When I got to school this morning I had to quickly do a drawing on Sketchup, for this guy James has laying out the foundation for the hammer bent frame. It was really frustrating at first, because the guy was having a real hard time understanding my drawing for some reason. Eventually we got on the same page and I managed to make his day easier by giving him a drawing to refer to, instead of just what James has in his head.

When I went to print the drawing for him I talked to Naomi for a moment, and she showed me the invitations she’d been working on all morning. They were for a party we’re all invited to on Friday after school. I want to go, but I might be going to Victoria that day to hang out with Dave. Either way I will have a good time.

After getting the drawing printed and given to the dude who needed it (Ian), I headed down to the shop to work on mine and Dave’s corner post. Yesterday, 3 groups were forced to find things to do while they waitied for us to catch up. This morning, while I was messing around with drawings that have fuck all to do with log buildings, Dave went ahead and scribed our post without me. He was supposed to find the widest gap and subtract 1″ from that, before making his scribe. He didn’t subtract anything, and it ended up making a really nice “rough  notch”. Since we hadn’t trimmed our post to length, we were able to do another small scribe and have a really nice finish notch (which I’m proud to say I scribed and cut).

This is Dave’s rough notch. It was almost good enough to be our final scribe, but there is that small gap at the top of the notch, so we decided to take it down another quarter inch, and see if that closed up the gap.

This is how my scribe and cutting turned out. There is a couple little gaps, but that’s okay, because with the logs being in compression constantly, they will have no choice but the settle and close the gaps.

This is the opposite side of the photo above. It turned out really nice I think.

This is the post mounted onto the first course of logs (Dave and I also made the log our post sits on), and looking fucking great! At this point we became so much further ahead than everyone else. We managed to be the first group done our post (and done it well I in my opinion!), so we moved on to cutting it to length, then adding a tenon at the top.

At this point I has to go work on another drawing for James, so I left Dave to do the layout, and he went ahead and cut the tenon to rough dimensions. I came back just in time to do all the chisel work (that’s really my favourite part of all this), which took me all of 15 minutes.

Here is the end product. The shoulder is a little messed up because Dave’s cuts just barely didn’t line up, but we will touch it up a bit today, and you’ll never even see it.

And here’s the end I cut. It was pretty easy to do, but had I been left without direction, I’d have never gotten it this nice, as easily as I did. In case you are wondering, the hole is for a wooden dowel that anchors the post to the corner. It’s sort of like a tenon, but it makes creating the corner post so much easier.

After school I went to see Jan. Jan is the guy building James’ infill wall jig. I had showed him sketchup last week, and he’s been wanting me to do a bunch of drawings for him since. I agreed Monday night, to go see him after school yesterday (mostly because I wanted to see his shop), and I ended up hanging out there for over 3 hours. We had a good time, got a ton of things figured out for the jig (which I now have to build in Sketchup), then we smoked some huge joints, and Jan went off on Bible talk. He did this the other night, and it caught me way off guard. I asked James about it, since they’re old friends, and he told me Jan gets worse the more he drinks, and lately it’s become really bad. I didn’t mind. He’s churchy, but not preachy. I can tolerate that – I think.