Solar Power Day 24

Only a few photos to show this time, but the good news is that the fence is finished. But before I dive into that, I’m also pleased to report that my cleaning efforts were successful last night with my planer. It took me about 40 minutes of scrubbing with mineral spirits and acetone to loosen everything up underneath the cutter heads, but it’s finally clean.

If you look at the image file name … yeah I really did stay up until 01:37 cleaning this thing. I’m a night owl, don’t judge me!! :P

Today saw the return of only the project lead (he’s worked on this project almost every day that a crew has been here) and one other person, but considering the workload and that the materials are more or less already prepped, more than this wouldn’t have noticeably sped things up. Case in point: after just 30 minutes of work, the second fence section was very nearly complete.

Note that on the table in front there are a few Douglas Fir boards that have been prepped for installation, however we didn’t end up using them for the post in the back that needs its left face covered because they were better candidates for another post. I did have a few more boards planed to thickness, but not yet beveled, so back inside for a few minutes to remedy that with the table saw.

I’m still mesmerized by how beautiful these boards are!

Even with the color differences between the new and old Fir boards, this is going to look amazeballs once I get some stain on in the spring

Once we got both inside faces of the south posts covered in Douglas Fir we could proceed with the other two fence sections. All told this was around another 90 min of work. Not too shabby.

While the fence itself is complete, at this point roughly half of the pergola post faces are covered in Fir, so it’s back to planing and beveling.

Instead of installing boards as they were done, we opted to batch out as many boards as we could in the time we had left (which was about 90 min after the picture above) and then install them next week when the crew returns after New Year’s Day. This also gives me a few days to glue up some boards since we didn’t quite have enough full-width boards for all of the post faces. I have some ideas on how I’m going to accomplish this, but for now I’m signing off to enjoy the long weekend. Happy New Year and I’ll see you in 2023!