Log Home Pictures from 2009, Part 3 of 4

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8/13/09 After many years of delay, I finally got started on building the loft staircase. The treads have been waiting out in the woodshed all this time, and the stringer has been serving as a temporary bench in the cabin for almost as long. Now, the treads have to be notched to fit onto the stringer. The jig you see in the picture, sitting on top of the sawhorses in the foreground, will be used to guide the saw cuts that will be made prior to chiseling out the wood between the cuts to make the notch.

8/13/09 To notch a typical tread, the jig is mounted in the special sawhorse as you can see in the picture.

8/13/09 Here is a tread mounted in the jig in the special sawhorse.

8/13/09 Here is another view of the tread mounted in the jig in the special sawhorse.

8/13/09 Here you see the position of the saw when the cut is complete. The jig shows where the cut should stop on each side.

8/13/09 Here the jig has been removed from the sawhorse and is placed on the tread which is cut out of the main loft beam. The beam must be notched on the underside just like the rest of the treads so that the stringer can fit up underneath it. The jig will be used to guide the saw to make the cuts accurate.

8/13/09 Here is a close-up of the jig resting on the loft beam tread.

8/27/09 Less than 24 hours earlier than this picture, I learned that the loft stair stringer that I had waiting for so long to install, was too short for the job. After considering a few options, I called Robert Ferrel to come up and cut down this tree so I could make a longer stringer. He is an expert faller and I was lucky to get him to come up so quickly. Here he is making a cavity to hold a 10-ton hydraulic jack which he will use to push the tree uphill to fall where I want it.

8/27/09 Here Robert is driving wedges into the kerf to assist the hydraulic jack in pushing the tree over. You can see how severely the tree is leaning to the left. Robert made it fall to the right.

8/27/09 Here Robert is falling a dead grand fir. This is the tree I had selected for making the stringer, but Robert pointed out that grand fir is not a good structural wood. He picked out the Doug fir that he falled first. That's the one I will use. The rest will probably be firewood.

9/29/09 These were the smaller mushrooms that I harvested for my dinner. The big ones were all infested with bugs.

There are multiple picture pages for this year. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .This is Page 3 of 4. Go to page 1 2 3 4 next prev

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