Have you ever broken a bone?
…however, I did destroy a Sthil MS250 chainsaw bar and chain. This weekend.
Our neighbour, MS, helped me take down the other half of this leaning, dead, ash (that’s smack dab in the middle of our future BCB&B build site). I have a 15’ poker-straight length that can be milled. The rest, long term storage for firewood.
I removed the saw’s head to prevent further injury to the chainsaw.
…leads to a roughed-in build site! See the attached images, eh.
Revision: Ah. So THAT’S how one inserts images. Oy.
…hey! Back off. So we did. 4 hummingbirds found our forest feeder and are now having a turf war over the bloody thing.
A humourus 12 minute description of our feathered fiends (not friends).
Lumber update: I’m chopping straight lengths of oak & maple (~5-6’ blocks) so that I can dry them out and possibly mill them. It’s too nice to burn!
TS had her first black bear encounter this afternoon (at about 3 p.m.). I was splitting firewood up at the parking lot. TS was shredding branches (~150-200m away from me). While I was banging logs apart, I heard someone swear(?) and started blasting on our canned-air horn. A lot. I hopped on the ATV and tore on over. The stupid thing was watching TS on a nearby rock outcrop, staring down at TS. The bear took off. It was close to TS… perhaps 10-20m away.
She later said that she had this feeling that she was being watched. That there was something nearby snapping twigs. TS did EVERYTHING RIGHT and I am VERY PROUD OF HER. We both know people who would never set foot in the forest again after a close encounter with a black bear.
…that green branches and fresh leaves play holy hell with small chippers & shredders. I blocked up the mechanism 3 times before I walked away from it in disgust (TS is more savvy than me about the unit… I end up jamming branches and stuff into the hopper… and look like Wile E. Coyote on top of one of his spinning-blade ACME contraptions [sorry TS… do as I say, not as I do]). After de-energizing the system and pulling the hopper apart 3 times… I gave up.
We crawled back to MTC and are recovering from the grind. This is fun. Right? RIGHT?! Ow, sore.
TS & I were able to get back into the zone while clearing the build-site. Yesterday, TS was able to rough-out the new ATV trail from the build-site to her soil-operation. Me? I just smashed and crashed my way hither-and-dither using our Polaris! I strung a trail-line from our starting point to the soil-operation.
This morning, I was far more confident with my chainsaw and was able to safely bring down more trees (without huffing & puffing & tripping-stumbling). My Stihl’s MS261’s chain didn’t skip off the bar (as I’m properly tensioning it). Safe, sane, and productive work with a high-performance saw? Nailed it.
TS, the super-ant (AKA ‘The Mad Lopper’), has piled up a stack of branches that will be processed tomorrow. She’s also filling in the rock fissures (exposed after removing the juniper) with punky logs. Now that we are spending more time in the future back yard/garden, we can chip and shred deadfall and material in situ. I’m just not butch enough to haul the bush buggy over rocks & crevices to the soil-operation (despite using an ATV to haul it).
…to the bush. I’m optimistic we learned a few lessons from our last session. We’ll have to DIY our own bush-buggy-platform for the wood chipper. King City Trailers gave us good advice, had SOME stock, but couldn’t sell us a ready-made option. Still, I’d recommend them to you.
Meh… we’re planning on pushing another ATV trail around the buildsite so that we can easily move green-matter to the soil operation. SR told TS that we can grab our wheelbarrow from the school shipping container.
Black Cat Bed And Breakfast 