Processing the heavy cherry pillars

Ian Rosenberg of Philadelphia found out one can sit on a skateboard and easily skin a tree of this dimension by riding back and forth. You see the faithful traditional tool on the tree. That cleaning prevents bugs and fungi creating a world under the bark. That process will quickly reduce trees to earth. Next we lift the supports in place by our old digging machine. In the background you see the tent under which we did a lot of work. No tent means a lot of stopping. Lengthening an otherwise straightforward project. It was meant to be the last project of 2012. Which it was. It is actually waiting completion because of weather conditions in the meantime were not permitting.

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!!! ;)

Porch of natural beams heavy woodwork

Ian Rosenberg had already put in place rabbits cages and a hothouse in a hothouse. The hothouse in the hothouse had been finished in a high quality way as had the rabbit pens for that matter. We learned quickly from Ian that dedication and quality get a deeper meaning with his kind of thorough and detailed focus. On his own he lifted our level of quality more than the proverbial inch. I experience myself as sometimes pretty stubborn, but his level of quality left no space for denying. For this 19 year old I take off my hat. As did Mile and Mirko. I was thinking of a new project that could challenge all of us. Meaning Mile, Mirko, me and not in the least Ian. The heavy woodwork is meant to have a different effect than an efficiently built, precisely calculated, sterile porch. I wanted some heavy duty verticals and ditto horizontals that made one solid impression. Something one might expect in a movie about dragons. An idea of future projects. For ourselves as well as to inspire others. Maybe that we might be hired to build in a natural way for clients. So a challenge to later advertise our acquiered skills. In the meantime, as I write, this exercise is already bearing fruit. About which later. As Ian is the son of an architect in Philadelphia, he was already familiar with sketching a structure. Here is what he came up with after discussing the ideas.