Clayton's Bootcamp Experience

Hi everyone. I arrived at Wheaton Labs on Friday and decided to start my thread today.

Today's Sunday so there was no project labor, but I spent a few hours building a firewood rack with Orin's help.

Yesterday we spent four hours in the morning falling and delimbing trees at the lab for junk pole fence. We returned to base camp for lunch (pizza baked the night before in the rocket oven) before a quick garden tour at the tab. After that Josiah, Scott, and I went and started repairs on the shower stalls while the other boots stayed and worked on planting the garden

Yesterday we spent the morning at Allerton Abby cutting notches in the logs that will become the horizontal logs on the junk pole fence. I forgot to take pictures of the process, but will try to next time we return.
The afternoon was spent planting tree seeds on Fred's plot with a hand seeder.

The seeder had some serious clogging issues. It worked fine in dry ground but any soil that had even a bit of moisture would clog the seeder almost every hole. This got even worse in high clay areas. I'm currently working on a design that will hopefully solve this clogging issue.


Tips and Tricks:

Holding the seeder at 90 degree angle hugely increases the odds of the seed actually landing in the hole

> design...

Sounds like a neat little challenge. Might take a few tries. Gonna be easy to make?


Cheers,
Rufus

Rufus Laggren wrote:> design...

Sounds like a neat little challenge. Might take a few tries. Gonna be easy to make?


Cheers,
Rufus

Shouldn't be too difficult once I figure out how to use the welder haha. I suspect you're right about taking a couple tries, I'm planning to build my first prototype tomorrow night.

Yesterday we spent the morning harvesting logs from slash piles use in hugelkultur beds to use at the Abby.
I spent the afternoon working on the Shower Shack with Josiah


Tips and Tricks:

If you think your log might roll when you cut it, stand on the uphill side while cutting

Yesterday morning we split into teams then carved the brackets and hung the horizontals for the junk pole fence around the Abby.

In other news, after another full afternoon of work, the shower shack is finally functional! We had to combine two faucets to get one that didn't leak. The carpentry to enclose the pipes in the wall is yet to be completed

Tips and Tricks:

Melted pine sap makes pretty good glue (for non critical applications)

I finally remembered to take pictures of the junk pole fence joints, which was our morning project. I am happy to report the vertical junk poles are starting to go in near the South gate! (there are still more horizontals to be done as well though)
I again spent the afternoon working on the Shower Shack, and we made some snazzy pull out panels to make the plumbing accessible

Tips and Tricks:

Mark a square on each side of the junk pole where you will cut the notch so you can line up the two notches and fit them on the fence. This works much better than just two vertical lines