cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is Good to Know a Blacksmith I'm about to run into a brick wall with the construction. I am out of money and basically out of materials. I have rafter tails on the other side to cut, some extra nailing to do to ensure against the roof lifting off in near-hurricane strength winds and then I have a couple of windows to install. But then that's it. Work will come to a halt for lack of materials and I really don't know when things will get moving again. To get dried-in without using the tarps anymore, I need to spend another 212 dollars. Really another 261 on top of that would be preferred, in order to also buy subfloor for the attic (much easier to get the sheets of plywood up there before the roof is enclosed) and shingles for the roof rather than just the tar paper minimum. The front steps will be about 130, but that can wait a bit. Being as how I'm basically broke at this point, I'm back to looking around at what construction materials I can manufacture myself rather than purchase. My brilliant idea yesterday was cedar shakes for the roof. Cedar shakes are expensive to buy but relatively simple to make. I've got a whole bunch of cedar on my property. Now the catch is that you really want to let cedar dry for at least a year before turning it into shingles for a roof. So I went for a walk in my woods after work yesterday to see what I have to work with. I found at least 3 standing dead cedar trees that are over 8 inches in diameter. Dead cedar is, naturally, already dried out. So there's no waiting. Just cut them down, slice them into manageable pieces and you're ready to go. I've got a chain saw that my father loaned me a while ago. Chain saws scare the shit out of me, but there's no helping it in this case. I've got to use it. I can use the chain saw to turn the trees into big hunks of wood but then there's the matter of splitting those hunks into shakes. There is a hand tool called a froe that was once commonly used for this purpose. Back in the old days in America, a roof was made from either slate or shakes. So a froe was a very common tool. Any village blacksmith knew how to make them. Of course, cedar shakes are generally mass produced with machinery these days so it's not like you can just go out to the hardware store and buy a froe. Which is where it comes very much in handy to have a friend who happens to be not only a blacksmith, but a blacksmith with a degree in 'Applied History,' who has worked at all sorts of historical reenactment places and knows how to make all sorts of old fashioned tools that nobody else has even heard of anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if Paul already has a froe that he's made which I could borrow. If not, then I'm sure we can work out another trade of some sort for him to make one for me. Probably 20 pounds of dry-aged, butchered venison in the fall. Depending on how much work it is to make the shakes for the roof and depending on how far my supply of cedar goes, I could also make enough to use for siding as well. Would it be stupid to try to cut my own boards for the attic subfloor? Probably. But I'll entertain the idea. A big band saw would help. I know it's at least possible to cut boards from a log using only a chainsaw. Maybe I can rough-cut them with the chainsaw and then run them through my table saw to square them up a little better. Really uniform thickness is the hard part here. Look at all this shit I'm dealing with here. Could there be any better illustration of the degree to which the American economy has completely gone to shit? Here I am, a white collar professional who only a few years ago was solidly middle class, planning European vacations and driving a BMW. And today, despite the fact that I'm still working full-time at the same job, I have in large part been forced to adopt what amount to 19th century economic strategies for survival. Killing and butchering my own food. Building my own house for lack of available credit to refinance my current house and free up cash for a construction loan, and now I'm actually bartering meat to a blacksmith in exchange for a hand tool with which to make my own roof shingles for lack of money to just buy shingles from a hardware store. Un-fucking-believable. I wonder how many other people are doing this? My in-laws are growing more of their own food now. Not for fun - they're doing it to eat. Despite the fact that they are both well-educated professionals. But both they and I all started out with an edge. We all had some skills and knowledge that can be easily applied to making the transition into a 19th century personal economy. Probably many of the people who are losing their homes through foreclosure and going bankrupt could have managed to avoid all that if they'd been willing to make some of the sacrifices and do the kind of work that I've done. Not everyone, of course. But certainly a lot of people. Some of what I do seems sort of romantic and fun on a certain level. But *having* to do it sucks. And think about how this strategy for survival affects a local economy. It's basically a break-down of the division of labor. Some years ago, I would have been inclined to pay someone else to mow my lawn and meadow now and then. But I can't afford to do that now. So that's work for a lawn maintenance guy that is gone. My mower deck is broken. A few years ago I would have taken it to a repair shop. But I can't afford to even transport it there at this point, so I have to do my own repairs. All of this continues to apply in my production and processing of food, construction of my own house, etc. All sorts of jobs that I would once have given to other people that I am now doing myself. The fucked up thing is that all of those professionals who do those things are better at them than I am. And they work faster. And I in turn have many skills that they do not have. In a well-ordered capitalist society, we should each be doing only the things that we specialize in, while effectively exchanging our own skills for those of others through the medium of money. But that whole system is falling apart. The mower repair guy is certainly in just as bad a spot as I am. As are the people who work in a factory somewhere making shingles. We all desperately need to be exchanging our specializations with one another but we lack the necessary means of exchange (money) with which to do it. What a horribly stupid situation. 11:23 - 2008-05-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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