We've been digging, digging, digging... Scraping, picking, chipping, chopping, hacking, and scooping our way down and back up again in order to be able to make the floor of the boiler house. The forms are all set and the concrete comes tomorrow...
There are Arxx brand insulated concrete forms (ICF) around the perimeter, one side cut down to allow the floor slab to be connected to the footing strip. #4 rebar is placed in the convenient clips built in to the forms, then wired together and finally staked to the ground and banked up with gravel to keep it all in place. Foam sheets are placed within the cut down area to insulate and isolate the slab from the ground. 6x6 welded wire mesh is placed over the foam and linked together to reinforce the slab (it will be pulled up into the center of the slab as the concrete is poured, hopefully it will stay where it is put...) Anchor bolts will be placed around the perimeter, peeking out the top of the slab, ready to hold down the walls that will start to go together about a week from tomorrow... More news on the boiler house later - but here are some pictures...
The site:
The stack of foam form blocks:
Forms ready for concrete:
Detail of forms:
Remember those chickens we raised on hand-fed bugs and worms and rainwater and grass and dustbaths and frisbee matches?
Freezer.
And man are they tasty :) Whupped up a meal the other night - involved honey, mint, lemon, and some other magic something. I had half this bird to myself... mmm-MM!
The pellet mill finally made it to the driveway. Actually I had to go pick it up with the trailer since the trucking company conveniently forgot that they were going to drop it off... Probably a good thing... The mill was defunct when I opened the crate. It had not been secured to the crate so it had flopped around a bit. The bolts that had previously held it assembled (disassembled for shipping) were in the bottom of the crate rolling about and trying to hide from me when I tried to hunt them down. The washers and nuts were loose, too, only they were inside the switch box that holds the controls, metering, and breakers for the motor. They had caused their own mayhem in the switch box and there were wires disconnected and small metal things wedged between the electrical bits. I can only imagine what I would have if I had followed the 3 page manual (the light version with no parts list or electrical diagrams) and plugged it in and hit the switch... (Probably nothing, actually...) There were paint flakes everywhere that had once held residence at the bottom of several dents in the back of the switch box and there was one unlabeled bag of the rest of the bits and one tool I would need to put the mill back together.
Sigh
Reassembled, I plugged it in and pressed the start switch. The breaker popped. Reset the breaker, checked everything, pressed the starter switch again. GRRRRRRRpop. The ammeter pegged out at 50 amps before tripping the breaker again. hmm... (emails and phone calls ensue - requested wiring diagram (I may post a picture of it later) , talks about warranty issues, who pays for testing, new motor, parts - last suggestion is that the centrifugal switch is not closing so that the start capacitor can actually do it's job...) I bent the arms of the centrifugal switch just slightly, hit the start switch and off it went...
So far I've made a mix of flour, oil, and sand to polish the bores of the plate die so the material can go through smoothly, and I've made a mix of just flour and oil (cooking oil, by the way) to oil the plate for 'storage' so that I don't have to use a punch or drill to clean out the hardened wood bits. So far the formula for perfect wood pellets (as shown by the company on the web site) eludes me, but I still have a fair amount to go through as practice...
At least I can use it as a dough mixer - maybe at Christmas I can use it to make dough pellets... ;) More pellet news as I make it...
~Use it up - wear it out - make it do - or do without~
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