looks a bit dodgy, and I considered ripping the dodgy bit off the board before planing it, but I wanted to hoard the wide pieces, so I choose to plane it and see what I ended up with, and this showed up. I call it Spirit Eagle. It will be the feature of the bedroom door.



Still Life with Titebond.



Eagle Spirit Door coming together



I'm slowly managing to move the woodshop into the cabin crib. The far stack of boards is Eagle Spirit, the near stack is the laundry room door. It will be a pocket door.





The Tardis is almost done.

And I can't wait to finally be able to take a shower.
And that's the news from Cold Comfort.

It occurred to me that I need

it occurred to me that I need to change the title of this blog, as I'm not coming even close to updating every day.

That said, though it's been weeks, I've actually been doing stuff. My concern, and the reason I've not posted is because I didn't really have much of anything to say, as I felt like I wasn't getting anything done. Well, For what it's worth, here it is.

I think I left off here:




Well, here's the jig for resawing the old flooring:




Did I say something before about Freud saw blades? I think I did. Anyway, moving right along:



Same doorway treatment into the bedroom, and now the anteroom has a finish-y feel to it. Moved some of the Davis furniture in, and started sleeping on the futon, instead of in the tent-cot. Big change, feels good.

Then on to other stuff, with that milestone reached:

On the words of Dave Hickey, one of the premier DIY'ers on this planet, I bought one of those Kreg jigs, and now it's time to put it to work.
remember all that hemlock?


First cabinet I've built in a long time.



massive amounts of sanding, and a lot of messy stuff trying to get the base to play well with the whackiness of the level of the floor, or rather, the distinct lack thereof.

yes, that's a laundry sink. The bathroom (in-house, rather than out-house) will be a laundry sink. Just makes more sense that those tiny little basins. This is me, shrugging.

So, more kreg jig fun:



Plane it, plane it, and plane it again. Days spent planing, thinking it's right, then planing some more.



Eventually, I got sick of planing, and set the pockets, and started the glue up.



Ready for the battens.



Batten door, one each. Hemlock with an inlay of Sassafras.

(and days of sanding and sanding and more sanding go by)



"finished" (if you can call it that) with Formby's. Because it's easy, and to be fair, if you work it hard enough, it actually looks okay.



Spent today at Cold Comfort doing a final coat of Formby's, cutting in the hinges, the old-school way, by eye and by hand with chisels, and yeah, I used a level, it helps. Hung the door. And here it is. Nope, not done, I failed to take into account how much the floor drops from the wall towards the center of the room, so I need to relieve an inch or so from the bottom of the door so that it will open all the way. Binds up close to the bathroom exterior wall. Folks have suggested cutting a crescent moon into the door, and in fairness, the composter needs ventilation to work correctly. But I think pulling warm air under the door is a better fit. Besides, (and here's your trivia for the day) If I cut a crescent moon in to the door, that would make this 'in-house' (not out-house, 'cause it's inside) the women's. See, the crescent moon is the woman's outhouse. The men's outhouse has a sun carved on the door for the vent. Now, since men just use the woods anyway, the men's outhouse usually fell into disrepair and the woman's outhouse had to be maintained. So, all we now know of any outhouse, are those with the crescent moon, as the sun outhouses rotted into the ground long ago.

And that's all from Cold Comfort today.

Except maybe,



This is Erustepholis Davis, or Ed as we call him. He's come up to live at Cold Comfort, and he's most welcome.

I kept at it.

Got up, and got back at it.

Friends of mine, who actually know what they are doing, have been somewhat dismissive of my intention to build and hang my own doors, in my own door frames. Which is fair enough. That's how folks do doors. Go buy a pre-hung and stick it in the rough-in, tack it in place, shim and level, and done.

Sadly, I don't have that much sense.

Some old oak flooring, re-sawn serves as the frame for the bathroom door. This was the old kitchen floor. It won't be going back down, as it's a bit thick for a radiant floor.

Tracey had sanded the finish off a few of these boards last spring. So out of the garage they came, and onto the work table. Ripping them to the proper width proved pretty straightforward with the new work table. That was time well spent.

 With the door way in place, was time to see if I was kidding myself.

Hrmmmm, , ,

I hate big levels. But not too shabby.

Now THAT'S more like it. Of course, it's a short level. I think I like short levels better.

But the level only tells part of the story

it's old,
it's rusty,
it's ill tempered
But it NEVER lies.

mmmmmm,
umm,hum, hrmm

Errr, and ha!

Horizontal is plumb, and the verticals are true to the horizontal, even if big nasty level's bubble is a tick to one side.

It's a doorway, and it's oak, and it's plumb and it's true.

More trim, more molding, more flooring, more more and more.

Fairly, I'm terrible at drywall, I can't paint worth a hoot, and I know I'm no frame carpenter, and I shere ain't no cabinet man, but this I can do, and I like doing it, and I can build doors from scratch, and they are much cooler than store bought stuff. But in truth, no one really cares, you can't get paid to do this work.

 I like it though. Yes, that's a great big knothole in the 'corner molding'. I like knotholes, I like defects. Clear lumber has it's place, but this is mostly aesthetic, not structural, and I like wood with character, and that's my sense of aesthetic. How it iz.

I finally actually got back to work

on the house. Took a few days to catch up on my sleep after Cheatfest

which was a whole lotta fun, but I was pretty tuckered out. Didn't get much sleep. Then I sorta messed around for a while, hmming and haaing on how to re-design my workstation after seeing Mykl Messer's  set up.

Eventually, I got that together:

With that done, finally got around to tackling the trim and molding.

This stuff is sassafras, courtesy the back porch of Jimi Snyder's shop. It's a true joy to work with, smells WONDERFUL! However, it's all thin strips, so I'm having to rip a lot of them to fit those strange size window and door cavities. Very tedious, and suboptimal. Some of the rips I'm having to do freehand with a jigsaw. I'm grateful I have a very nice jigsaw.

example:

I thought I had all the sassafras in the world, now I'm wondering if I'm going to have enough to finish, I'm going through this stuff like it was free. :) Looks just like I wanted though, I'm actually pretty pleased. They're closing down the cafe, so I gotta go.

My Bicycle. The Big Dummy/Stoke Monkey, how I did it.

To something I did a while back, but never blogged, though I most certainly intended to do so. This is a digression, but the Big Dummy is a big part of Cold Comfort Microfarm, and was a significant investment in the future plans of the new lifestyle. I meant to blog this a long time ago, but never got around to it.

Was at the 18th Annual Cheat River Festival last week, and this bicycle got a lot of interest, as I was using it as my work truck all week. So I thought I'd go ahead and write about it so folks would have a reference.

Where we began:

This is a pretty much stock out-of-the-box Surly Big Dummy. The modifications at this point are the addition of a VO setback seatpost, Planet Bike Cascadia 29er fenders, A Xtracycle 'kickback' center stand and a set of Surly 'Open bar' lo-rise handlebars. And of course, my trusty old Brooks saddle, stolen from Pugsley.

I purchased the Stokemonkey Kit from Clever Cycles in Portland, and a battery from Li Ping in China. Clever Cycles doesn't sell the battery, as the headaches and hassles involved in shipping lithium based batteries around is just a bit too much. I don't blame them.

So, First things first.

Off come the pedals:

Then remove the old cranks:

Next, remove the external bottom bracket bearings:

Now we're ready to install the new bottom bracket. I had a heck of a time with this. Emailed back and forth to the good folks at Clever Cycles about the EXACT bottom bracket axle width. I was assured, more than once, that the correct width of the axle for the Stokemonkey is 113mm, but that it might go as wide as 118mm depending on chain-line issues. Not exactly wonderful, but there was high confidence that 113mm would work in most situations. So, I got a 113mm bb axle.

I went with old-school loose balls in cups style bottom bracket, as that is the level of technology with which I am most comfortable. It's good stuff, properly maintained will likely outlast modern civilization, etc etc. Not as easy to find as it once was, but the good folks at Harris Cyclery came through again.

The crankset is provided as part of the Stokemonkey kit. It's nice Sugino stuff, way strong.

With that done, time to add the cranks.

Starting to look good, now it's time to add the motor. Instructions say to invert the rig at this point, and they are right. This gets a bit tedious.

Things started to get pretty frustrating at this point. I located the bracket according to the instructions, that being between the two bottle boss sets, one forward facing, one rear facing, and no matter how hard I wished upon a star, I was unable to get good clearance either from the top tube, or the seat tube and the motor. I was using the phone camera and phone calls with Jeremy at Clever Cycles a few times at this point, and he did his best to be helpful, but in the end, I had to punt, and try to straddle one set of bottle bosses. I could never get him to say that "yes, we have mounted this kit on a 2010 'new style' 16" Big Dummy frame and it fit just fine." Well, in the end, I did get a decent fit, just not according to the published method.

Now time to cut the primary drive chain to fit:

A bit of a digression: I don't get why folks use 'superlinks' or whatever they are called, when good ole chain tools work just fine. Honestly, this is something I do not understand. I've come to accept the superiority of the threadless headset, and I appreciate how external bearings make servicing and replacement so much simpler for the mechanic, and other things besides, but I still don't get why folks don't use chain tools anymore. -end digression-.
Getting closer;

Swapped out the fancy new front shifter and brake lever for an old-school Suntour friction thumbshifter/brake lever I had laying around to accommodate the left-thumb throttle.

Added some of those fancy cork-feeling Ergon grips too. They are niiiice!

as you can see, there is not a great deal of clearance in this frame for the motor assembly, but there is enough. This shows the strange cable tensioning system. It works, and it's simple. Not very easy to adjust though, but adequate.

Ta Da!
Alas, on the test ride, it was revealed that under torque, the crank arms would impact the motor mount bracket, on the granny ring, the chain would interfere with the bolts on the motor casing, making granny gear useless. I had to pull it apart and go with a 122mm bottom bracket axle, which solved everything. No, a 113mm isn't adequate, nor would be a 118mm. 122mm is correct for this bike.

113mm axle.

122mm axle
Some fun working pics:

A bunch of 6-foot stakes, a 6-foot step ladder, 600 or so feet of rope lights, 800-plus feet of extension cord, a maul, and other bits. And yes, this load taught me to turn the handle bars away from the direction of the fall at the last second to open a good sized path past the handle bars to more gracefully fall off the bike as it goes down. :)

A honda generator, 100 or so feet of heavy extension cord, my electrician tool bag, my carpentry tool bag, some other stuff.
Oh, and this was hybrid parking only, so I qualified. :)