9/27-29/16 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It was a very pleasant 70° both inside the cabin and outside when I arrived at 12:45. After lunch and a nap, I went to work installing the newel post at the top of the front porch staircase. I used a drill and the sawzall to cut a 5-inch square hole through the deck plank. Then I used my home-made 18" rebar wood chisel and a big hammer to cut the mortise hole down into the joist and beam below after cutting what I could with the sawzall.

The big beam is not a very sound log and had been infested with powderpost beetles. I killed the beetle infestation with Board Defense many years ago but that still left the log full of holes. As I dug into the log, I ran into ant galleries and woke up a bunch of carpenter ants. I sprayed them with ant killer and soaked the wood so that it would reach as deep as it could. I'll have to make sure I keep ant bait close by every summer to make sure the ants don't colonize the log. I haven't seen many ants around this year so if the log is infested, I don't think it is very bad. I'll keep an eye on it.

I got the mortise hole 10 1/2 inches deep before I quit for the night. The tenon is 12 1/2 inches long so I'll have to make the hole deeper.

On Wednesday morning it was 40° outside but still a pleasant 65° inside without having any source of heat on. The logs in the building seem to be very effective in holding in the heat.

After breakfast I went back to work on the mortise hole and with the help of the vibrating saw, along with the rebar chisel and hammer, I cut the hole down to a depth of 13 inches. There were no ants in the hole so the poison must have killed all the nearby ones that were still alive.

After lunch and a nap, I used the sawzall and the Bulldog with the wood chisel bit to make the tenon on the end of the post. Then I began work on fitting the tenon into the mortise hole.

To start with, I tapered the end a little so that it would start into the hole. It dropped in about a half inch and then got hung up because it was too tight. I marked the tenon with a pencil where it was too tight and then took the log back out and shaved off a little wood in the tight spots.

Then I tried again and the log went down another half inch or so. I repeated the process of marking the tenon, taking the log back out, and using the Bulldog to shave off a little wood where the fit was tight. I probably averaged a half inch to one inch each time until the gap remaining was about 3 1/2 inches. Then I quit working for the day.

On Thursday morning, I continued working on the fit until the newel post bottomed out and went in all the way. As it went deeper, I began shaving wood off one side of the hole in the beam in order to make the post line up vertically. Once it bottomed out, I stuck a shim between the tenon and the beam hole in order to keep the post plumb. Then I removed the shim and the post, put the post up on sawhorses, and sprayed both the post and the mortise hole good with Board Defense.

After taking some pictures, I had my lunch and left for home at 1:00, happy to have made some progress on the staircase railing project.