Guests from Leiden travelling to Mozambique

Our dutch friends the Colijn family from Leiden on the road to Mozambque arrived at our place in september 2012. We had a lot of fun together. Cooking and eating together. For their trip they have the best tools. A safari trailer and an air cooled landcruiser. For the jeep to cross the Mediterranean there was separate barge. They arrived earlier in Egypt. Some days later the barge arrived and they were reunited with their mobile camp combination. They are experienced overland long distance voyagers. Earlier they made a trip down east Africa and up west. They took more or less 2 years for that. In the meantime they experienced all kinds of adventures that have to do with border crossings, repares and long distance travelling in general. Let's say that every country has it's own culture of how they organize and administrate things. At least they are enjoying their house on the coast of the Indian ocean now. Marcel is contemplating going into farming. We are looking forward to their next steps.

First result of experimenting with splitting wood with a froe. The material you see under the froe is the next project. Making gates of split acacia. For the roof the kind of wood we chose is sweet chestnut. Length is about 30 centimeters per piece. The tool we used is a froe. Wooden handled & the bit is to be slammed into the top of a segment of tree. The result should be a shingle. You can even the rough surface a bit through honing with the cutting device you see in the previous picture. We are showing results not process now. The showing of process will be the next level in showing what can be done with natural materials. For process we will need youtube or so. Anyhow Ian and me were surprised about the speed with which things could be done. While I was welding and grinding away at the froe, Ian was making the frame under the shingles. The frame you can't see. Froe and test set-up were realized within 2 hours. The froe bit is made of an old blade spring of a car. It does not need to be so very sharp. It's just a grinding so the profile of the froe has a splitting effect. It will keep on working for ever probably. We calculate we need to make 1200 of those shingles for the porch roof to be. It started raining in the days after we created this experimental test roof. We put a plastic bucket under the shingles. Not a drop came through. In principle a good result. Except we don't know if sweet chestnut is the advisable kind of wood. There are shingles made of evergreens that are pretty much the best. We will end our experiment with a definite choice of wood for the porch within the next supposedly nice months. Spring and all. No more snow!!! ;)