What's up - January 2025

 "Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world." - Peter L. Berger

Weekend update

 "He who eats my bread does my will." - Marcus Aurelius

Refurbishing the Mac Cat chainsaw and a couple of minor projects

 Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.  Everything we see is perspective, not the truth" - Marcus Aurelius

A bunch of random stuff

I had a busy set of days off.  I somehow managed to get a lot done, considering that one day was lost to church, and another to overtime.  The overtime is a good thing, because I had to spend a lot of money this past week.

I was forced to purchase a new phone last week.  I'm *not* fond of replacing stuff - especially stuff that I've gotten used to, but there wasn't much choice in this case.  The power button on the phone had mashed all the way in, and it wasn't waking up any more.  I had to plug it in to wake it up and then enter the password to use it.  Not good.

So I transferred all the files off the six year old Droid Turbo, and then it got wiped.

Cleaning up the property

I had five or six red fir trees die over this past winter.  They never fell over, so a couple of weeks ago, I and some friends felled them.  That left me to do the clean-up.

Stihl Chainsaw Repair - Model MS362 - *UPDATED*

Late last year I was dropping and limbing a few trees, when I noticed that the chainsaw wasn't using any bar oil.  I stopped using the saw, and shortly afterwards heavy snow fell.  The trees I had felled were buried in snow all winter long - so there was no clean-up.

"Vacation" spring 2016

I took another brief "vacation", one of those things I seem to do these days when I don't rest very much.  Actually managed to get quite a bit of down-time, but that was mainly due to bad weather.  Below is what I woke up to on the first day of vacay.  It didn't put me in the mood to go out and clear dead and fallen trees.

Chain sawing

I'm not a lumberjack, but I do have 5 acres of property, of which about half is woods.  When the weather has been co-operating, I have been trying to make my house safer from wildfires by removing trees that grow very near the house.

Additionally I have been thinning trees and removing limbs up to a high level, as well as clearing brush and slash from the forest floor.  The result is a safer place to live, although definitely not as natural-looking.  This summer, the natural look seems to be "burned up", which I have no interest in.

So I clear trees.

I'm pretty hard on chainsaw chains though.  I have about 10 of them, so that I can get through a couple of days' work without having to make a run to town and have them re-sharpened.

Re-sharpening the chains is a pain in the neck, because I lose at least an hour taking them to town, and then lose another hour picking them up the following day - not to mention the expense...
I have a hand-file for sharpening the chains, which I have never bothered to use.  It takes way less time to simply swap chains and keep cutting, and then take the chains in for sharpening later on.

My time off is limited, and so is weather-friendly cutting time.  When snow is on the ground, you don't want to be clearing the forest, and you can't even burn for about 6 months of the year.  It makes for a narrow time window to cut and burn stuff.

Long story short - Taking a lot of time to sharpen chains didn't work for me.  Here's the solution:

A dangerous tree

I took a week's vacation recently, and it wasn't much of a restful vacation.  More like catching up on chores - one big chore in particular.  Ever since moving here, I have been worried about one very large Ponderosa pine tree that was leaning toward the house.  I did not want to attempt to take the tree down myself because it was leaning the wrong direction, and I wasn't sure I could make it fall where I wanted it to.

Notice how the branches on this big leaning tree are the same size as some of the surrounding trees...

It took the tree service several weeks to give me a bid, then another month for them to actually come out and drop that tree (and a couple of others, one of which was leaning toward our power line).

As luck would have it, I had scheduled some time off about the time they got around to felling the big tree.  Good thing too; it was a pretty big job to clean it up.  The tree service would have hauled the tree off, but it would have cost 3x as much.  So I decided to do it myself.  ugh...  Of course it had to be the biggest, fullest tree on the property!

Happily, the tree fell away from the house, but it also blocked one of the driveway access roads.

Here I'm getting ready to start cutting off the limbs.

The first of four burn piles.  The tree is still blocking the driveway, but the lower half has been limbed.  I decided to save logs from the larger limbs.  Somebody will want them for firewood.

The driveway is open again!  Note the addition of more logs from the tree branches to the left.  There are still plenty of limbs remaining on the far side of the trunk.

The final burn pile.  The trunk is mostly sectioned.  There are quite a few more branch logs on the left.  After taking this photo, I stacked out the branch logs behind the house, but probably won't move the sections of the trunk until they dry out.  They are really heavy.

We had so much rain and a little snow, that I had to buy a weed burner to ignite the last pile.  I wasted a few gallons of gasoline and diesel, with no lasting fire to show for it.  This little sucker got it going after about 3 minutes of roaring and howling flame.  It's noisy, but it works.

Spring Cleaning the Forest

Our home-owner's insurance policy was recently canceled because "you no longer meet our underwriting requirements, due to being located in a wildfire area".  Well duh.  I thought they understood that when they first issued the policy.

Because the insurer cancelled my home-owner's policy, I also cancelled the RV, Motorbikes, and cars.  They don't get to pick and choose what property of mine they get to insure.  They also saved me some money, because I found cheaper rates with a different insurance company (Geico).

Anyway... this is the second time that we have owned property.  The first property we owned was 2-1/2 acres in the Mojave Desert.  That property didn't require any maintenance.  Even tumbleweeds would blow right across the land because it was not fenced on the downwind side. 

Now that we are living in the forest, things require a lot more upkeep.  The insurance cancellation brought the realization that we have been here for two years now, and I haven't yet created a satisfactory fire-safe zone around the house and shop.  We have been busy getting the interior of the house set up, and ignored the grounds.

There is a lot of hard work involved with creating a fire-safe zone.  The  recommended minimum distance between a structure and any tree is 25 feet, with the forest thinned (and undergrowth removed) to a distance of 50 feet, with all tree branches removed to a level of 6 feet.

Personally I think 50 feet is a good radius for no trees.  I don't want the possibility a burning tree just 25 feet from my house.  Actually I don't want any tree close enough to fall onto the house.  Although two sides of our house have excellent clearance, I still have quite a bit of removal and thinning to do on the remaining sides.

This is an excellent time of year to clean up, because the forest is very wet, so it's safe to burn.  It's quite difficult to get a pile of twigs, branches and logs to catch fire.  Both times I burned, it took a full gallon of gasoline (and some diesel) to get the pile to stay lit.  This means that the forest won't catch fire whenever a spark flies off the fire.  The only bad thing is that downed trees located in the shade are often still frozen to the ground :)

This past week I got started on the process of making the house fire-safe by removing several years worth of fallen dead trees.  I have owned a 18" McCullouch MacCat chainsaw for the past 20 years, and it has served pretty well for odd pruning jobs and taking down small trees.  The first time I used it to gather soft wood for the fireplace, it proved not to be up to the task.  It doesn't have the power or the cutting ability to quickly get through a bigger log.  This past week I damaged the blade by forcing the saw into a log, and I realized that with this level of work, I needed a bigger, professional saw.

So... This year I got an early birthday present:  A Stihl MS 362.  This sucker comes with a 25" bar, but it is powerful enough to run a 36" bar.  It is amazing how quickly and easily it cuts compared to the MacCat.  This thing goes through logs like they aren't there.  Instead of spending minutes getting a log cut, it's over with in seconds.  It definitely makes the job easier. 

I also bought a skip-tooth chain to try out aggressive cuts, but haven't tried it out yet.  A skip-tooth chain makes kickback more severe, so I want to get used to the saw before putting on that chain.  Kickback is where the blade pops up after grabbing and releasing in a cut, or getting caught in wiry ground branches, especially at lower engine speeds. 

With the new saw, I can round up a lot of trash wood and a few chunks of firewood in short order.  Note:  This is not a lifted SoCal poser truck with chrome and aluminum hardware underneath.  I also don't cry like a girl when it gets a dent or scratch. 

Lodgepole pine - crabgrass tree of the forest.  Not even worth cutting up for firewood.