Above is proof that I rarely get things perfect the first time, but if I practice and don’t give up, I can usually achieve something I’m proud of. Starting from the right, there is my first attempt at a practice notch. Beside that (in the middle), is the third attempt, after the second went terribly wrong, terribly quick. The last one on the end is my fourth notch (technically). I was very pleased with it.

My first notch was just ridiculous. I made my notch far too large, and didn’t have good control with the chainsaw. I decided it was good enough for a first attempt, and moved on to practice another.

This one went crazy! I over-cut my line accidentally, because I’m still getting use to the chainsaw, and how to use it to just braze the edge of something. I tried using the back of the bar to do most of my cutting, because I thought I would be able to control it easier. I quickly discovered that the opposite was true. The back of the bar felt more comfortable to me, but because I was trying to focus on where the back of the blade was, I lost track of what exactly the tip of the bar was doing, and then before I knew it I had buggered the entire notch up. I asked James if there was any way of correcting what I had done, but since it was a practice piece, he said to just forget it, go onto the next one, and try not to repeat the mistake.

This was my final notch. I was really proud of it. I think I did it pretty quick, and I managed to keep most of my pencil line visible, as well as having no splintering from over-cutting my score line. After I made this one, I’m much more confident with using the saw in the manor necessary to create a nicely finished notch. It’s tiring on the arms (mostly because we’re using smaller saws with no wrap around handle), but it could also be that I don’t hold the saw tight enough to my body sometimes, and then I force my arms to carry all the weight. I’m just still a little nervous around the chainsaws I guess.

Below are some photos of what I spent the rest of my day doing. Me and another guy paired up, and peeled and flat surfaced this log. It’s going to be one of the sill plates (first course), and it weighs a fucking ton. James demonstrated a few different methods of flat surfacing, and we decided to go with free-handing it. Some of the jigs take too long to set up, so we figured if we were both planing afterwards, we’d save time in the end, even if we had to plane as much as 3/4″ off.

Today we begin stacking logs to create our four generic corners, then we will cut the whole thing into quarters.