Third xc fence (stone wall, poorly made, with a log rail atop) mostly done. Stones are all piled up, but log rail needs to be put in place. Today, I learned that rocks, which are long-lasting and super-cheap seeing as how I can just pick them up fail miserably at picking them up off the ground, are heavy as fuck. The impressively-large ones? Heavy as fuck. The “medium” ones? Heavy as fuck. The smallish lame-looking ones? Those I can maybe shift. :( I can also move pebbles. *sigh* Oh, and I got the bucketloader stuck but then unstuck, so less learning than there might have been on that front.
Playing xc builder has been very informative to date. I’m learning a lot.
First time out, I started the dozer and drug the two recycled concrete culvert pipes into position. On the hillside. (We have very little flat ground. Most of it is sloped in one or more directions.) That day, I learned that ROUND culvert pipes, even very heavy ones, need to be wedged against rolling when they are situated on hillsides or they will roll down the hill. Fortunately, nobody else saw this comedy of errors and it didn’t take me very long to push the culvert pipe back up the hill with the dozer blade and block it in place BEFORE I moved the dozer blade away.
Second time out, I did a really nice job of dragging out a huge (2′ diameter) log with a teensy bit of central dry rot on it out of the woods and putting into place in the field. When I tried to roll it into a more salubrious position, it shattered radially into a fucking mess. Cleaning up the mess is on my agenda. *sigh* That day, I learned that central dry rot is not to be trusted and that one’s logs should be reasonably sound if one does not want to have to clean them up before they’re even jumped.
The third time out, since I’d learned not to trust elderly long-ago sawn logs, I decided to saw my own logs. We have a bunch of dead pine trees on the property anyway, so this seemed like a good idea. I learned that the chainsaw runs better if it has fuel in it. So, like, if the chainsaw is stalling every time you go to make a felling cut (because the saw is turned sideways and the tiny amount of gas in the tank can’t get to the engine when it’s held like that) but it restarts every time you put it on the ground (because it’s upright now and the teaspoon of gas still in it can now get to the engine), maybe you should check the fuel level before it finally fails to restart after the fourth (yes, fourth) stall. I did get a bunch of logs cut to appropriate size and de-branched and Felled My First Tree (that the top had broken off of in a windstorm so that all I cut down was a trunk stick, but I’m still counting it) and got a whole jump put in place (still needs notches cut and then roped).
I’m not even to the earthmoving for the steps or (god forbid) the water hazard... I can’t imagine how much learning I’m going to do when we get there.
