The moving of the tank

Back when the Village was young, in the mid-80s, there was no electricity, no gravelled road, no school. The pioneers used ATVs to get in and out (or snow machines in the winter), and cooked and lit their houses with propane. So when I came here I inherited an enormous propane tank. Eventually I was informed by the propane company that it was much too close to the house and would have to be moved. Furthermore I would have to replace the copper pipe that leads the gas inside the house. All this at great cost. No, said I and made other arrangements, at a tenth of the cost. But the tank was most inconvenient.
As you can see, the tank (a) is huge; it must weigh (mass) about 200 Kilos or 400 lb. as you prefer, and (b) solidly blocks the way to the woodshed. It had to be moved. So John and I started out on this odyssey. Regard the cable. What is it connected to? Why, my new come-along. This machine is indispensable for all bush Alaskans.

A come-along is a ratcheting winch. You connect the cable to an otherwise immovable object. You connect the other end to a really immovable object, such as a tree. You work the winch.
Observe the chain at the left of the picture. It is connected to faithful Vicky, my car, on her towing loop. One sweats. But the tank did move. Up to a point. You see, it has feet. The feet were set on top of concrete bricks. Came a point when tank would not move at all! The feet dug into the ground and would not budge. So after conferring, we connected tank direct to the car. Put car in 4WD compound low gear. Tank obediently rolled over and played dead.
The feet of the tank are now in plain view. If you look carefully you can see the concrete footings too, at the left. Once the tank was on its side we used the car to all the hauling. It was quite easy. We used rope rather than chain because we could lead the rope around trees to change the direction of pull, whithout mortal damage to the tree.

The tank now reposes at the regulation distance from the house. I don't need it at all, so if anyone wants a 300-gallon propane tank, you're wealcome to it. But you will have to come and get it and haul it off yourself!

My only complaint at this point is with the manufacturers of the come-along. They did not pre-stretch the cable, and dealing with it is like wrestling with an anaconda. Otherwise a fine piece of gear, much more solid than my previous come-along, which died in battle this winter. RIP.

The tao of tenons

Last post we made a mortise in a piece of 4x4. But something has to fit in that mortise, and that something is a tenon. A tenon is a tongue-shaped piece that goes at the end of a post -- or a brace. The easiest tenon to make is a post tenon. So let's look at it first.
Here is a post mortise. My standard post mortise is 6cm long. I made it just as I did the last one. Drill and clean. And there is Mr. Ferret, as I promised, sitting on top of the 4x4. Wonderful tool to clean out the bottom of a mortise. Better call it 88x88 mm, not 4x4. Got to watch the tricky gringos. They do you out of lumber at every chance. But note that at the right end of the mortise is a space. This is called the relish, for reasons that are obscure to me. So I am allowing a 2cm or so relish. Now we need to cut a tenon that will fit this mortise. This is a mark and saw job. You use the same marking gauge settings you used to do the mortise, but you saw inside the lines a hair. You want a looseish fit. Later you will drawbore the tenons. That is, you will put a peg through them. On the tenon you will offset the hole a bit (2-3mm) toward the shoulder. This will pull the mortise and tenon tight. So we saw out the tenon. It looks like this:
Now on to a more complex tenon. Since I did a brace mortise in the last post, it is only fair to show you how to cut one. A brace runs at 45 degrees between (usually) a post and the piece on top of the post, called a plate if it is a one-story thing, such as I want to do. Because things are at 45 deg the lengths of mortises are longer. For instance, the length of the brace mortise is 12.2 cm. Why? Well, Pythagoras. He worked the problem. Most things on a brace are multiplied by the square root of two. This is 1.4142... and on forever. I could do a whole post on the square root of two. But you may rest at ease; I won't (now, that is. I may still inflict it on you). However, to the nearest millimeter a 90-mm wide brace requires a 122 mm mortise. Slight error here, because "4x4" stuff is really 87-90mm wide, but it is better to overcut than undercut; it is very difficult to lengthen a mortise. So let's do the tenon.

First job is to lay it out. All angles are 45 deg. I use a Japanese framing square. In a real Japanese square, one of the scales is in plain old centimeters. Another, however, is multiplied by the square root of two. Alas, I have a gringified Japanese square. Inches, so help me, on one side. Shame on Lee Valley tools. Here's the end of the layout phase:
All 45 degrees. Can be done with a framing square very easily. Now we have to lay out the amount we have to saw away from the tenon. We want the edges of the brace to line up with the outsides of post and plate. Many ways to do this, including YAMG, or Yet Another Marking Gauge (This is why I have so many marking gauges. Pain to set up, so you have many of them, because I set them up once. But then I have to select the right one. Sigh). This time, I used a vernier plastic calipers for the task.
I am using a pencil here because this is where I don't want mistakes. On the other stuff I used a felt-tipped pen. Not the best thing but it shows up very clearly in photographs. Remember, a pencil lead is 0.5 or 0.7 mm. A felt-tip is perhaps 2 mm so marking with a felt-tip is asking for imprecision. The Japanese framers use (traditionally) bamboo markers, chisel-tipped, and india ink. Modern Japan has ersatz markers, very nice. Unavailable in Alaska.

Now we take the saw to our layout lines. I use (natch) a Japanese Ryoba saw. I have a real affinity for Japanese tools. We cut the ends all the way through, but we have to be very careful with the depth we marked out with the vernier callipers. That's the one I'm sawing here. You must saw only down to the marked depth on this cut.
And now we have to get rid of the upper portion if the cut, where my right hand is sitting. Some people use a chisel for this. I find it easier to rip it out. Just turn the Ryoba over!

Now if you want to do this for real you need a book. A good book will tell you how to cut all these joints. It will tell you a lot of things that make your life much easier. My bible is called Build a Classic Timber-Frame House, by Jack A. Sobon, ISBN 978-0-88266-841-3. I invented none of this; the old Saxons did this kind of stuff a thousand years ago and some of their buildings still stand. Much more than you can say for basic California ticky-tacky, nailed construction.

The making of a mortise

Now we come to the point -- or is it the edge? of making mortise and tenon joints for timber-framing. We need to make a mortise. I hauled in a salvaged "4x4," a misnomer if ever there was one; 4x4" would be about 100+ mm and what you get, in fact, is about 90mm. Somewhere they have cheated you out of a whole centimeter. But let that pass; I am too tired to rant. You will recall, I hope, that a mortise is nothing but a trench in wood. Into this trench fits a tongue called a tenon. M&T joints were the standard practice in framing a house up to about the 1900s; after that nailing became the practice and collapsing houses the norm. Let's not go there, it's a rant. Instead let me show you how to cut a mortise. We begin by laying out the mortise. If I were making a mortise centered on the 4x4 I would use my new marking gauge.
Note how the wide Japanese style gauge rides over the irregularities in the wood. I have it set up to cut right in the middle of the timber. Also note the knives in the gauge cut the wood rather than scoring it. However, I am practicing brace mortises. These are mortises for diagonal pieces of wood that support corners, keeping them at right angles. So I have to mark out in a different way. So I used a commercial marking gauge, because it is easier to set than my version of a Japanese gauge. But it has a needle point, so it scores rather than cuts. We are, by the way, making 25mm/1" mortises. Since the needles score the wood, we now chisel the edge of the mortise to prevent tear-out in the next step.
So we have prevented the edge from tearing out, because the next step will be to drill out the major portion of the mortise.
We are using a brace and bit for this job. A boring machine would be much faster. Unfortunately they are no longer made, and I have not found one. Fortunately it is not too deep a hole, 6cm exactly. A mark on the drill bit is my depth stop. You have to be quite careful where you drill the holes. They should overlap. This means less cleanout work at the end. So when you are through it looks something like this.

Somehow I am a little off on the hole next to the bottom. This is why this is a practice piece. We learn from mistakes. I think I mistook a crack in the wood for the centerline! Now we clean (square up) the mortise with chisels.
For this I use three (actually four, Mr Ferret is not shown) chisels. Foreground a 19mm Sorby UK mortising chisel, a 1" gringo chisel, and a wide (38mm) Japanese chisel. Be nice to have a 25mm Sorby chisel, but I don't so I use what I have. I am partway through cleanup when the photo was taken. At the end of the day, we have a nice 12 mm x 25mm x 60 mm hole in the 4x4, ready for the tenon.
My mistake in the hole-drilling does not show up too badly. Now it is ready for the tenon. I haven't show you how to make the tenon. Do that later. But here is the trial fit.
Not quite right. Reason is that the bottom of the mortise is not properly clean. When I dug it out with a ferret it worked very nicely. I'll show you the ferret sometime. It is a hooked tool used for carving, and works like a charm for mortise bottoms.

So I am piling up an impressive assortment of marking gauges! Here's my indooor inventory:
The outboard gauges are miniatures, but they work quite well for the big stuff. The left inboard one is commercial, and you have met Mr Japanese before. I find it very convenient to have several, because it bypasses setting these things, so I can have a gauge set up for each kind of joint.

And next time I'll show you how to cut a tenon.

A Japanese-style mortise gauge

To some of my readers, perhaps only the word "Japanese" makes sense in the title. No matter. All will be revealed in good time. A mortise gauge is a device used to mark out the sides of a mortise. A mortise, in turn, is a sort of trench excavated in wood. In this trench fits a similarly shaped peg, the tenon. M&T joints are as old as the hills. This summer's program includes a brand-new machine storage barn. I am determined to do it timber-framed. None of this nailing commercially milled lumber together. We will cut mortises and tenons and peg the whole thing together. It will last much longer than I will, unlike the ticky-tacky boxes they call "houses" these days.

Anyway, a mortise gauge is a layout tool. It will lay out the long sides of the mortise. If this is perplexing, stay tuned. We begin with the slider; it needs a rectangualr hole. I am using wood from a footstool that had fallen apart and been deconstructed.
What we have to do is cut a rectangular hole in a piece of wood. This is the way I did it. First, the dominant dimension in the scrap wood was 19mm, or 3/4" RGU. So we drill overlapping holes 19mm wide, and chisel out the rest so's it's rectangular. Behold the result above. A reasonable rectangle. Now we make the arms. These are nominally 19mm square cross-section, arbitrarily long. I could have made them much shorter than I did, but here is one of them:
That's one arm. The other looks just like it. In the middle there is an aluminum separator strip. This is to keep the arms parallel. The arms have to be planed so they are a tight, but not impossibly tight, fit into my rectangle. It is much easier to plane the arms than to enlarge the rectangle.
When both arms are in it looks like this:
Now, in the arms go the cutters. These things score the wood, and prevent tear-out when you actually make the mortise. I made them out of an old hacksaw blade (never throw good steel away). They were annealed, ground to shape, hardened and tempered. Then they were sharpened. Tedious but necessary. Now we had to make a slot in each arm to accept the cutter. I did this by drilling 1.5mm holes in a line and cutting out the intermediate stuff with one of my miniature mortise chisels (handmade, of course). When we got this done we had a respectable-looking Japanese-style mortise gauge.
There were some details, in which, of course, the Devil always resides. I epoxied copper rubbing strips to the inside of the rectangular hole, which, by the way, is itself a mortise. A through-mortise to be exact. The arms require wedges to hold them in place. But on the whole I am very pleased with my gauge. It cost nothing. Perhaps in the next episode I will cut a mortise for you to show you how it is used, and it has been used, and very, very useful it is. I have a commercial mortise gauge, but this one is much better, because it scores the wood instead of scratching it. This helps a lot; prevents tear-out when you actually cut the mortise. Next episode I may cut a mortise for you to show how it is done.

Rustoration Part two

I am very annoyed with blogspot. They cooked up a new, improved interface. It is no improvement. It is a nuisance. I did not want it. I did not ask for it. They forced it on me, and I am peeved. But no rants. Let's get on with posting.

This post continues the previous one. At the Willow thrift store, I picked up an old breast drill for the sum of $3.50. This baby was not in good shape.
For those of you who have not heard the term before, let me explain. A breast drill antedates the electric drill by, ohh, 100 years. At the right end in the picture above is a sort of tang. It is broken. But to drill holes in metal, pre-electric drill days, you put a drill bit in the chuck, at left, and put your breast or shoulder against the tang, putting body weight against the work. Thus you could drill, by turning the crank in the middle of the thing, holes in metal by hand. It so happens I already have a breast drill, in much better shape than this one. But I have plans for this baby. It was frozen solid when I got it, so in this case what you do is take it apart.
There it is in pieces. There, also, is the tool restorer's best friend, WD-40. Many people say that if WD-40 and duct tape were banned, Alaska would come to a standstill. "If it doesen't move and it should, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape," goes the saying. The toothbrush in the middle is to scrape grunge out of the gear teeth. Save them old toothbrushes, I do. Notice the gears. The thing is geared about 4:1. One turn of the crank gives you 1/4 turn of the chuck. When you are drilling metal this is a distinct advantage. On wood it helps a lot with big drill bits.

So all this needed was to be taken apart and cleaned out with a toothbrush. Well, a dental pick is useful too. Observe it at right of picture. There are days when I feel like a dental hygenist. Only it's gear teeth, not people teeth.

I have plans for this elderly gentleman. As I said, I already have a breast drill in much better shape. The plan is to make ol' elderly here into a drill press, hand operated of course. Stay tuned.

Rustoration

For those of you who might be wondering about the title of this post, a word of explanation. Actually a whole paragraph.

Roger Welsch is an author who lives in Nebraska. At one time he was a regular on CBS Sunday show, AKA "the fat guy in overalls," his words and not mine. His real passion is old tractors. Since old tractors are also a hobby of mine, although not quite as intense as Roger's, we share a mutual interest. You can Google him easily. But the point is, Roger uses the word "rustoration" because he restores old rusty tractors. In my context I will borrow his word to denote the restoring of old tools.

All this began when I stumbled across a reference in a British blog, all about restoring old drill bits and braces. I happen to have a large collection of old drill bits, all of them in deplorable condition, at least for actually drilling holes. A collector would be outraged by my proceedings. Collectors, however , seldom drill holes with their bits. They put them in glass cases. Fie on that. I need to drill holes, and there is no room at Chalupy for glass cases. So I set out to restore the bits. Mr British recommended citric acid, readily available in Britain (not so much in the USA), plus methylated spirits (denatured alcohol to us yankees) plus dish detergent, known in the Isles as "washing-up liquid"). Hmm, said I. A weak acid. What do I have that is a weak acid? Why, vinegar of course. So I made a tray off of the bottom of of a laundry detergent jug, filled it with vinegar, and off I went. I left the bit in the vinegar for four days. I may not have citric acid, but I do have patience. The bit emerged much, much cleaner than before. I am sorry I did not take a picture of the original state. Color it old and rusty.
As you can see, the bit has changed color from very dark brown to something that looks like metal. Here it is, chucked into the Taig for further cleaning. I used the four-jaw chuck because it is impossible to chuck a four-sided object in a three-jaw chuck. The four-jaw is a very good chuck indeed, but it is a pain to set it up. The three-jaw Taig chuck is exasperating, but it self-centers. Sort of. Note my improvised cup center at the right. It is a piece of wood drilled through and cinched up in the tailstock. It holds the leadscrew, obviously impossible with a conical center. An application of sandpaper (the Willow hardware store does not sell emery paper, which would have been much better) the thing cleaned up quite nicely. It is badly pitted. On the pyramid that fits the chuck, we found the number "15," meaning that it is 15/16 inch or about 22mm. Old Gringo auger bits are numbered 4 to 16. The number indicates 1/16s of one inch, about 3mm.

Again, no "after" pic. I wasn't sure it would work. But encouraged by my success, I braved my way out to the shop and collected all my rusty old bits. I bought them for at most a buck apiece. Fresh vinegar and splosh! In they go.
Above is my ex-laundry detergent tray, filled with vinegar. Do use distilled vinegar for this gig; save your wine vinegar for salads. They had marinated about four hours when I took the picture. Be patient. As with other marinades, good things take time. Vinegar is really cheap. After about five days, the vinegar had turned black. Time to unmarinade. The bits looked amazingly like steel.
A bit of work with sandpaper and steel wool, and they are as good as new. Well, not quite. They have to be sharpened. The link will tell you how. The last step in the process is to spray the bits with Teflon lubricant.

There are alternatives to this process. You could use battery acid, which is sulphuric acid diluted, or hydrochoric acid. These are much faster than vinegar. Overnight, in fact. But they are nasty substances, and you have to dispose of them properly. When you live on the north end of a southbound septic tank, as I do, it is highly unadvisable to dump acids down the same. Poison. There is also electrolysis. I may post on this someday. For now I wil stick to vinegar.

Waiting for Spring

Breakup is slow this year! It snowed this morning, maybe a whole centimeter. Gosh. It is now raining lightly. It seems, this time of year, that the snow will never melt. But the other day we went for a walk. Perforce we go on the road, because the snow, even with snowshoes, is impossible. But off we go. Out the driveway. What's this?
Look! Behold! It's the ground. Bare patch in the driveway! Exciting way to start your walk. So. encouraged, we persevere and get on Beryozova, giving Basargin a C- grade. While we are on it, we note the snow has left the roofs. Why that isn't rooves, I cannot say. English spelling, she is erratic.
The unheated shed still has full snow on it. Today, by the way, I went to one of the unoccupied houses in the village. It is roofless -- collapsed by the snow. On we go. On Bery, we have a pleasant surprise.
Nice big patch of bare ground. We amble down Bery about a about a klick and a half ("klick" is, or was, USAF shorthand for Kilometer) and come out on Crystal Lake road. This is a paved (well, chip-sealed) road, so we expect some melting. Indeed:
We conclude that there are indeed some signs of spring. We return home and have a cuppa, reassured that Nature is really doing her job. It is we humans who get impatient.