3/14-16/17 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It was raining lightly and around 35° when I arrived at noon. I brought all my gear up to the cabin in one trip, hoisted the flag, moved in, started a fire, and had my lunch and my usual nap.

When I got up, I set up my rebar cleaning tank on the front porch and then made a rack for holding about 18 rebar baluster blanks in a position for painting. Then I proceeded to clean the 15 pieces of rebar that I had previously cut and put each one in the painting rack. I had only dressed the burs on one end of each piece, so that was the end that went into the rack.

The plan is to develop an efficient process for cutting, cleaning, and painting the rebar balusters. I had previously cleaned and painted three blanks and learned not to do the painting on the front porch. So, after cleaning the 15 blanks, and putting them in the rack, I carried the rack down under the front eaves in front of my firewood splitting station and set it on a sawhorse.

Then I sprayed the primer coat on the rebar by aiming the spray can toward the snowbank opposite the cabin. Since the temperature was under the recommended range for the paint, I had warmed up the rack of rebar in the cabin before I brought it outside to paint. The can of paint was also warm so I figured that the little cooling the paint went through on its way from the can to the rebar wouldn't hurt too much. As soon as I had turned the rack and sprayed the back sides, I picked the rack up and brought it into the utility room to dry. I shut the interior utility room door and turned on the vent fan in there. I also left the exterior door ajar. I figured that the temperature in there would be acceptably warm and that the fumes would be kept out of the rest of the cabin. It worked very well.

While the paint was drying, and before I quit for the day, I went out to the front staircase and drilled the holes in the underside of the rail that will receive the balusters. I couldn't use the bubble level on the drill so I used the cordless drill instead. I think I made the holes plumb enough because there were enough vertical things in the background that I could sight against to align the drill accurately enough. We'll see when I try to insert the balusters in those holes. If they are off and I have to rework them, it will be a nuisance but not a big problem.

On Wednesday, Dave called first thing and we had another delightful conversation. When we hung up, I hoisted the flag, started a fire in the stove, had my breakfast and went back to work on the railing system.

The paint on the 15 balusters had dried nicely and the balusters looked great. I took the rack into the cabin to warm it up again, and when it was warm, I took it back down to the sawhorse and sprayed on the black paint over the primer coat. Then I brought the rack and rebar back up to the utility room to dry just like before.

While the paint was drying, I took the drill out to the porch and drilled weep holes down through each of the holes I had made in the treads. This was an idea Dave had suggested to keep water from pooling in the bottoms of the holes under the balusters. I made the weep holes just a little smaller than the holes for the balusters so that the balusters wouldn't drop down through.

Most of the weep holes went all the way through the tread, which was the whole idea. But the bit was too short to go all the way through for many of the holes. In particular, many of the holes were right on top of the log stair stringer under the tread and to go all the way through I needed a lot longer bit which I didn't have.

After lunch and a nap, I spent the rest of the afternoon splitting and stacking a bunch of firewood. I think my supply of firewood rounds is going to last the rest of the season just fine.

On Thursday morning, I took the nicely painted balusters out to the front porch and removed them from the rack. That took a little doing but with the help of a vise-grip and a fulcrum, I got them all out.

The ends of the balusters that had gone into the rack had already been dressed to remove burs so that they could be seated in the rack holes. But that meant that for an inch on that end, the rebar did not get painted. What I decided to do about that was to invert the balusters so that the painted end would go at the bottom and go into the tread holes and the inch of unpainted rebar would be at the top. The plan is to select balusters for each position so that they needed to be cut to length by cutting off an inch or more from that unpainted end. Then the only unpainted part would be just the cross-section at the top and that would be embedded in the underside of the handrail where it should stay completely dry all the time. So, I don't plan to paint the very end.

But the other, painted, end of the balusters had never been dressed and so some of them had burs that prevented them from going into the holes. So, I went through all 18 balusters, tested the painted end in a hole, and for those that had burs and wouldn't fit in the holes, I used a hammer and the railroad-rail anvil to hammer down the burs and make the end fit into the hole.

Next I made a long bit to drill the weep holes all the way through. I took an 18-inch piece of 1/8" (or so) diameter rod, hammered one end of it flat on my railroad-rail anvil, and once I had fashioned a flat flare on the end, I used a flat file to cut it into the shape of a spade bit. The net diameter of the spade bit ended up being just short of 3/8".

The bit worked perfectly and I used it to drill all the weep holes all the way through. While I was drilling through the big Grid F.5 porch beam, I could feel that at two different levels I encountered voids in the log. I know that the log has a history of severe infestation of powderpost beetles and carpenter ants, which I had exterminated using board defense many years ago.

The log is so huge and it bears such a light load, that even if there are substantial galleries and weak spots inside, it does not present a structural problem. And since it is all inside the log, it doesn't present an esthetic problem either. But I figured that the weep holes would provide a new point of entry that might encourage a new infestation and that I needed to use some more Board Defense as a precaution. I mixed up a small batch of Board Defense solution and poured it into those holes.

Just before lunch time, Robert called and brought me up to date on his activities and plans. He told me that we need to renew the Forest Practices logging permit and I agreed to do that. After we hung up, I called Marty Mauney at DNR and learned that our permit had expired 6 days ago, and that we couldn't apply for an extension. We would have to go through the entire application process again and get a new permit. I called Robert back and left him a message with the news. I felt really stupid for having let the permit lapse.

I left for home at 12:45 with that little cloud over my progress.