!!!! SEPP to Boot: Stephen's Experience (BEL)

Hans Quistorff wrote:It would be nice to have a resident up there to feed warm water in there and tend some winter greens

Noted. I totally agree with this...! Working on it. :)

BRK #426

Spent a fair amount of time making a wood-burned sign for the kitchen today. I wanted it to be a companion piece to the "sawdust" sign I made a couple weeks ago.



I think it turned out all right. It was odd to see the stark difference between the two types of wood used for the sign. That's what I had on hand however, so it's going to be  like that for the duration.



Cat and I played a new print-and-play tabletop game I picked up on Kickstarter a while back. The goal is to plot out railway lines, and deliver goods like iron, timber, and grain. There's a Montana map, so it's worth giving it a second try in a later evening.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BRK #427

It was a special day today, with Samantha and Cedar in attendance. Thanks for being here...!

Cat was busy today creating privacy curtains for the Solarium. As it turns out I didn't pick any terrible fabrics to use over the weekend.

I think these curtains will look fantastic once they're done. Even the tie-back that Cat came up with looks great.



Dez and I started off the week with a bunch of odds and ends. Prior to lunch, we focused more on the "easy bake cob oven" for the Bun Warmer rocket mass heater. It required some iron support bars. Here's Dez cleaning-up my angle-ground ends.



I had some fun this afternoon puttin' the easy bake cob oven together, gathering some video footage and photos of the process. I completed the walls, added the supports and pizza pan roof, and then covered it all with cob. While doing other tasks in the afternoon, I periodically checked the fire, which I'd lit to accelerate the drying process for the cob.



(Sorry Paul, we didn't have any steel angle-iron that fit the diameter of the barrel so we resorted to flat bars.)



As the fire burned and the barrel heated up, I was tickled while watching steam rise from the drying cob and hearing it sizzle.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BRK #428

Happy Taco Tuesday to you...!

I could have sworn there were mountains over there, somewhere...



Built up a fire in the Classroom at the start of the day today, keeping things warm enough to take care of work in there.



Speaking of which, the battery box is finished! Once I receive some more feedback from SEPPer Jeff, I'll know where the outlets will be installed. Meanwhile, I'm just pleased that this one is finally done. Seems like the angled roof took a bit more than we expected.







Before the close of the day, I started adding the "clay cape" to the Bun Warmer rocket mass heater. Not sure if you can tell clearly from the photo, but the one-inch layer against the barrel is the clay-perlite mix, while I had to immediately add a layer of fresh cob atop this to prevent it from falling off the barrel. It was onerous work, but it will be an interesting experiment.



I'm almost certain I'll wake up in the middle of the night the evening after Bun Warmer Day (tomorrow's Half-Assed Holiday) is over, mumbling to myself, "Oh, why didn't I think to do it this way?!?!?!" and have an idea to make the cape-fabrication process much smoother. Oh well...!

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BRK #429

Happy Bun Warmer Day to you...!

This is one of our Half Assed Holidays for the 2023 - 2024 season. For it, we go to the berm shed and its Bun Warmer rocket mass heater to do some improvements and to roast up our dinner. Cat and I took some video footage and I hope that's put together soon. For now, here are a few photographs of today's progress. I'm pleased with what we did.

To understand what we hope to do, here's a quick summary:
- Build a small baking area directly over the top of the barrel. Top it with an aluminum pan.
- Build a sand insulator on the "next floor up" from the oven, surrounded by more cob.
- Cap it off with a flattened cob lid to seal everything together.
- End goal: have an opening to a cavity just on top of the barrel hot enough to bake things.



Here's the Bun Warmer "easy cob oven," after we built a cob ring around the top surface.



Here's the cob ring, filled with sand.



Here's the sand level partially capped by more cob.



Here's the end result. We ended up adding more cob to the cap, but this is still the essential shape we have.



We used the "smokeless" fire ring to heat up our small dinner for the evening: sausages on skewers, and a pan of seitan for me.



There were several curious cats in attendance, detecting the unmistakable aroma of tasty, meaty morsels. Here's Batman AKA Puff:



Here's Top G, the loudest beggar of the bunch:



And here's little Bean, who most definitely relished the heat of the Bun Warmer.



Finally: while collecting more clay this morning to prep the cob mix, I became distracted by the wild patterns across the surface of frozen clay.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!