Sept. 29th - Rafters Up

It's been an amazing week weatherwise as well as progress. The full Autumn colors are surrounding Rico and it is incredibly beautiful. Greenbay and Joe made some great progress and have probably close to 1/2 the rafters up. Perhaps in a week or 2 we can have this portion of the house dried in. Working with varying dimensions on old lumber can be very challenging, but the roof framing looks great and dimensions are right on. They are doing a great job.

Pat and I continue on the logs for the garage. We now have all our all-thread, couplers, nuts and washers. It's tedious work preparing each log to be installed. First, the old bark and old powder post beetle damage must be removed. We use a draw knife for peeling off the majority of bark. The powder post beetle damage is nearly always in the white area of the log just under the layer of bark. A grinder with a wire wheel works great to further clean and prepare any powdery or soft layer of wood that need removed from the top and bottom of the logs. The all thread sections are added as we need them and the higher we go the tougher it gets with lifting and setting the logs in place. Using this system with washers and nuts we can adjust the height of each log. As you can see from the photo, some of the chinking is as tall as 6" in between the logs.
Each log has one or two 7/8" holes that we have to drill the entire depth of the log. Some of the holes are 18" in depth and deeper than the length of our drill bit. These require measuring and drilling from the opposite side. We use construction adhesive and Ollees on each corner to fasten each log to the one below by fastening it through the end of the dovetail. Tommorrow we'll have to use scaffolding for lifing the logs up and into place. Only 6 courses of logs are used on this red oak cabin, as the depth of the logs are 2-3 times those on the aspen cabin, which used 14 courses