Beware of Flying Logs

Yesterday afternoon, Lisa got out the chainsaw and we started to go to work on the pieces of wood that were too knotted to split. Things went well for a while, and I hauled a hand-cart-full of pieces to the wood shed. Wow, is the grain in some of those knots tight! No wonder the splitting maul bounced right off of them.

After she cut one of the larger pieces in two, and one of the remaining pieces looked like it should split pretty easily, so Lisa backed off and I took a whack at it with the maul. It split, all right, but the pieces went flying off in both directions. One of them hit the chainsaw that was sitting a meter or two off to the left. Lisa went "Ow!" a couple meters further away as something hit her.

Uh, oh. When the wood hit the chainsaw, it broke the oil cap, which continued onward and hit Lisa. I doubt you could have done this if you'd planned it. No harm to her, but our chainsawing was abruptly curtailed. You can't run the chainsaw without oil, and you have to have the cap in place or else the oil will shoot back out the hole.

We have the saw's instruction manual and parts list. The part itself costs only about $1, but it would cost another $9 in shipping even for ordinary take-a-week shipping, and a lot more for overnight shipping. I'm going to hunt around and see if any of the local saw-supply stores have that particular part in stock. There's a chance that there's a place within walking distance (even here in dinky little Mehama) that has the particular type of oil-cap cover for this saw.

Phooey. If I had been more diligent about moving the other equipment away while I was splitting wood, we would have easily finished reducing those un-splittable logs and also would have cut the various tree branches down to burnable size by the time it cooled sufficiently for Lisa to assay another visit to That Darn Roof.

Roof: What Next

Lisa says that we've completed everything she set out to accomplish during my trip up here this month, so anything else we accomplish in the remaining days is a bonus. She has decided for now to not put down any White Goo on the sections we covered already and to instead concentrate on the rest of the north roof.

( Next Steps )

Something not so obvious is that the areas of roof with roof fabric and/or roof goop have considerably better footing (once dry) than the basic shingle roof. I would have thought the opposite, but Lisa assures me that it's much easier walking on the treated sections. Also, even without the roof fabric, the goo makes the shingles stick together and hold up better. So her plan is to apply the Gray Goo directly to the sections of the west end that she's managed to clear, concentrating on some obvious gaps, like these areas with the rotten shingles. It won't be as good as the full-blown three-layer treatment (fabric + two types of goo) on the east end, but it's much better than nothing at all, and we just don't have time to go through the full treatment on this end. Preserving what we can here should make it easier to come back when we have time again and can take the time to lay down lath to which the roof fabric can be attached.