Porch floor

With the porch roof put on (only two ridge caps left to complete), it was time to start laying the porch floor. With my dad’s help, I started putting boards down on Monday.

In the spring of 2009, a friend let me cut down some beech trees on his property and have the logs. Dad and I dragged the logs out of the woods and staged them for milling last fall. Finally, a friend of mine brought his Woodmizer sawmill over to saw the logs for me early this summer. We brought them home and stickered (stacked with sticks between the layers so that air can get all around the boards) them near the house, waiting for the time when they would become our porch floor.

We hauled several over near the cut-off saw, and Dad began squaring one end. The design of the porch is for the floor to run from the house out. This allows the boards to be laid down without concern for their overall length, as long as they are long enough to allow some overhang at the edge of the porch. Once the boards are screwed down, I snap a line and cut them off to the right length with my circular saw. Then, they are all the same length.

After dad squared one end, I would put a board in place and then screw it down with deck screws. This takes a fair bit of time. We were able to complete almost 30 feet of floor along the front of the house on Monday. Yesterday, I finished up the last four feet and cut the excess off the edge leaving a nice overhang. It looks quite nice.

Today, Jon came over to work. He, Dad, and I worked on the porch floor on the back of the house. When I cut the trees and bucked them into saw logs, I was planning for the porch to be 9 feet wide. It turns out that it is actually 9.5 feet wide. So, some of the boards are almost but not quite long enough. So, we had to get creative.

On the back, we cut short lengths and screwed them near the house. Then, we ran longer lengths out from that. This made good use of our material with little waste, and it will work fine for the floor.

We completed the back porch floor and started on the east side of the house before quitting for the day. On Friday, we’ll continue where we left off.

Sill plates

On Monday, Jon and I coated the kitchen crawl space wall with surface bonding cement. We also coated the small section inside the root cellar that I didn’t take care of last summer. I also finished stuccoing the piers for the porch at the back of the house. We had these jobs finished by lunchtime. So after lunch, we started milling boards for the sill plates. That didn’t go so well because my Husqvarna 3120xp chainsaw (the powerhead for the sawmill) wasn’t running properly. After milling one log, we completed a couple of other jobs unrelated to the house.

This morning, we returned to milling. I checked out the saw yesterday in preparation, cleaning the air filter, fuel filter, and muffler. It ran better, but still doesn’t have the power it should. I believe the fuel filter is the culprit. I’ll be ordering a new one.

After we had several of the boards milled, we hauled them to the house to begin bolting them to the foundation and to see what we still needed to mill. There are four different thicknesses which we’re milling. All of the sill plates are cedar.

We put down aluminum flashing on top of the block wall and then bolt the cedar board on top of that. We were able to complete the sill plates around the root cellar and on the west side of the house. We put flashing across the front before we had to quit today. We’ll work on it again Friday.

 

 

 

 

Milling porch posts (part 2 with video)

Sunday of this week was a nice day. Dad and I had already milled 15 6x6 posts for the porch, and I decided to get the rest of them milled. Last week I 3 new Oregon saw chains from from Treestuff.com (3/8” pitch, .058 gauge, 115 drive links). They shipped them out right away and I received them on Friday. These were regular cross cut chains with a 25 degree angle on the teeth. Sunday morning I ground the first one to 20 degrees with a 50 degree hook angle. Generally, ripping chains are ground to either 0 degrees or 10 degrees. I wanted to try it at 20. It worked fine. I’ll probably try the next one at 10 degrees so I can compare it to this one.

I purchased a new video camera (Canon FS100) for creating a video documentary of the house-building process from this point forward. Using the sawmill provided an opportunity to use it. My dad shot this video of me finishing one of the posts.

I’ll probably share occasional videos on the blog. The editing process for the documentary of the project will happen later.

After milling on Sunday, we now have 22 posts ready for the porch.

I still have some more cedar logs to mill, but I’ve not decided yet what dimension lumber/beams would be most desirable at this point. I’ll also need to haul some beech logs from Gill’s place and mill them. I think the milling will be put on hold for the next three weeks at least, though. I’m hoping to get the root cellar floor poured and the walls blocked and then to get a perimeter of concrete blocks laid around the timber frame. These will enclose the crawl space and help support the porch and straw bale walls.

Milling porch posts

Last week while we had some nice weather, we started milling some of the cedar logs into porch posts. The posts are 6x6s. Sure, 4x4s would’ve worked, but six inch posts will look better.

My dad helped me move and set up my Procut Mobile Sawmill. I hadn’t used it for several months. I did use the saw (a Husqvarna 3120XP) for cutting down several beech trees at a friend’s place. We’ll be skidding out the logs from those trees in the next few weeks if it dries up a bit. Those will be milled into beams and lumber for the porch, at least that’s the plan.

Milling the porch posts went well. It’s not a speedy process with my chainsaw mill, but I wasn’t out to set any records anyway. Things proceeded well, though. We cut 15 posts after getting the mill and everything ready. We also had to change chains on the saw after the first one broke. I have three chains, but they’re all about worn out, having been sharpened about as much as is desirable.




As you can see in the photo of completed posts, some still have bark and rounded corners. I’ve judged this to be fine. I’ll shave the bark off, and the rounded corners will work and look fine. On some of the posts, the rounded corners occur on the end which will be cut off when the posts are cut to length. We also cut a few 2x4s from some logs that weren’t quite large enough to make 6x6s.

With good weather in the coming weeks, we’ll get the rest of the posts milled. We’ll also have to haul beech logs home and mill them into the desired sizes. That may be before or after work on the root cellar and porch foundation work.

(A special thanks to my dad for providing the photos for this post.)

Skidding cedar logs (future porch posts)

Because it was another nice day here in South-Central Kentucky, I skidded the cedar logs I cut earlier in the week out of the woods. My dad helped, which I appreciate a lot. We started with three logs which were far up the hill. I actually had cut these trees last winter. They’d blown down in a storm previously. I had limbed them and left them long, 16 to 20 feet.

Even though they were at the top not far from the old county road, it was easier to skid them out from the bottom of the hill. I can drive the tractor in a couple of hundred feet which was at the bottom bellow the trees. They were still over 100 feet up the hill. We used a couple of ropes to reach them and pull them down the hill. They pulled out fine, meaning they didn’t get caught up on stuff and needs extra coaxing. For one, we had to use a snatch block to redirect the direction of pull. I have a couple blocks that are part of the two block and tackle sets I bought prior to the frame raising.

After lunch, we skidded out the five cedar logs I had bucked into 9 foot lengths earlier in the week. These didn’t lay too far from the bottom of the hill, and we were able to physically pull them to the bottom where we could get a choke chain around them and pull them out of the woods. This went much more quickly than snaking logs down from the top of the hill.

 

We skidded the logs and laid them out where I’ll mill them into 6x6 posts with my Procut Mobile Sawmill later. I had two cedars I cut several years ago which we also skidded to the pile. Each of these was long enough to make two posts. So, in the pile, we now have enough cedars for 17 of the 20 posts.

We then went in search of another cedar tree that might yield three more posts and which would be easily accessible. We have many cedars on the property, some of them very nicely sized. We didn’t find one that was tall enough for three posts where we looked on the other side of the ridge, but there are several that would yield two posts.

I cut one down, having picked where I wanted it to fall and where I thought it would naturally go. However, it didn’t go where I thought it would. It was evident while making the back cut that it was beginning to lean the opposite direction. I guess I read it wrong, but it sure didn’t look like it would fall that way. It ended up falling about 90 degrees from where I planned for it. This was fine, except for how cedars so easily get hung up in other trees. This one did, leaving it leaning at about a 35 degree angle.

I limbed what I could off of it and then measured and cut the lower nine feet off for a post. This allowed the tree to settle down a bit more. So, I was able to limb the next section and cut it off. I’ll pull the rest of the top out later after skidding the logs. It was getting near chore time, and we still needed to put the tractor and tools away. So, we called it quits. I’ll cut another tree for the 20th post and skid them out of the woods later. (I wasn’t wearing my chainsaw helmet because I hadn’t brought it. I had the chainsaw just in case it was needed when skidding, not expecting to do any real sawing.)

The root cellar and some porch posts

Yesterday morning, I shoveled some more dirt out of the root cellar. It’s getting much closer to being ready to form the footers for the block walls. I still have a bit more dirt to remove, but I didn’t go back to it today. I have some sore muscles, including my right shoulder which I strained throwing some firewood a week ago. In the photos below, you can see the current state of the cellar hole. I have to take some proper measurements and lay out where the footers need to be. To this point, I’ve just taken some quick measurements to figure out approximately where to excavate to.



Yesterday afternoon, rather than excavate more, I headed out with my Stihl MS250 to fell a few cedar trees. The trees I selected will be milled into 6x6 porch posts. I need 20 posts all together. I spent a little time with Google Sketchup the other day laying out the spacing for my porch posts. They don’t fit exactly on eight foot centers. So, I needed to determine where they should be in order to have them as close to that spacing as possible. On the front and back, they’ll be on 8’ 1-1/2” centers. On the sides, they’ll on 7’ 10” centers. Close enough to eight feet to work, I believe.

The first tree I cut yesterday was one near the house site that had lost its top in the recent ice storm (at least I think that’s when – I hadn’t noticed it before Sunday). I walked up on a nearby hillside and felled three more trees.

Today, I limbed the downed trees and bucked them into nine foot lengths. With a couple of trees I already had down, I have enough for 12 posts already. They all need skidded out of the woods and to the location in which I’ll mill them. I should be able to do that within the next couple of weeks if the weather permits. I’ll need to select a few others, but having over half of them already down is good.

My Sawmill

There is something appealing about being able to slice trees into lumber. Maybe it's just operating the machinery that does the job. I don't know, but I thought it would be cool to have my own sawmill. I thought this before we ever moved to Kentucky in 2003. I had looked at the ads and thought about the different options. Of course, when you seek to limit the amount of financial outlay as much as possible, you can only dream big.

While doing some searching online, I came across Procut Mobile Sawmills. The Procut is a chainsaw powered mill that you build yourself. The information about it on the website and what reviews I could find made it sound like a nice unit. Perhaps, what I liked the best about the description were the estimates about how much it would cost to build. I didn't have any welding experience, but I figured I could learn enough to be able to build a Procut.

So, in the summer of 2003, I ordered plans for the mill. I studied them, and they seemed pretty straight forward and clear. I bought a used arc welder and some welding supplies. Then, I bought the steel I needed from Sandusky Sales in Columbia, Kentucky. I began building the mill in August of 2003, after putting a concrete floor in the garage (a 24' x 40' area). I cut all of the steel using an aluminum oxide metal cutting blade on my circular saw. My welding wasn't perfect, but I figured out how to make it work.

I don't remember how many hours I spent working on the mill, but we tried it out for the first time in October of 2003. I had a small cherry log and a cedar log. It was a pretty neat experience to mill a couple of boards for the first time. I hadn't painted the mill yet and still had it in the garage. Talk about dust! I don't recomend milling inside a closed space like that.

The picture to the right is of the mill taken when I was milling some beech logs during late fall 2004. After I finished building the mill, I painted it with some blue automotive paint that had been left in my garage by the previous owner (he left a lot of things, most of it hauled off as junk). I painted the saw carriage gray, also with auto paint that was in the garage.

I bought a new Husqvarna 3120xp to be the mill's powerhead. It has a 36" bar for use on the mill and a 24" bar for using off of the mill. It takes about 5 minutes to remove the saw from the mill in order to use it elsewhere. It makes felling trees or bucking logs really nice -- like a hot knife through butter. It is kind of heavy, though.

In the fall of 2004 when I started milling some of the white oak and beech logs I had collected, I discovered that a chainsaw mill doesn't cut very fast. It takes a fair amount of patience to slice up a 20" white oak log. I cut a few hundred board feet of 1x6 lumber out of these logs before a friend brought over his WoodMizer LT-40 Super Hydraulic and finished up the rest of them. I have 3,000 board feet of 1x6 lumber that we cut from white oak, red oak, poplar, beech, and sycamore logs. I've cut several pine, poplar, and cedar 2xs with my mill since then. I've also cut a few beams, but most of the ones for the house I purchased from a local Amish sawmill.

One thing about the Procut that needed changing was the dogs for clamping the logs/cants on the saw. You can see one of them in the second photo. I spent nearly as much time setting the dogs to hold the logs as I did milling. Even then, they didn't hold things firmly enough. I needed to change this part of the mill. So, I gave it some thought.

What I came up with involved welding two rows of 5 inch pieces of 1" diameter metal pipe together. I welded these to the middle of the sawmill frame. I then welded two pieces of 2" box steel on the side of the mill near the two center log bunks. These pieces of box have a hole drilled in them and a nut welded on so that a bolt can be threaded in. This bolt holds a smaller piece of box inside the 2" box, allowing it to be adjusted up or down and locked into place. I welded small pieces across the heads of the bolts so that these can be locked in place by hand. These two dogs are perpendicular to the log bed to ensure squareness when cutting.

In the picture to the right, laying on top of the pipes is the heart of the clamping system. I took a 1" metal rod that fits inside the pipes (my rod actually was a 1" threaded rod on which I filed down the threads a bit) and welded a three inch piece of 2" pipe at one end. When a log is put on the mill, the dogs are set on the side, the log is pushed over against them, and then the clamp is inserted in the nearest pipe to the log that it will fit in. It is dropped down to the desired level and then, using the rod pictured here with it, it is turned so that the 2" pipe at the top presses against the log. The cam action of this clamp exerts a lot of pressure, holding the log in place. The clamp can be set to hold the middle of a log or the bottom of a cant, whatever is desired or needed. It works great and saves a lot of time.

Here's another view of the clamp. Definitely an improvement over the original design in the plans for the mill. I needed something that would work and that would be affordable. The only money I spent on it was for the 1" pipe. The rest of the system was constructed with scraps of metal that I already had. The time it takes to secure a log in position or hold a cant has been drastically reduced.

My sawmill isn't top of the line. But, I didn't have thousands of dollars to spend on a sawmill. By building this mill myself, even with buying new steel and a brand new saw, I still have less than $2,000 in it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.