[AT] oil dry

[Indiana Robinson]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:03 AM, Stephen Offiler <soffiler at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wood ash!  Wow, interesting idea, Charlie.  I do use it for de-icing the
> walkways, but since my woodstove grate is kind of coarse, I get plenty of
> small chunks of wood coals mixed in the ashes, and you know how tenacious
> carbon black is...  so, I only use it on walkways and curtail it near the
> house.
>
> I've been using kitty litter (we have three cats) mixed with sawdust, and I
> tend heavier on the sawdust because I have a lot of it and I'm sort of
> frugal ;-)  Now I've gotta try to mix in some wood ash as well.  Definitely
> need to figure out some kind of sifter to remove those coals.
>
> SO
>
>

Just how "frugal" are you? That isn't "used" cat litter is it? It has
"chunks" too...  :-)  :-)  :-)

The blacksmithing part of my shop was a dirt floor but quite few years ago
I put down several inches of white ag lime. It's about like a coarse sand
with some dust in it. It makes a good floor for that area but can be a
little prone to track a bit with wet shoes. It's still better than the dirt
floor and the tracked over lime is easier to sweep off of the other floors
than the tracked dirt. Well, off of what floor you can find to sweep. That
ag lime floor is a lot softer to stand and work on than the concrete floor.
Full ramble mode on now.  :-)
The part of the shop that used to be wood shop is a wood floor on treated
sleepers, a strip along the front of the shop about 12' x 30'. That amount
of space was not bad because I could always borrow working space from the
concrete floor areas. My feet, legs and back really loved working on that
wood floor.
I moved the woodshop several years ago to another building but then I moved
it to the house where I have full time heat and AC going all of the time
anyway and I can walk in and do something anytime all winter when I can't
be outside. I walled off a 24' x 40' room in the basement of the part I
call the "East Wing" which is an addition built on around 1970. The top
half of that dividing wall is just high clarity plastic so it all seems
more open but sawdust is controlled.
I (well... son Scott) dug a big hole outside at the back of the house about
12' x 16' and below the basement floor level and cut a hole through the
wall for a 5' wide door opening. Existing access simply would not allow
moving stuff in. It is all going very slow but I'm pretty happy with it.
Puttering along on it has helped keep me from going nuts indoors this
winter.
This summer we want to landscape the hole into a small patio like area and
make it accessible  by drive so I can back a pickup up near the door for
loading and unloading. It can be very helpful having a son who has free
access to all kinds of excavating equipment.  :-)
The only problem with the wood shop now is that we heat with a wood furnace
and it is still sitting in the middle of the woodshop. The colder it gets
outside the hotter the woodshop gets and some days it is just too warm to
do much. We are going to relocate the furnace out of the shop and closer to
the stairway to the upstairs but it just didn't happen last summer (or much
of anything else).
That wood furnace is about the only way we can afford to heat this big
house even though I had to stop cutting my own wood. Even buying all of the
wood it only cost us about 25% of the gas heat. I hope to get back to
sawing this summer/fall.


-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com