Skiddable Work Shack

Need to replace a work/storage skid shack that burned, things are getting crowded. Need a heatable/bug free(er) place for a work bench and tool storage. 8X20ft.
We covered some of the tools and background here: https://permies.com/t/275418/Vintage-tools
These were used out back here as temporary living quarters years ago. The remaining example of Fred's sheepherder cabin/tiny home is just up the road a ways along with a pretty little house he built for himself. Unoccupied property, currently.
This is the concept, simple. The oldtimers bent the galvanized roofing over the curved rafters. Roof metal has changed a bit since. Since the gauge of the supplied metal has decreased, manufacturers have gone to using hardened steel, just like auto bodies. The profile I'm looking to have matched in galvanized is available in a slightly thicker gauge, non tensile, so I'm comfortable trying to bend it to an 18ft. radius. Gives me about a 6in. rise from the plate.
Board and batten siding I'll mill from my trees.
I'm going to make the center 1/3 of wall section swing up/open to provide about 12 feet of indoor/outdoor space. Easier to load large projects if necessary. Mobile woodworking work bench inside, store/secure our small house generator, solar/battery/inverter for lighting and small tools, small air compressor.

Tommy Bolin wrote:Need to replace a work/storage skid shack that burned, things are getting crowded. Need a heatable/bug free(er) place for a work bench and tool storage.

Had to modify the build and use of my sawmill to cut the 22ft. skids I wanted.
I used a house dovetail to attach the cross timbers to the skids. Strongest joint I could think of. Pull tight with strap and wedge to hold.
Have the floor framed, the 4ft. cutout in the center is for access to a future 'stash', maybe. Curved timber in the front is not just decorative, but adds ventilation and makes sure the cats have access to the underside to hide and keep the vermin at bay.

That is some impressive work, Tommy.

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:That is some impressive work, Tommy.

Agreed. The joinery at that size is almost unseen these days.
Impressive.

Also, that's a hell of a mallet.

I  think that cutout is a great idea! In my dreams, I could see you digging a cold cellar and then moving your skiddable structure over top of it. I get frustrated with not being able to store my apples in a low work, low energy way. I have contemplated the "barrel in the ground" system, but it would be a nuisance to access. Having a building over top with a trap door would make it much easier to use.

So far as the building itself, good job. I love the curved roof. It's nice to make a building both practical and aesthetically pleasing. I do hope you plan on adding more pictures as the work progresses?

Appreciate the compliments. Buried those joints under floor, so you are the only ones that will ever see them.
Wanted something that couldn't be pulled apart dragging this thing around with the cat, but didn't have much exposure to water and rot, no cheating with steel.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:Also, that's a hell of a mallet.

Another old timer's tool, 'native' to this place. Like swinging a fire hydrant with a handle that short. I like it.

Jay Angler wrote:...In my dreams, I could see you digging a cold cellar and then moving your skiddable structure over top...

Well, to be honest, I was dreaming of a mini version of Sarah Conner's apocalyptic weapons stash from Terminator 2.
Your idea might be better.  We'll see. Hard to frame after the fact, so it is there.
What do you do now to store apples? I know about nothing. Our legacy orchard is crabapples, prolific, bright red, really sour, excellent canned. We also have a small tree Lil'B calls a 'transparent'. Tasty, light colored, bruises very easily, does not keep well. Bears have wrecked those trees more than once over the last few decades. We planted a red/green sort that is just starting to produce. Like to store as much of all of them as we can.
Electric refrigeration, not an option. There is a small log structure rotting into a north facing hill behind the garage, think Andy used it as a lake ice refrigerator box. Building either dry(er) root cellar or ice box there, not sure which. Need produce storage.

Tommy Bolin wrote:
Well, to be honest, I was dreaming of a mini version of Sarah Conner's apocalyptic weapons stash from Terminator 2.
Your idea might be better.  

As a Canadian, I'll just say that weapons don't taste very good and leave it at that...

And wrote:  

What do you do now to store apples? I know about nothing. Our legacy orchard is crabapples, prolific, bright red, really sour, excellent canned. We also have a small tree Lil'B calls a 'transparent'. Tasty, light colored, bruises very easily, does not keep well.  

Mice like apples (as well as bears). We have a room on the north side of the house.  I put the apples in boxes inside a barrel in there. They would store better with more air-flow, but that would attract more mice... This only works with fall apples, as it's usually too warm in the summer.

Transparent apples are great dried. I have to use an electric food dryer because we're too humid for solar. I have my eyes on the Wheaton Labs rocket food dryer, but  it needs a spot to live as it's pretty heavy. They make a decent apple crisp too. My son froze a lot of them chopped up which I'm baking with, but freezers take power. The trick for cooking is to pick them a bit unripe. Our ducks and geese love them, which since the grass tends to dry out in the summer, is reason enough to have a productive tree - I need to start one for their field, so they can self harvest!

And wrote:  

There is a small log structure rotting into a north facing hill behind the garage, think Andy used it as a lake ice refrigerator box. Building either dry(er) root cellar or ice box there, not sure which. Need produce storage.  

Earth cooled is great for storing a lot of things. The trick is that one size does *not* fit all. Canning jars and winter squash are better in a dry environment and it's critical not to let them freeze, whereas most veggies benefit from more humidity, and different ones have a "just right" temperature niche which can sometimes be managed by shelf heights and location within a space. Somethings are best not stored together even if you manage a good amount of air exchange because they absorb flavors.
Short answer is that having separate areas for storing different foods is not a bad approach and has the added benefit of redundancy. Using Lake Ice as a cooling system has been done for a very long time - low tech meets modern harvesting techniques!  However, even it would benefit from being earth bermed, on the south, east and west, and ideally being shaded by plants as well. In northern areas, being below ground isn't essential, but places where there's really deep frost, you might need to go deep to be safe, or actually insulate the berm and the north side.

Appreciate the apple/storage advice. My wife cooks with both our legacy apples, very good.
We have a bunch of volunteers, near the trees. Our plan after gifting a couple to willing neighbors, is to replant some way out back on Crown Land, give the bears a distraction and some happiness not derived from our yard.
Whatever I build for cellar/ice storage will be north facing, shaded, and earth bermed.

....and vermin proof.

Tommy Bolin wrote:Had to modify the build and use of my sawmill to cut the 22ft. skids I wanted.

Is that a swing blade mill?  If so, what flavor?  How do you like it?

My brother bought a Woodland Mills (Canadian) band mill in the fall of 2019, right before all of the COVID stuff hit, with a set of extension rails.  He mounted it on a tri-axle equipment trailer, set up the extension rails with jacks for leveling, and added an old service crane on a homemade tower constructed from salvaged house trailer frame beams (he gets called more often than you might think to dispose of old house trailers which have succumbed to a final winter worth of snow).  There are jacks up in front by the service crane, too, to help keep the trailer from turning turtle when winching and lifting.  In addition to winching logs to the log deck and then lifting them onto the bunks, the crane lets him lift the saw head off the rails and set it aside, so that he can put a full load of saw logs on the trailer with the crane.  The stake pockets are still there, so he can put quite a few logs on it, though he mostly does onsite sawing, truth be told.  With the crane raised up a bit, the line pull through the block on the end of the boom can help to keep the logs from plowing through the dirt, even if the logs are downhill of where he's working (at least, within reason).  It's done yeoman's service for him, but I'm always curious about alternatives for local portable lumber making, whether chainsaw milling or swing blade or whatever.  Years ago, I read Will Malloff's "Chainsaw Lumbermaking", which still seems like a pretty good setup for his use case - going out to offshore islands in a small boat to process lumber onsite.

And I second (third? fourth?) the compliments on the skiddable structure.  Looks plenty stout, to my eye.  Maybe through tenons would have been stouter than the dovetails, but they'd have poked outside the longitudinals, and I'm not sure they would have been stronger, in actuality.  The trap door floor forethought is a good feature (I wish I'd thought of that when building last summer's shed!).  My shed is theoretically portable - joists over skids - though it is unlikely to ever move, and I could probably retrofit this feature, but it would have been easier to do it up front, that's for sure.

I have a Granberg set up with a 572XP Husqvarna and 28in. bar/rip chains. Works well. Can mill 16in+ spruce. I avoided the whole ladder/rail setup as being too costly, too restrictive on length/size and too bulky to pack in. I use a stringline setup and sliding 2x9 board on a series of nails leveled and set into the tree to make that all important first cut. I use a chalk line and smaller saw to square the timber. 10 inch SkilSaw to rip boards. I cut beams and posts for the garage addition as well as barn siding, milled some trees in place for a gate. I can carry that setup anywhere on this property and mill any tree I can fall.

I bought some dimensional lumber and plywood to frame the skid shack. When I looked at the cost, 2500CAD, and the time it would have taken to mill enough material to replace it, as well as the size of the next three projects, we decided to go ahead and purchase a sawmill.
I looked at a Woodland Mills band few years ago at Magard Tools in Prince George. Having talked to a two band owners, I didn't feel I wanted to spend the rest of my time sharpening little bandsaw teeth, nor was I impressed with the sturdiness of the blades, especially regards sand.  I did buy a Woodland 68 PTO limb chipper. Maurice has since sold the company, but the website is still up, https://logbuildingtools.ca/ and the new owner, Scott is excellent to deal with.

We bought a D&L Timbertech 816. They have been making these for about 20? yrs. Brunette Machinery, maker of industrial sawmill equipment in P.G., bought D&L few years ago and modified/streamlined the manufacture.
The flexibility of the mill was what appealed to me. Once I level off my timber, I can set up a series of rips, 1x3, 1x4 and siding widths, then slab them off after swinging the blade, until I get to the dimension of the beam/post I need to mill, like wise with the side slabs. Minimizes waste or extra hand ripping.
I can mill multiple sizes of material off the same timber, all without having to turn the work. I also skid my milling trees with the cat in the winter to minimize mud in the bark.

I don't have all the nuances of the operation figured out yet, but so far output has been good. The mill came with a 23h.p. electric start Kohler, an extra 21in. carbide blade and an electric sharpener/jig. Also included the parts to assemble a carriage to move the mill across ground and set on rails, which I have not yet used.
An option was a jig that locks the blade in a number of canted positions to mill beveled siding or posts. They had a sale and threw in a really well made set of sliding log dogs to hold the work as well as the bevel.
I bought the smaller version not just because of costs, the mill was 3x a nice bandsaw mill, but because like your brother, I want to have the ability to mount this on a trailer, needed to fit between the fenderwells. His setup sounds really well thought out. I eventually want the mill palletized so I don't need a dedicated trailer to pull it into the woods. We have more than 6 mi. of road/fenceline/fireguard on this property and I'd like to mill some of the more inaccessible timber. I would likely walk the backhoe out to handle trees.
I used the shipping pallet to stage the sawmill thereby extending it's length capacity. I'm sure that's a nono.
Negatives.
The owner's book was very dated, and a bit vague. Obviously written stream of consciousness style by someone who has been building these things through all the iterations over the years. Some things overlooked. There is a good FBook forum for Timbertech owners, if that is your thing. I don't participate. Usage videos are posted online.
I dozed a temporary level area in my driveway for setup, road filled it. The rail system is pretty solid, but was short one leveling bar. Needs one at every joint in my opinion, as well as ends. I had to build something. I had hell over the winter with snow, freezing and thawing, keeping the rails level and mated just right to the pallet.  I'm okay for now with the location of my current setup, that was a question, so I am going to drill and pour some concrete piers, build a new permanent platform/shelter with a roof, make it all more stable, get it out of the weather.
This thing throws a lot of sawdust. the kerf is double that of a big bandsaw. The parrots will scream waste, but if you are milling dimensional lumber from 12-14in. logs, the difference is irrelevant. You cant save enough wood to make a difference. Milling siding from 18in. logs, you'd have a point, but that is not the typical usage. The flexibility to usefully mill the side slabs as you go, makes up for a lot of that anyhow, I believe.
Fuel usage seems decent, LiFePo4 battery, started up in cold January weather w/out trouble. Think the engine alternator is big enough to run a small LED work light setup, can't find much to complain about. Carbide tipped blade, very robust, durable. Nice unit.
Someone asked in another thread about running a mill off solar. D&L offers an electric version. Needs three-phase power which I have no current interest in. My offgrid capacity is too small. However, D&L told me when I asked, that a fella named Rob from Okanogan Solar was running one of their mills off of solar power. I bought a bunch of Canadian Solar panels from him two years ago, sharp guy, very nice. He does not have the time to spend fending off questions from forum groupies, but if an electric sawmill makes serious sense to you and you live in western Canada, D&L and Okanogan Solar can set you up.

https://timbertechnologies.com/

As far as the shack goes, thank you. Yes, having a tenon through, even if flush cut was not what I wanted. The dovetail has a bigger cross section and unless the tenon is housed as well, more resistance to twisting. No penetrations to the joint for water/rot to enter was my plan. I also framed the floor hanging over the skids for a drip edge and flashed the framing/floor with galvanized L metal, same idea.
I thought about insulating the floor, still waffling. Fixing to frame walls, looks like a no go. I would have to lift the platform and sheet the bottom with plywood to keep the packrats from destroying it later. Nothing else of all the ideas I have read makes sense.

Tommy Bolin wrote:

This thing throws a lot of sawdust.

You mean it throws a lot of chicken bedding? Or covering for your Willow Feeder?

Partly depends on just how fine it is, but that stuff has all kinds of uses. My neighbor is happy to have me clean off his mill for him. We have areas that get seriously muddy in winter, and if I've stashed it out of the rain, it can help with that for short periods, particularly in spots that you want something biodegradable. And I layer it with Doug Fir cones in pans in my woodstove for making biochar with.

The problem is the solution!

I'm not complaining, we have plans for the shreds, and that is what they are, shreds, not just dust.
You know how the internet is, people with no relevant practical experience, parroting an opinion like fact. Shrieking about saw shreds, a common complaint when touting the superiority of a bandsaw mill.

Tommy Bolin wrote: You know how the internet is, people with no relevant practical experience, parroting an opinion like fact. Shrieking about saw shreds, a common complaint when touting the superiority of a bandsaw mill.

Exactly! That concept comes up in many areas here on permies.

There is no "one right way", and I posted in the hopes that if someone who's been reading the same sites you have, is lucky enough to find their way here, they'll see my enthusiasm for seeing those shreds as valuable raw materials, rather than waste. I've even read of sawdust being used as insulation.

Permies has a thread about 100 uses for sticks. I wonder if we need one for the uses of sawdust. Not sure we'd get to 100!

Tommy I applaud your craftsmanship and thank you for some detailed explanations of your projects.  About the bandsaw debate....preaching to the choir, respect the opinion of a man with a few splinters, yeah.  Yes, more than one way forward, I agree.

One man's kerf is another person's comfort
Rico

Well along those lines. When I was quite young my wife and I lived in a small shack out the end of JobCorps Road south of Ronan, right on the canal coming up from Mission to the south. The house was repurposed from a whole bunch of little shacks built to house workers when the Hungry Horse Dam was built. When the Tribe gave the houses to members, Steven Small Salmon lived on the ranch just up the hill, had put it on wheels, moved it down.
The house was skirted with a series of boxes, filled with sawdust from a local mill. Open to the weather, the sawdust held water and was decaying. Being young, ambitious and not all that smart, I decided to shovel off the rotting wood mulch on the west side and 'renovate' it. Not moving fast enough, my pipes were freezing by the end of October.

Ha, sounds like something I would do.  I am slow in many ways, my wife tells me. I point out I am merely deliberate. Appreciate the story, and other details of your Homestead, it helps paint a picture for us here in GA.  Especially the "distraction" apple trees you planted for the bears to maul....

Post more pix as we go, but this is the basic idea.
Recessed the door header 2in., used some Ives commercial hinges I picked up at the Army/Navy Surplus in IdahoFalls. They allow an outswing door to fold flat to the wall.
Used a half lap 45deg. mitre to secure the corner of the swing out frame. Put it in backwards, poor screw coverage. Flip it over next time.
Installed 2in. galvanized L metal under the floor sheathing, held the framing back a half inch to allow wall sheeting to be installed. If I was framing production, I would have squared and sheeted the wall on the floor, but by myself, 20ft. of wall is about what I feel like pushing. Get the rest of the walls framed tomorrow, start cutting the curved rafters. Metal roofing will be in Mon.-Tues.

This is the general scheme. Cut the corbel length, set the front/rear overhang to fit exactly the overlap/width of my metal roof sheeting.
Sheeted the walls enough to stiffen the framing, square the corners. L metal wraps the floor sheeting, covers the bottom of the wall sheeting, 3/4in. drip edge each side.
Needed something to seal the ends of the skids and corbels, so I heated some linseed oil, turpentine, and paraffin, to a consistency softer than your SnoSeal boot wax. Works well so far. Base oil mix carries the paraffin into the grain, then dries.
Multiple ways to figure radii for cutting, I've used them all. This is a simple way when space is very limited. Three nails, two sticks fastened to form the hypotenuse of half chord triangle, kerfed to hold pencil for scribing.
Cut arches for wall ends and rafters, laminating them with wood glue, to a 2x6 core. Layout varies over the length to accommodate steel, but is around 22in. o.c. Limited building width and overhang to 9ft. arc length of curved steel.

Tommy Bolin wrote: Multiple ways to figure radii for cutting, I've used them all. This is a simple way when space is very limited. Three nails, two sticks fastened to form the hypotenuse of half chord triangle, kerfed to hold pencil for scribing.

Yes! Too many of us were taught to use "the string" way, and only discover when it counts that a stick is *much* more reliable and accurate.

Got the rafters cut and laminated. Bunched them and planed them to smooth any wobbles in the radius of the roof plane.
This is where it sits for now. Will be well into summer before I can finish milling the siding. Hang the steel on the roof and awning door prior, get it good and dried in.