Yesterday I went town to get to two bearings I’d ordered for the wind charger. While I was gone, Will and David unloaded, by hand, the three piles of free plywood Will had gotten on Monday. Most was 3/16-inch thick birch with about one pile of 1/4-inch birch plywood. It took a lot of unloading!

Will has already used a few sheets, trimmed to fit, for the west wall of our storm porch. We’ll lay log siding over it next year, but for now, it doesn’t look bad and it sure keeps the snow from blowing in around our front door as most of our wind comes from the west. This morning, he used four sheets to tack up on the front of the storage barn to keep blowing snow out of the workshop area. We’d had lumber tarps up there last winter but they photo-degraded and shredded so the plywood is sure a big improvement! We’re also going to use several sheets on the horse shed and cattle shed walls as our eat-everything burros chewed holes in them so they aren’t exactly weather-tight! Now the burros have stopped so we hope the new walls will stay in place. As the plywood is quite thin, we’ll just sandwich several thin sheets together to make the walls stronger. Hey, for free, you just make adjustments! That’s what homesteaders quickly learn.

This morning, Will is putting the bearings back in the wind charger and getting it ready to put back. The old bearings were sticky and worn so hopefully the wind will now turn the blades. But Will is setting it up on a stand at head-height, to check it out, just to be sure. It’s a long way back up on the storage barn’s metal roof and we both fell off that slick roof two years ago!

3 COMMENTS

  3. The new west wall looks so nice but that white stuff around it does not…brrrr. We seldom get snow here in southeast Virginia and I think looking at yours should count as good enough for this year!

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