Our House

Judy of the woods do-it-yourself desk chair.

I occasionally do mad spates of research.  This morning I was trying to find a comfortable and supportive desk chair solution.  I spend hours at a time sitting at my desk and finding a chair that supports me properly is proving to be difficult.   That’s not the reason for this post.

In looking at desk chair images, I ran across the lovely image to the left.  This sort of thing makes me smile.  It’s an excellent example of someone thinking outside the box!

Judy’s chair struck a chord.  My current desk chair is being held in a relatively comfortable position by a length of cord, a cargo strap and a length of mountain tape (1″ wide flat nylon tube).  I’m not perfectly comfortable, the chair is still tipped a bit too far back, but I am *more* comfortable than I was before the cord, cargo strap and length of mountain tape.

The moral of this tale is, when we can get beyond vanity to cost effective function, we truly have come to the point where we can be thrifty and self-sufficient.  Judy of the woods looks to be a sister of my heart.  Check out her blog.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

The day before yesterday Wadly and I test fired the sawdust stove out in the yard.  It really does work exactly as acclaimed.  We used fairly damp cedar sawdust (it’s what we had).  I had a little trouble getting it lighted (learning curve) but it burned just fine once it was lit.

Wadly’s planning to burn the paint off so it’s safe to light indoors.

You might want to check this out.  A person commenting on a previous post turned me onto a forum thread about a sawdust stove being used in a wood shop.  Thanks Nancy.

In future I hope to have dry hardwood sawdust to burn.  Keeping us supplied is going to be Wadly’s job.  Right now we have two stove loads of cedar sawdust.  That will do to get us started, but it won’t last beyond a day or two.

Note to self; learn how to braze and find your your anvil.

Raw sheet metal parts.

I took my concept for the bottom workings of the sawdust stove to our local sheet metal shop and they did a brilliant job of turning my concept into solid objects.  All this perfection (not the vent adapter which I got at Goodwill for $5) cost $89.  That’s a heck of a deal, in my mind.  I just don’t have the tools to easily cut and bend metal.

Yesterday I cut the hole for the sleeve/drawer in the 55 gallon drum.  The hole looks great.  It’s a tiny bit smaller than the final, but I’ll leave it as is until I talk to Lorr.  I’m dealing with a barrel that has a fairly good arch in the bottom, so want to have flexibility for which way I jump when putting this all together.

The hole in the sleeve (piece standing on end) has had its edges bent upward to facilitate centering and supporting the burn chamber.

All these bits (not the vent adapter) are to be tack welded Saturday at Lorr’s.  I’ll try and get good pics of the assembly process.

I haven’t cut the exhaust hole yet.  I don’t want to do that until I talk to Lorr.  He may not be okay with using the vent adapter.  Cutting the hole to match the vent adapter reduces my ability to step back and punt.

Since the RMH workshop I’ve been tossing around ideas for my installation.  With rocket mass heaters, the devil really is in the details.  They’re super inexpensive to build if you can scrounge the parts and innovation is rampant and lauded IF it works.

The mock-up of my stove encourages me to find a larger diameter riser.  The 6″ well casing I have will work, but bigger in my case may be the difference between marginally functional and awesomely functional.  Ernie’s suggesting an 8″ core and I’m agreeing . . . bigger in this case is better as long as I don’t go above 8″.

I put a “want” out for 8″ well casing on our local freecycle and our County’s 2Good2Toss.  I’m not really expecting any results but I have to try.  I probably shouldn’t be fussing about this as the installation isn’t going to be a long term one.  I could use 8″ stove pipe.  It’s certainly more readily available, would easily last the couple years I need it to and I know where the scrap pile is for our local stove store.  But you know me, I’ve always got to say “what if”.

Logging is big in our area.  Short lengths of log truck reach (3/16″ thick 8″x6″ tubing) are pretty readily available.  With Wadly’s connections I could probably score 50+ inches of that fairly easily.  So the question is, can I use 8″x6″ steel tubing for the riser?  What effect will the rectangular shape have on the draw/draft?  I’ve posted queries on the RMH Experimenter’s Corner and and on the Permies Alternative Energy forum.  I won’t hold my breath waiting for answers.

Riser in place and base for barrel in the works Working through the exhaust port detail Mocked up exhaust port Making sure the barrel is properly supported With barrel added and fire started Nice clean burn, good draft Without an insulated riser, once the barrel warmed up, draft was lost and smoke-back was unfixable Knocked apart when the test was over

Last weekend I attended a rocket mass heater workshop put on by Ernie Wisner and Erica Ritter.  I learned SO much!  You cannot imagine!  I’m going to try and cover a very small portion of what I learned.

I learned I will not be able to use all the lovely free stainless steel ducting in the construction of my rocket mass heater.  Some I will re-purpose to improve air circulation between rooms.  Whatever I have left won’t go to waste.  You know me, I’ll find a use for it.

I spent the night at Ernie and Erica’s on the RMH bench in their living room.  My hips loved the heat.

My RMH requirements are a bit out of the norm, so I took my parts with me to do a bit of testing to see where I would have issues.  The whole process was extremely educational.  The pics on the left are thumbnails.  You’ll need to click the thumbnail to see the detail.

In addition to the four paying attendees was an awesome and ever changing group of young people known collectively as “the legs”.  You will see bits of them in the photos of my rocket mass heater test.

I’ll post more later.

We got the second window in the south wall of the sun porch today.  It looks awesome!  Okay, it looks as awesome as dirty windows can look!  <grin>  Neither of the windows are permanently fastened in yet and the divider between the windows hasn’t yet been installed but it’s still progress!

Terry and I got the sun porch roof finished. It’s AWESOME. We’ve got one glass panel in the south wall and one to go.  We’ll keep pecking away as weather permits.

I still have to figure out what I’m going to do with the north wall. I wanted to use eps-crete, but finding a way to grind the foam is proving to be problematic. I’m going to talk to Lorr (son) when he comes today to see if he is willing to fabricate something. I don’t see it being complicated. We’ll see what he says.

If I use papercrete, I’m going to have to parge (word is NOT in my dictionary!) the sun porch side to keep it from absorbing moisture AND I’m going to have to build a retaining wall (also on the sun porch side) where the wall has to be backfilled.  I really want eps-crete for the wall.

Lorr using serious equipment to prepare the parts for welding Parts beveled and drilled Pin in shaft, worm gear ready to go onto pin Welding the result Chucked for final cleanup

This seems to be my month for equipment repair.  Earlier this month I repaired the head on a reciprocating saw but the much needed repair of my table saw has been hanging around a lot longer.  I broke the shaft off the worm gear that adjusts the angle of the blade and it was totally my fault.  I should have cleaned the gears of the years of accumulated saw dust before trying to do any adjusting.  Oops.  Nothing is quite such a wake-up call as failed maintenance.  I popped the worm gear right off the end of the shaft.

After a significant amount of time spent searching the internet for repair parts, I finally accepted they were not available and repair was my only option.  I had the parts welded locally but when the weld was cleaned up so the part would fit where intended the parts separated again.  Time to drag out the BIG guns.

Our son is an ingenious fellow and brilliant at what he does.  He chucked the parts in a lathe, cleaned the ends and center bored a hole to accept a metal stabilizing pin.

Once the parts were all cleaned and ready for the pin he welded the parts together and, rechucked it in the lathe to clean up the weld.

This is the definition of perfection in repair.

I’ve spent the last 4 days playing Plummer Girl, the plumbing wonder working to replace the kitchen sink drain line in the Airstream.  You might ask why I’m Plummer Girl and not Plumber Girl.  If I’m going to be the plump plumber, I dub myself Plummer Girl to cover both bases.

Day one was clearing the downside blockage/sludge out of the holding tank.  It truly was an all day process.  It took a while to get the downside drain apart.  Then it took multiple flushings to get all the blocking sludge out.  It took multiple washings to get the smell of gray water off me when I was done.  I swear it followed me around like a miasma.  Yuk.

Day two was clearing away stored stuff so I could see the plumbing line running from the kitchen sink to the holding tank.  Planning the new line didn’t take very long, neither did shopping for parts, but I took the opportunity to do all the in-town run-around stuff all at once.

Day three was the tear-out.  To get to the line I had to remove the gas stove and all the storage shelving in the hall.   The guy who devised the original drain line route with 4, yes FOUR elbows should be shot.  With four elbows and only a single cleanout, there is NO way the line could be flushed.  While I was doing the tear-out/rebuild inside, Wadly was out putting the drain line between the holding tank and the septic line back together.  It didn’t take him as much time as the initial clean-out I’d done the day before, but I know it was no more fun.

After dry-fitting the new components, I had the new section of drain line in, the remaining section of old drain line cleaned, the whole thing tested for integrity and flow and the stove back in in time to cook a late dinner (NY strip steak, fresh corn on the cob and fresh garden salad – I LOVE summer).  I was delighted to be able to leave the kitchen that night with all the dishes done.

Day four I built a base shelf for the small refrigerator (new location) and our filtered water cistern.  I also built a 2-shelf rack for Wadly’s boots and my shoes out of scrap lumber, osb and some old masonite board.

Today I have to build three more short wall mounted shelves.  The one below the main shelf will be for the cat food dish and storage coffee cans of dog and cat food.  The two shelves above the main shelf will be for storage (linens, towels, pots).  I also need to put up a new slightly longer clothes rod in the adjacent closet (I torn out an unnecessary wall which meant taking out the old rod and shelf).  When these are done I will again be able to see all of my living room floor and the top of my sewing table.

Once I’ve got everything put away, I want to build a new set of wall mounted shelves to hold the toaster oven, coffee maker, fruit, sugar, salt, pepper, ground coffee . . . I’m cleaning as I go, scrubbing walls and winterizing.  Oh joy.

With any rebuild there’s always time lost to other things.  Wadly’s brother “gifted” us with a reciprocating saw.  I’ve wanted one for a while and knew it would be *the* thing for cutting through the old drain line.  The gift was more of a “here, take my worn out tool and see if you can fix it” gift, but I can handle that.  It took two hours to rebuild the head so the blade would stay in.  I did some quick screw swapping to get the stripped out screw that held the blade replaced, but there are actually two screws that hold the blade in.  One provides pressure on the blade to hold it in place and the other is milled to provide a pin to fit in the blade hole to lock it into the tool once the pressure screw is tightened.   The pin end of the original screw had been sheered off and the blade would come out unexpectedly.  I built a new pin screw out of a screw with matching threads.  I really should replace the cobbled together phillips head pin screw with a matching allen key screw.  Is it gonna happen?  <shakes head>  Don’t hold your breath on this one.  It works.  That’s the necessary part.

I’m still plugging away on the sun porch.  This last week I got the flashing and shingles up on the adjoining wall and I’m ready to put in the last run of roofing glass.  It’ll be nice to have the entire roof done.