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backwards blade, suppressing dust
Saturday, September 19 2009
Gretchen was off in Vermont all day. She awoke unexpectedly late and was in a hurry as she was leaving, so it was my job to walk the dogs. For whatever reason, Sally has been reluctant to go on walks in the forest lately. It seems she likes to stay at the house hoping someone will take her somewhere in a car, which is her far-and-away favorite thing to do. She wouldn't come with me this morning when I set off into the woods. Eleanor came, as did my Stihl chainsaw. I thought I'd maybe clear the trail of some large fallen trees and maybe buck up some firewood for the heating season. But when I went to cut a tree, my brand new blade seemed to cut reluctantly and then began smoking. It turned out I'd put the chain blade on backwards, something I hadn't even thought was possible (and had never done before, though I'd installed chain blades twice in the past). It just goes to show how ignorant one can be of a technology even after a couple years of use.
It was a beautiful sunny day, and for some reason I decided to make Sally's car-riding dreams come true. So I went into town to get a few supplies, the most important of which was a dust-blocking respirator. I wanted equipment that would allow me to operate a masonry saw in the bottom of my greenhouse well without having to come up for air. While I was out, I also picked up some more topsoil from the Esopus floodplain near the Hurley Mountain Inn. There was guy on a bicycle coming down Hurley Avenue with a huge St. Bernard mix running beside him, and this gave Sally and Eleanor a chance to be social (though the big guy had to be physically restrained from climbing into my Subaru).
Back at the greenhouse, I strapped on the respirator and ear protection and began sawing away at the floor. Soon I was surrounded by opaque nimbus clouds of bluestone dust, though the amount of excavatory progress these cuts permitted proved trivial. This was the sort of realization I needed mentally in order to be able to wind down this needlessly-obsessive part of the greenhouse project. The well is already about 100 gallons in capacity, which should be sufficient if lined with plastic and deployed as a cistern recharged by groundwater.
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