Wooden Work Continues - Restacking the Floor Boards

Its been a lot of learning so far, but after several weeks I almost feel competent about 'drying boards'. Today I would like to take you through an adventure in 3/4 inch stickers.

A few days ago, my apprentice @tolimax and I went to get some 'ripio', cutting off of other wood that were at least 3/4 inch in one dimension. The tiny quarter inch stickers we were using to separate the wood was not allowing enough airflow, and some of the wood was producing fungus.

We also picked up some cement blocks to weigh the stacks down.

I took an afternoon and cleaned up the material with my circle saw, lovingly gifted to me by my dad, who is the type of wood worker that would know that a guy has gotta have a circle saw. I cut appropriate pieces into 2.5 foot sections large enough to dry three boards wide.

But I had another problem, none of them were equal.

Yesterday we went and ended up paying just about 3 dollars to rent a table saw for about an hour. From each of the cast off wooden pieces we were able to get several stickers. This was @tolimax's first time using a table saw, so I tried to remember all the things my dad told me. I told some of these things, half for me to remember and half for him if he feels like learning. He seems eager to learn.

With zero injuries or incidents we cut out over 120 stickers, and bagged them up to take back to our already too tiny warehouse.

We took a wire brush to all the boards and, one by one, restacked them a bit wider and with the now exact 3/4 inch separators. This took the better part of the rest of the day, mostly because of the wire brushing.

There is something satisfying with working with wood, even when its slow going.

This is the final form for these lapped floorboards, I hope the get a bit more evenly dried, as next week they will be installed up on the farm.

Today, we will tackle two other stacks of non lapped boards, and will learn a lot by comparing the two, as the lapped boards have been immunized twice with my homemade boric acid treatment. Will there be more bugs in the non treated boards? More fungus? More or less moisture?

It's time to get to work.

Freedom and Friendship!