WE NEED TO END THE WARS NOW!!!!

My personal projects would not be possible if I weren't in this part of the world. Some people can't even gather fire wood to heat their homes with out being killed.. like the nine boys attacked and killed yesterday in NATO air strikes.

The boys were killed while gathering fire wood.
9 young boys deliberately killed by helicopter gun ships in Afghanistan... we here in this country need to end these wars, tell the DOD, call them @ 703 697 5131, call the White House: 202 456 1111.. here in Athens we protest every Tuesday from 5-6 @ the Arch. there is a protest in Washington with Veterans for Peace on March 19th. These wars need to end NOW!!!! We have to stop them!!
Please, I beg anyone with a conscience: take some time out of your life, a life that is not riddled with mortar shells through your living room, where you can go to a wedding with out being afraid you will be bombed for assembling....take some time and do what you can here to end these rapacious wars. The people there can't bring our military home, we Americans are the only ones who can. Please, invest some time in Peace, Love and Compassion and make our democracy work!!

Assmebling the roof trusses and installing the roof!!

We have 1/2 the roof installed! The hardest part, over the living room where we have had to crawl around on the tops of the walls done!

It has been raining a lot these past few days, and so we have been working in between the weather and Scott's crazy/busy schedule. He is working + going to school @ night + doing his clinical, and I am getting ready to leave for North Carolina, to meet with a group of Buddhists from The Great Smokey mountain Peace Pagoda, to walk with them from Asheville, NC to Oakridge Tenn. where there is a proposed new nuclear weapons plants being developed. The rally in opposition is on the 16th of April if anyone reading this is interested in coming. These weapons are not only in violation of numerous anti-proliferation treaties the USA has signed, but they are a blasphemy to all life, as they would kill everything living thing on the planet. http://orepa.org/
I am get the trusses up on top of the wall and installing as much as I can, the horizontal bracing and windows, before sliding the completed portions of the roof further down to make room on the staging platform ( the upper bathroom loft floor), to work on ganging the next set of trusses together. It's coming along, no major hitches yet!


I bought this generator from the coolest cop EVER! I said he was a skateboard kid and the cops would always hassle him and pull a huge power trip all the time, and so he wanted to grow up to be a cop so that he could actually help people, and be cool, and not just walk around being a sycophant and putting the heavy on every body. After my experience with the police in Virginia, where I was arrested while peacefully protesting outside the Quantico Marine base I was so impressed to meet someone like him!

We have mad a little mock up of the top of the walls on the ground and have been aligning the trusses and pre-drilling them, and attaching the angle stock like book ends, so they will stand up, then lifting them on top of the walls for ganging.

Cutting the horizontal bracing.
It's so nice to have power @ the site.




I have been working for the past month on filling an order of burlap clothes for a shop in Arizona, Paris Montana.
Burlap is rather messy to work with so had transformed the garage into a sewing studio, sewing away and just looking at the roof trusses all in a nice pile. But now that the work is done and off to the wild west I got back to work yesterday, cutting the angle stock that will anchor the trusses to the top of the wall, and leveling the bottoms of the trusses where they will meet the top of the wall.
The next step is a lot of pre-drilling for through bolting the angle stock through the trusses, and also points where the wood is enclosed by the metal. We think it will be less stressful to through bolt these joints rather than bite into the wood with screws on both side. I used my friend John's drill press to pre-drill the 1/4" and 5/8th" holes in the angle stock.

How to build a home-made bathtub from scratch

This post was started when I started building the tub, more than a year ago, but I want to update it to show HOW to build a home made wooden bath tub from from scratch: start to finish!
 I started with a cedar tree that had fallen in the ditch at someone's yard in the country. Landus Bennett of Watson Springs cut it down and milled it into boars and dried it in the kiln for two months.

 Here is Landus showing me the wood, almost ready to come out.


There is my tree, with the white on the ends.

  Here are some pictures of the cedar once it was dried and cut into 2"x2" pieces.
I used a piece of card board to cover the floor of the bathroom in the trailer, and then drew the area that the tub would fit into, and a rough outline of the rim. I then did some math to figure the amount of water that it would take to fill a tub of various dimensions, @ first forgetting to figure in the displacement of volume when my body will be inside ( I freaked when I thought I would need 85 gallons of water!), and then once I had a good idea of the size and shape of the rim I cut it out of the cardboard and traced it in chalk on the floor. I then cut the wood at various angles to create the curve of the shape of the tub, and glued/nailed the piece together to create the first layer of the wall.
The solar batteries have come in handy as weights to press the rings of the tub together. It is hard to tell from this picture because it is shown here upside down, but each ring gets a bit smaller. Here is the bottom of the tub. I'll sand it and then glue it in place.
Okay, so after I got the rings and the bottom all glued together, and filled in some spaces with some wood epoxy it was ready to sand.
 


 
So, I, and several of my amazing friends sanded it until the edge was smooth-ish. 


 And then I put four coats of Bondo around the inside of the tub and drilled a hole in the bottom for the drain. Then the Bondo was sanded until it was smooth.
 
I used a marine grade spar varnish to finish the wood before applying the fiberglass.
 
 

And here is a picture of layer one of fiber glass done, the loose sheets are sandwiched between the wood and the piece of 1 inch tubing, which is nailed into the rim. This layer will be folded over and create a rounded edge to the tub.