Hi
I just happened across your web page on the internet and found it very interesting and informative.I do small wood crafts and just starting making bird houses from old barn wood.I was wondering if you have to wash or disinfect the barn boards in any way before you use them for the projects or do you just use a steel brush on them and then go ahead and put your project together.?
Thanks!

Mattie

Well, this brings back memories. I had a period of about ten years doing things with barn boards. It started when a lady offered me a whole barn if I would totally remove it and clean up the site. It was a treasure trove. Besides the huge pile of beautiful boards, beams and weathered shingles there was a truckload of goodies including a perfectly good parlor woodstove, old tools, even an antique crank telephone. I wonder if there are deals like that anymore?

Barn boards are dirty from being around so long and most of them didn’t shower regularly so it is wise to clean and disinfect them before using. Wear good leather work gloves. Barn boards have slivers galore.

My first treatment was to shake the dust and loose stuff off them and pull out nails while making sure to not damage the beauty of the piece. Then I piled them in a stack with sticking between the layers to let air circulate around each board.

Every few weeks I would rebuild the pile so the boards would dry and weather evenly. While doing this I learned to put my favorite boards face up on top of the pile to let the sun and rain give them a “finish” weathering. Sunlight kills some of the mystery microbes in and on old wood but not all. If I am not too concerned about the color of the barn board I want to disinfect, I spray them with a solution of 1/3 laundry bleach and 2/3 water. I do this at least three times and let them dry in the sun between treatments.

Cleaning your boards with a steel brush gets the loose stuff off. A stiff bristled cleaning brush works without damaging the wood grain too much. For bird houses, brushing and disinfecting should be enough. If you rehab your bird houses occasionally, it would be wise to disinfect them before handling. Birds carry little things you don’t want to inhale or get on your skin.

A way to clean smaller barn board projects is with compressed air. It gets dirt out of all the cracks really well and doesn’t hurt the color, grain or texture of the wood. It is a good way to remove dust from your finished products after they have been around awhile too. Be sure to wear protective eye glasses and gloves.

This may be more than you wanted to know for your bird houses but someday you may get offered a whole barn and you will be ready.

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Back to flying with the Luggage Glider.

A glider 8′ in diameter and about 50 feet long would hold about 800 pieces of luggage. It would be shaped like a bullet with small wings, a rudder and tail just like a regular plane. That would be for a big plane on a long flight, say LA to Tokyo. Other gliders would be sized to the plane and luggage needs of each flight.

The glider would be controlled by the copilot, flight engineer or a computer through the tow cable which could be reeled in and out to position the glider for best flight stability behind the plane. The glider could be controlled by wire, radio or both.

The flight surfaces of the glider would give added control over the plane, something like a tail on a kite only with more options and precision.

When landing, the glider’s flight surfaces would add drag to the plane to slow it down and use less runway. The glider might even have emergency measures built in such as extra drag panels or a parachute that would deploy during a hairy landing. The plane that went off the runway in Brazil recently might have been saved if it had had a glider such as this in tow.

Some recent passenger plane crashes have been caused by tail and rudder malfunctions. With extra flight surface controls on a glider in tow, such situations could be overcome by a trained pilot and people’s lives would be saved.

Keeping the luggage out of the plane makes room for “safe” cargo, more fuel or more passengers.

These changes in functions could be put into future plane designs. I can think of some pretty wild new designs, but that’s another story.

If this idea works, some changes would happen at the airport. The baggage carousels would be removed to make room for the gliders to be brought right into the building to be unloaded and loaded up for the next flight. It would save running around if the ticket counter was right in front of the glider used for the flight.

Imagine your bags controlled by you, not slung around, damaged, pilfered or lost by baggage personnel. Too good to be possible?

Unions and makers of all that airport security hardware won’t like this plan, but small plane manufacturers who would get the contracts to build gliders will. Pilots may not like “towing a trailer” behind their sleek jet planes but the airlines will like the added advertising space available on the gliders. And all of us would appreciate more convenience and less frustration at the airport.

Money saved by machinery and staff no longer needed could be used for other forms of security on passenger planes.

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