Mom and dad come to visit

Mom and Dad came to visit last week, and we couldn't have planned a better way to wrap up our summer. 

Indy has found the bean tipis to her liking.  They offer shade, a spot to supervise, and of course, beans.  I lost many beans, most of my peas, and all of my grapes to this predator.

The visit coincided with the harvest time for the hops and Mom and Dad made chipper volunteers.  We took our hops to Erik and checked out his brewery and hops.  Later in the week we went to Hopshire Farm Brewery's CoHoperation Celebration when the brewing and growing community bring the hops they've grown to Hopshire to make a community IPA.  What that meant to us was some good beer, good friends, and really good pulled pork.

The field next to the house is beautiful, but also producing a dizzying array of allergens.  Poor Sarah and Eva were beside themselves.  Both have since recovered.

Mom and Dad and I hit some antique  malls mid week and saw lots of cool old stuff.

We also checked out the Plantations.  There was a bit of wind and rain throughout the week, but we managed to find plenty of sunshine, too.  The Plantations was amazing with lots of flowers and trees in peak season.

I love how Mom and Dad point things out to each other and always have an idea about where the plants might fit in their gardens.

The Plantations provide quite the home for honey bees.  It was good to see so many of them.

The training has begun

Woodsmens Games!

I'm trying desperately to get caught up here before the summer ends.  The weekend before Mom and Dad came to visit was a busy one.  Nathan came down, Sarah met Livia for the first time (her international student-friend), I rented an "Electric Eel" from Home-Depot to snake the clogged main drain from the house, and Sarah and I took Zhora to her first lumberjack competition.

These first few are gratuitous and self-indulgent shots of my own small forays into lumberjackdom.

Jonas loves to go to Pat's to help me work the horses, mend the fences, and process the trees.  He does get a little tired after awhile... or lazy; it's hard to tell.  Anyway, he loves to ride on the tractor.  We do this a lot, but since I'm normally the cameraman, I don't have any pictures of it, so I asked Pat to take this shot.

I took this one because I wanted a close up of Jonas and myself.  I just trimmed my beard yesterday and, looking at this picture makes me miss it.  It was a good beard, but it was getting a little silly.  Anyway... that was Friday.  On Sunday we got up early and headed to Boonville, NY for the last day of the games.

We were surprised (at least Sarah and I were, Zhora seemed to take it in stride) to see A. how big the event was and B. how many vendors there were.  Usually this kind of blatant commercialism bothers me, but apparently when what is being sold splits logs into 8 sections in one step, my punk rock attitude takes a back seat.

There were several food huts, but not as many as you might think.  There were smoothies and hot dogs and cheese steaks, lots of fries, pizza, and of course ice cream and funnel cake.  This one sold all things elk.  We were all pretty impressed with the size of the antlers.

The size, quantity, and variety of the machines was surprising.  These were what our fore fathers had in mind when they wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; cut from the original document was Jefferson's eloquently written, but questionably placed prose on the TW-Pro MP XL Firewood Processor.  "The tree of liberty must be felled and split from time to time with the sweat and blood of lumbermen and there is no better machine that I can think of than Timber Wolf's Pro MP Firewood Processor."  Franklin argued that the Declaration of Independence was no place for Jefferson's proclivity for lobbying and self interest and the sections about Timber Wolf, Coca Cola, and Monsanto were all removed from the final document.  Still, the Pro MP is a heck of a machine.

So, after we wandered around for a little bit, got some salted potatoes, ice cream, and thick fresh cut fries with malted vinegar, we settled into our bleachers for some competition.  This is my favorite event, called springboard chop.
 

The competitors start on the ground, chop a bite into the trunk, throw in a springboard, jump up and repeat that, then jump up again, and from what is essentially a pirate's plank, chop off the top foot of the pole!  It is very exciting and cool to watch.  The guy on the right is Mr. Waterfield.  He is one bad lumberjack.  We rooted for him all day, and although I don't think he won, he was awesome in all his heats in all his events.  I'm not real knowledgeable about the whole scoring of this thing, but there were a couple events he didn't compete in, and he got DQ'd in the open hot saw event (probably for going faster and more hardcore than was acceptable).  Anyway, we had a good time choosing someone to cheer for.  Zhora still talks about him... so does Sarah.

Here you can see Nathan Waterfield  relaxing and waiting for his competition to catch up.  He placed two springboards and highballed up the pole in 66 seconds.  He could have lit a pipe while he waited for his heat to wrap up... and done the whole event again before the last man finished!

Zhora was  in the minority, being neither overweight nor attired in flannel or truckers cap.  She made up for these deficiencies by cheering, clapping, rooting, and generally being more enthusiastic than most of the people around us.  She even yelled at me a couple times for taking pictures when I should have been shouting or clapping.

The materials of the games have been standardized in the last decade or so.  Apparently until very recently betting on the games wasn't especially difficult; bet on the guy with the smaller log with less knots.  Now they take pains to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.  The posts in the front are for the springboard competition, the horizontal posts were used for the crosscut competition and for the hot saw, and the tall tall posts in the back were used for the tree felling competition.

Between events we walked around some more.  There was an great little tent filled with raptors and this beautiful lady vulture.  I've really come to appreciate turkey vultures of late.  They are impressive and under-appreciated birds.  This one was in a playful mood and flew off the handlers glove and scared the crap out of several small children.  It was pretty funny... once I knew the bird was ok.  The woman who told us about all the rescued birds was very nice and brought most of the birds out for everyone to see.  There was a barn owl and a barred owl (who don't like each other), a peregrine falcon, a Harris's hawk, a kestral, and two screech owls.  We learned that the odd calls we've been hearing at dusk lately are screech owls.  The evening campfires feel more exciting somehow.

This is a hot saw.  It's like a snow mobile and a chainsaw had a baby.  It is a very exciting animal.


Also, it is loud.  Speaking of, I had my hearing tested in a booth at the show.  Turns out, according to the test at least, that I have great hearing.  So now I really don't know what my problem is.  Probably something in my auditory cortex.

Strong like Mr. Waterfield!  Check out the size of the wood "chips" the woodsmen were chopping!  Incredible!

I have no idea what happened here, but got a real kick out of imagining that somebody just got overzealous and defoliated everything that resembled a tree in the area.

On our way out at the end of the show.  A lot of big wood had been turned into smaller wood.

Life is good.

The Forge

So this is the short story of the forge.  I'm not sure when I got interested in forges and blacksmithing, but it's been a couple years.  I approached it in quite a desultory manner; so much so that its very existence on my property is remarkable.  Anyway, one evening last fall I was standing around a friend's hunting camp mostly nervous drinking due to the social nature of the evening when the conversation happened to turn to forging and I expressed an interest.  

Frank.  The builder of the camp and owner of the forge.  "I got a forge ya can have.  It's in the barn, though, you'll have ta wait til it dries out a bit."
 The forge was, of course in the back corner of the barn behind a bunch of maple shack equipment, a couple lawn mowers frozen in place with locked up wheels, a pile of tetanus and some other odds and ends related to farming and personal injury.  Anyway, we extricated it, got it in my truck somehow, and I drove it home.




It belonged to Frank's grandfather originally.

She was well rusted out and the blower was seized up and filled with the hopes and dreams of some long dead chipmunk.  The hood is in pretty poor condition, and the rust is pretty extensive.  So it sat for a good time under the roof of the shed.

Until Nathan brought over his anvil and rehung a straight peen hammer to get me unstuck from my indifference.

As usual, I had some help.  Some of it was even helpful, but that particular variety is not pictured here.

I heated up the nuts and bolts with a torch and was amazed when almost all of them came apart.  A few broke, but none created any real problems.  Here you see the blower removed from the body of the forge.  It cleaned out pretty easily and with a couple screw tightenings it spun freely again.

Here you're looking at the bottom of the firepot and the clinker breaker, which... wait for it... breaks the clinkers.

The tools and supervision of the trade.

Firepot removed from the hearth and belts removed from the flywheel... perhaps a little prematurely, but it gave Nathan and I some brain games to play.  #staving off the Alzheimers!

Gratuitous shot of the flywheel.

In need of having the rust burned off 'em.  The pot, clinker breaker, and blower.

Nathan came down the weekend before last and we did some thrift store shopping.  Popped some tags as the kids like to say.  Nathan was excited about the sparkly belts and plans to make his Halloween outfit out of the buckles and a few leather scraps.  The rest of the belts we cut up and used to attach the hand lever to the counterweight and the counterweight to the flywheel (main band) shaft.

Nathan brought his angle grinder and attention to detail and spent a better part of Saturday cleaning the forge and cutting the belts.

He had better luck with the belts than with the rust.

This past week I finally got the main belt assembled and run around the main band wheel and the blower shaft.  I couldn't help but try it out.  We had collected some charcoal from the fire the previous weekend, and I'd been collecting charcoal from the other campfires.  The forge roared to life for the first time since before WWII!  Everything held together and worked as it should.  I couldn't have been more pleased.

The current, less than ideal setup.  We'll have to carry Nathan's anvil around whenever we want to use it, which is troublesome.  It weighs several pounds or more, and really begs to be attached to something sturdy for hammering.  Also, there's not a tonne of room to work under the roof, which, besides all the firewood, is also flammable... or inflammable.

Haven't done much yet, just tested it out by heating up an old horseshoe.  I hammered on it for awhile and made a paper weight that was the butt of many a joke.  Hope everyone wants paper weights for christmas this year!

The catalog for Buffalo Forges can be found here.  Mine is a pretty similar to Model No. 0 on page 245.  It retailed for $54.00 (with the water tank attachment) in 1891, and was to be appreciated by all smiths for it's cranked blower rather than a fan or bellows.