Bull Sigh

I knew there was a sale but I was pretty broke at the time. I should not complain, I've paid huge bucks for conference proceeding books and rare historical books. The thing is, I want to focus on axe making so I knew I'd eventually pop for this one, then my son beat me to it.

Clean up and organization always takes me 2 or 3 times as long as I think it will.

My son picked up a copy and I'm working through it. So far so good. Kinda pricey.

That stand is a beauty !

As a relative newbie here, I don't know the people of the community well. However, Frosty was active in most of the threads I participated in and he was very welcoming to me. Rest in peace, Frosty. You will be missed.

Do you still have copies of the hard cover?

If IFI had a thumbs-up button to click, you'd have many, JHCC.

There is a Youtube timber frame builder who uses the handle of Mr. Chickadee and he has a video of building a timber frame smithy. He builds in the Japanese timber frame style, so that's not what the OP here was looking for, but Mr. Chickadee is an interesting guy that makes lots of cool stuff, so you may enjoy checking it out.

Are you experiencing any tippiness if you are out on the end of the horn or on the heel?

LOL, JHCC. "This has definitely been a strange turn of thread." My fault, sorry...

"I had to look up "challenging matrix for a nutrients digestion method," read a few hits and am lost. Why would anyone want to make digest nutrients challenging. Don't get where matrix comes in." It relates to analysis of nutrients in natural waters, since high levels of nutrients are toxic to bugs and beasts. Many analytical methods convert similar contaminants to one single compound by a digestion procedure, then analyze for that compound and report a total. For example, nitrate and nitrite ion are related and can contaminate a river if excess levels of fertilizer are used. That's a common issue, see "Gulf of America (or Mexico) Hypoxia" in a search. Some methods convert nitrite to nitrate, then analyze for nitrate. Waterways with high levels of fine particulate shale can basically swamp the capacity of the analytical method's digestion procedure.

"So on the walls I installed plenty small floodlights so i have plenty of light from different sources and angles to eliminate as much as possible shadows." You nailed it, Gewoon. Having a mixture of diffuse light and direct light is what works best for me. As I age and my vision deteriorates, this becomes more important.

"So Bull my friend I gift you with this, one of my favorite rabbit holes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale" Wild. I've heard of Burgess Shale because it was used as a challenging matrix for a nutrients digestion method, but I had no idea of the history WRT fossils. It's a huge world out there.

I admitted once that I had a bad case of Fungi Fear. Botanists like to do that naming crap. I avoid it whenever possible. I start with Oliver Medsger: Edible Wild Plants. Available used under $10.

LOL on rabbit hole. Yes, much of the natural product world makes me wonder about humans. For another large rabbit hole, look at Sacred Datura and Native American rituals. Pyrrolizidines were a badger hole for me at the time. I did my work in Scrophulariaceae, mostly Indian Paintbrush. They are worth avoiding: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/20801500/PALecture2010.pdf

Frosty said: "Remember fellow travelers, if it tastes or smells Bitter it is an alkaloid poison." That is a good general rule to live by. Emphasis on "live". My grad dissertation was focused on natural product alkaloids. Working in that area, you run into all kinds of literature about alkaloid consumption gone wrong - to the point of poisonings and death. After I finished school, I went to work with a guy that had been an apprentice of Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin discovered and re-discovered many alkaloids from the synthetic side, informed by structures found in nature. For example, MDMA was one of his re-discoveries, and you can think of MDMA as a synthetic analog of amphetamine. Shulgin was fairly successful at finding and testing (on himself and/or his wife) psychoactive alkaloids. He lived to age 88, managing to thread the eye of the poison needle. I find it ironic that much of his work was done while employed at a major chemical company, where his management chain was clueless about what he was really doing. When they finally figured it out, they pushed him out. Relative to your comment, Frosty, Shulgin ingested his purified alkaloids for decades, but if you read his publications, you see he started with low doses, in the microgram range, then ramped up stepwise. I wouldn't even recommend people to replicate that process. People have died by drinking wildflower teas that had low quantities of pyrolizidine alkaloids, for example.

I like this stand! I recently made a wood anvil stand from oak I reclaimed from an abandoned piece of furniture, but down the road, my plan is to make a stand from steel.

The Birch incident sounds brutal. It's great you survived it.

"I think Anaerobic does not mean what you think it means." No I'm aware of the meaning of the word. Our property is at 8500' and it's not that difficult to get into the zone where I'm anaerobic. I could slow down to the point where I'd stay aerobic, but I guess I enjoy pushing my limited fitness in hopes of a training benefit. Princess Bride is a classic that is fun to re-watch. "You know they put engines on saws to make killing and butchering trees easier don't you?" I have no real excuses for using axes and hand saws for cutting trees except that I enjoy the work and the more peaceful experience. I've got great quality gas and electric chain saws and do use them when I'm in high productivity mode, but especially after retiring, I end up doing manual labor more often. Down the road, I'm going to apply to the USFS for a lumber cutting permit and for sure, the gas chain saws will be on that job. I've worn out quite a few high quality chain saws.

I just found this thread. Does anyone have a status update? I hope he is on the mend and am praying for his health.

"I LOVE my fencing pliers even though I haven't hung any fencing in a couple decades they still come in handy." I recently moved about half of my pliers from our house in Superior to the tool box in Westcliffe, including my fencing pliers. That brought back memories of the most heinous fence job I ever did. A friend had a serious spinal injury unloading fence poles and chain link fencing while I was helping him. As my friend recovered from surgery, another friend joined in and we put up the fence. It was "only" a quarter mile long, but it ran through a swamp and the land owner friend had bought galvanized poles 3" in diameter, top cross-bars, etc. Auguring out the post holes in the swamp was a beast. We did it in one very long day, then I spent the next week recovering. I can't look at those pliers without remembering the last quarter of that job, knee deep in cold water. I don't blame the pliers for my lack of toughness I had that day. Cold and wet really sucks the will out of my brain. Relative to this thread, my son found a Kelly axe head at a flea market. It was in OK shape, with some significant edge damage, but he got it cheap, like $3. We found a good, 35" hickory handle at Tractor Supply and we handled it up after he reworked the edge. We took it up to our mountain property and used it on our ongoing fire mitigation work. It performed well and the altitude got me into the anaerobic zone. We have hundreds of Pinon and Ponderosa with low dead branches and probably 10 down-and-dead trees, mostly Ponderosa. Fortunately, we're not in a real high risk area, but it's great to get out in the fresh air and do some work.

"Bull, staging is what I was referencing as camping on the side of your climb. Spending the night.. Sometimes it can be a cache of stuff put there to move on more.." I have bivouac'ed on a few big routes and on big walls. Bivies can be suffering multipliers but also get you very connected with the place you are visiting. There is a book by Reinhold Messner called The Crystal Horizon that describes what I'm trying to say, in an amazing way. It's a narrative of his solo climb of the N Ridge of Everest, but even more, it is about a journey of the soul. A guy I've climbed with did a south-to-north traverse of the Sangre de Cristo range in southern Colorado. I'd guess that a straight line distance from start to finish was about 70 miles. He placed caches that were mostly food but also a bit of stove fuel, etc., at 3 places along the route, then stayed on the ridge line for the traverse. It was epic. -------------- What is left to do on the current project?

"Did you ever do any staged climbing?" By that, do you mean training with repeats of hard routes? I lived in MI for over 20 years, which is not a climber's mecca. We had to run laps on the few local routes, climbing up and down to work the endurance side. And we had to travel often. I went to grad school in Colorado and took a series of elective classes that were run by Holubar. You could take 4 in a year. I took their rock climbing class, run by Michael Covington. It was mediocre at best. I also took backcountry skiing, kayaking and ice climbing. Jeff Lowe taught the ice climbing and it was awesome. Most of the class was top-roping but towards the end we got to do some leads on easier routes. Year later, I took another class taught by Jeff in New Hampshire, run by EMS. Even more awesome. He was an American legend that I ran into in the back country a few times. May he RIP. Technical ice climbing has some similarities to climbing poor quality rock, except with ice, you have pointy things strapped to you, ready to poke holes in you and catch on things when you fall, breaking legs, etc. So it is prudent to be patient as you work up the grades and learn to assess the quality of the ice on-the-fly. The best long ice routes I've done were in the Tetons, like the NE Snowfields route on Mt. Owen. For 4 decades, I was a "climb to live, live to climb" person. I had good career progression, raised a family and did stuff that was "normal life" for many people, but I still managed to train for climbing 40 to 80 hours a week. Once I got past 50 years old, I had to dial that back and train smarter. "My largest problem now is getting started." I can relate. I'm dealing with it now to some degree by doing more pre-planning and setting fewer priorities. Almost everything I do takes longer than planned, costs more than the budget plan and has more hard knocks. Getting old is a double-edged sword. You have more experience to fall back on but there is less gas in the tank and strength somehow vanished. "I have hundreds of projects currently and have to confess it's a little to much." Hang tough. Finishing the building and getting classes rolling will give you a huge emotional reset. But my money says you will keep yourself over-busy. That's what doers do. "Probably one reason I'm such a strong believer in cause and effect. I wonder what'll happen if I do This? is a way of life." I believe it is the only way to live. One has to be able to look in the metaphorical mirror and have a balanced self-critical view. For me, cause and effect produces evidence that has to be pulled into the logical process. If I don't, I end up with too many similar failures, and life is too short to let that reality get in the way. Most of my career was research in materials science and it was too easy to go off on fun tangents, where I'd get results but they were a sort of a drift in priority. I had a mentor that helped my learn to stay focused on the main topic by writing status updates regularly. That keeps the primary target right in front of your face.

"My mantra "you can do it". " I'm going to re-watch Deuce Bigalow tonight. "As ive gotten older and I feel this is one of those getting older things is this " do I want to do this"..." I hear that so clearly. I'm so OCD, if I start something, I need to finish it. I get so much inner peace by setting a goal that matters, then getting it done. We should talk sometime about the range of classes you will teach. I think there is a road trip in my future.

"I was 17." My grandfather bought me my first tool, a folding Barlow knife when I was 5 so we could sit on his front porch whittling away the hours. It was serviceable, but not really good. Before long I was checking out knives in stores and bought a smallish hunting knife. It fit my hand and I could safely work it hard. When my two boys were getting into tools, I pushed them to feel of the handles. You can actually get quality hammers and knives for small hands. I'm still feeling of tool handles, trying to find the best. I'll look for a Heller. "I use a modified Hofi slab handle." Thanks for the info and detail. More looking around required. I've used a variety of materials to cast the grip shape of my hand. One of these days I'll carve an exact fit handle.