Making it thrugh another year, '24-'25

[Old Greenhorn]

Well, between yesterday and today I got a good days work in.  Yesterday I went back to the mill and trimmed the legs off a bench and a chair. I'm still not real happy with how that leg trimming works on the mill, but it does work, but I caught another leg stub in the chute. Might be a mill issue, I dunno. But I got it done. Brought that stuff home and did some sanding on the bench legs and top and laid a coat of poly on it. Then I set up to do the blind spline waterfall joint on the chair. I am coming around to the @tule peak timber philosophy on this oddball stuff, which I characterize as "figure out how things work, then break the rules to make it work for you". SO I mixed my epoxy, did the joint and clamped it, then waited only about 5 hours before I did another pour on top of the first for a fill pour on the inside corner, creating a fillet. Normally I would let the first pour cure fully before I did the fill pour for appearance. But I want to get this thing done in another week or so and 12 hours for each pour kills a lot of days and at that point (last night) I didn't know how many additional pours I would need to fill that joint all the way around. I masked everything up to hold epoxy where I needed it. I also did some small fills on other pieces coming up the get them ready. I went back out at 11pm and removed all the masking before hard cure (makes for easier sanding and cleanup, doing it while it's still a bit soft).
 This morning I went out and did the shape sanding on the chair joint and low and behold, I had no crack holes to fill in the joint! Best blind spline joint glue up I have ever puled off. (accidents happen.) All sealed all around with zero voids. But I did have other holes to fill in this wood not related to the joint. Originally, this was going to quick/cheap bench. Now it is a much nicer chair, so more work is needed. Actually it is a really cute chair and I am getting attached to it. So I did have some bug holes to fill in and some knot holes. I may even re-sand it all down again to make it a bit smoother but keep the rustic effect. So I have this highly sophisticated setup which I have carefully designed and constructed to hold these odd shaped  projects in the proper attitude for these little pours.


 Please note the carefully milled cutoff board prop on the right. That ain't easy to do.  (No, I did NOT mill that board.)
 So tomorrow I will do some final sanding and then I think I am ready to apply poly.

 On the becnh job. I am pretty pleased how this is appearing. It's an Ash seat with Maple legs and has 'curb appeal'.


 The bottom, all live edge, is heavily engrossed with deep EAB galleries. It looks pretty neat. I got two coats on the top today, but things aren't drying as I would like. I believe the humidity is just too high in the shop, so at noon today I made a smudge fire in the stove to dry things out a bit. We'll see if it helps.
 Tomorrow I have to bring my wife in for her ortho appointment. She has been miserable for well over a month with her knees and I am hopeful that tomorrow's appointment will finally get us to the next step. I hate seeing her in pain all the time. She had an appointment last month and they blew her off for another month on short notice. Sometimes I wonder what these people are thinking.
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 On another front, I have not mentioned in a while, but my attic kiln temps have been on my mind these last 6 weeks and I have kept a daily eye on it. Last week, it hit 130° up there. Today was cool and mostly overcast and it hit 103°. This tells me I need to follow up on this and make it work for me. I put a 2" RO slab up there last fall that had air dried for two years. The bark was still tight. Last time I checked it, the bark was ready to fall off. I'm convinced this thing is working and I need to get lumber up there for next winters builds, like now. 
 So much to do and so little time.
 Tomorrow is another day, but I will only get in a few hours after the doc visit, then I have to get ready for a wedding on Saturday down on Long Island (oh joy).

[aigheadish]

Neat info about the early epoxy pouring Tom. Thanks for sharing. 

The bench looks great and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that uses jenky, crazy ways to hold things in place. 

[Old Greenhorn]

Austin, Not sure what you mean by "early epoxy pouring". If you will expatiate on that I can elucidate you in so far as I can later today.

[aigheadish]

Haha! Not waiting the requisite 12 hours to repour and adding a layer at 5 hours. 

[Old Greenhorn]

Well Austin, it's pretty simple and there's no magic there. I have never had any issues with epoxy overheating or cracking as it cures, some folks have and I guess they either need to pick another brand/formula, or adjust their techniques. But I have always understood that the first pour should cure up, get a little sanding, then other pours added as needed. This chews up a lot of time. Also, you can pour a crack fill and watch it for half an hour and sometimes add more if it goes down further in the crack, but when you finally think it's stabile and filled, then walk away, come back the next morning, you see that it ran down and filled in below and you have to do it again. I hate that, it adds another cycle of several (12?) hours.
 With joint gluing using epoxy (about the same strength rating as TB II) the same thing can happen, especially if your have a hard time masking the underside of the joint. So what I do now is I pour the best I can, follow up with touch ups for the first hour or so, then wait and come back a few hours later. What's in the joint at this point is not fully cured at all, but it is not longer flowing or moving so this seals the areas it is in and now doing another pour, it will hold much better. On the joint in question, I was able to complete the full joint and add that amount of epoxy that would create to smooth radiused flow on the inside corner of the joint. My goal is to have things appear smooth and also remove any areas where water or moisture could sit and work it's way in.
 In the past I would have done the joint pour, wait for a cure up, then do the fill pour, and wait again, then pull all the masking and look at the far side of the joint and do more small pours of any gaps I found, sometime that means holding it at a different angle for each little fill, so 12 hours for each angle. You can easily see how this could take several days to do the joint.
 Also I have discovered that when I do a hole fill on a vertical surface and I form up a little cup with masking take to hold the epoxy in the hole, it still won't fill the entire hole, So at around 4-5 hours I pull the tape and can mush the semi-hard epoxy into the hole and it fills it and stays there until cured. That saves me yet another pour angle. Everything gets sanded anyway, so my finger prints or mush marks in the epoxy don't matter at all.
 I'm not getting better, just getting a little faster.
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SO at the end of last week it was just routine work, nothing to write about. The wife's doc visit for her knees which are getting worse was of limited value. All that time for 90 seconds with a Doc that just said she needs PT. She should have been in a month ago and they blew her off for a month 'because they got busy' so she spent another month in pain for a 90 second visit. At this rate it is going to take forever to get her some real help. It's frustrating and tough for me to sit by and watch.

 Also at the end of last week, my Neighbor (affectionately know around the neighborhood as 'The Idiot') had a small excavator dropped off and began cutting some trees on the far side of his property along the line. This is always stressful to watch and even more stressful to listen to. Imagine 30 minutes of nonstop WOT noise just to cut a face notch, then a similar amount of time for the back cut (at a 45° angle). To my knowledge he has never sharpened his chain and doe not know how. You can't see him cut, as he stands in a cloud of white smoke. His tow trees were followed by many many hours of excavator works. Sine he could not really buck the logs in a reasonable timeframe, he took to lifting them as high as he could and dropping them so they would break, or putting them between supports and trying to whack them into pieces. The he digs a hole and buries them. It has never, in more than 5 years, occurred to him to just offer the logs to a neighbor for firewood to get rid of them. Instead he buries them and we all know how his yard will look in a few years when they rot out. Whatever. 
 Then he started making mounds for his 'motocross track'. That took all day Friday, hours and hours listening to the pins on that machine get slammed in every direction, it grates on my nerves. In addition, this machine needs grease on the track rollers, so it squeals every time he moves it. Add all that up, throw in the backup beeper running constantly, and you can guess why my nerves get frayed.  Being away on Saturday until Sunday noon was helpful, but he started up again Sunday afternoon and had that machine slamming, beeping, and squealing until around 9:30 PM last night. At some point, doesn't it become legal to shoot him? Just askin'.
 Lest you think that I am complaining about the noise, it's not that. I actually find the sounds of a good operator running a well maintained machine relaxing to hear the (normal) clack clack clack of the tracks moving around and rarely hearing the pins knocking at all. But this is not that, by a long shot. I spent a lifetime listening to all kinds of equipment run, and whether it's a high end CNC milling machine, a dozer, a loader, a grinder, or an excavator, you can hear the sounds of a poor operator abusing a machine a long way off and i just grates on me. It's after 9pm on Monday night and he is still at it, whacking on something now. Yeah, I am sure there has to be a caveat in the law that allows recourse in these situations.
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We had a wedding to attend on Saturday that had been stressing me out because it meant driving to Long Island and spending the night. It's our Nephew, so really we wanted to share their day. However, the folks on Long Island are a different breed, with nice clothes and mostly office type jobs. We are, um, not like that. SO Pat has been watching her diet very carefully for 4 months so that should could fit into the pants suit she wanted to wear. (She looked great IMHO, BTW.)  I was pretty self conscious about my hands. These last few weeks, for reasons I don't understand, they seem to be shedding skin like mad. Maybe I just never cared or noticed before, but now it mattered to me. I didn't want to look like some bum, or scratch anyone when I shook their hand. Exhibit A:



I hope that shows up in the photo. Usually this only happens when I do concrete work. No idea why it's happening now. Thursday night I was desperate and started putting "Gardener's Hand repair' cream on it and it got a lot better. By Friday night it was almost invisible. I got through the wedding with no embarrassment. The Bride was/is Cambodian and her and her family all came down from Toronto. All well educated, successful, and business owner type hard working folks. A very fine group, I made a few new friends.
 The wedding was over by 5 and we headed to our hotel. If I had my thinking cap on, we would have just drove the 3 hours+ and been home at a decent hour, but it had been a long day and we were tired. So we spent the night in a motel listening to a loud and non-stop party in the parking lot until 2 am complete with loud cackling women and a booming car stereo with very functional woofer speakers. Not  a great night.
 We headed out at 8am Sunday morning and were home by noon. I headed out to catch the 'touch a truck' event over at the fire department ( I had a booth there last year and wanted to see ow it was going this year.) They sure didn't have any trouble filling a 4 acre field with all kinds of big equipment, great for the kids, not so great for any vendors. Advertising was weak. On Friday, I provided an escort to Bill and his Skidder/Bucket truck, kind of funny going down the (55mph) state road with folks trying to pass him on both sides. I got to play a game of blocker which I haven't done since my FD days. Some folks don't know what to do around a big machine doing 15mph. Somewhere in New Jersey is a guy who owns a black Escalade that is still mad at me because I cut him off from getting around on the right side (shoulder) as Bill swung to the left to make a wide right turn into the small side street without taking out some bushes. If that guy got around me, he would have wound up jammed between a rear tire and an outrigger. There was no way Bill could have even seen him. BOY That guy was pretty mad, at least judging by his horn, waving arms, hand (well, finger) signals, and swinging wide into the oncoming lanes to get around us. I just smiled broadly at him as he flew by. I always smile at morons. I found the whole journey not only amusing, but extremely entertaining. Bill had no idea the fun I was having behind him, he couldn't see any of it.
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ANNNNYWay. Today was back to work. More routine coats of poly on the bench and chair. The bench may be finished in the morning but the chair probably needs a little more work, because I am really liking this cute little thing and want it to look nice. I think it's cute, and it's comfortable too.
 Then I decided to start something new, or rather re-start on something old and make it new. A few of you may recall this piece, it made it's debut here 4 years and a couple of months ago.


 It looked pretty good when I made it 4 years ago. It was my first major piece that required some kind of skill, thought, and planning. As I said it looked pretty good when I made it and I showed it to a few folks who visited the shop, but that was it. I had little thought of doing shows then (mid-covid), so after 6 or ten months of stepping around it, I took it apart, wrapped it in moving blankets, and tucked it in a corner and it's been there ever since. Now as I built it I began to realize all the mistakes I made as I went along and fought with them and I made just about every mistake I could possibly make. First, the top slab is a split pith cut off the log, so it cupped pretty good. I was so anxious to 'make something big' that I didn't let the wood dry nearly enough and the top cupped. There was also a lot of knot drying shrinkage here and there, plus a twist/ The side plate were (are) also heavily cupped BIGTIME.
 Now after 3 years, there has been settling in and shrinkage and all kinds of joyful movement. I was shocked to see it still went together. The pages no longer will hold the side tightly because the sides are a lot thinner now, there are bumps and rolls where none were before, epoxy crack fills have squeezed up above the surfaces, or sucked in, and there are a few new drying cracks down the centerline of the top.
 We all say 'if you want to learn how to make lumber, build something with the lumber you milled and see how it goes'. Well, Here's your sign.
 There is a limit to what I can do to 'save' this piece, but I figured "it's stable now, let's just make it workable". SO I ran the top  and sides through the drum sander. I would have to sand 3/8" of of EACH face to begin to make it all flat (3/4" total) but that would mess up the through tenon joints. SO I am settling for solid and reliable. Something that might make a good solid table in a kid's game room or a family room, or out on a covered porch. Something folks could sit on, use as a table, dance on if they liked, and would take any abuse offered. It will never be a pretty or elegant piece, but can be rock solid.
 Now that I sanded to high spots off I went and did some epoxy cracks fills and I'll sand those tomorrow. The main thing I have to do is adjust the peg holes to be shaped to hold the sides on properly and also make new pegs. I did a lousy job on that 4 years ago and they barely worked then, they do not work at all now. But I now know how to fix them, tedious though it may be. So this will give me something to do in the coming weeks. I don't know if I can fit this in the trailer or if I even want to bring it to shows and set it up each time, but at least it will be ready if I sell some other of work I have in to it stuff. Also, I can put a very low price on it considering the appearance and known flaws. I'll chalk up all those MANY hours to 'Educational expenses'.
Here's how it sits now, before I laid on some epoxy in small cracks.



 So this turned out to be a bigger dump than I thought it would be. Sorry. That excavator has been grating on me for 12 hours or so for each day for several days now and I am a bit testy. What he 'accomplished' would have been about 3 hours work for a competent operator. 9:30pm and I just heard it shut off.
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 Tomorrow is another day and I am going to have to find a way to escape the nonsense somehow. Maybe it's time I fired up the saws and splitter to drown out his distraction. Let's see what the day brings and go from there.

[Nebraska]

Sorry your neighbor is a moron.  I am thankful it's 3/4 of a mile to my nearest. 

[Wlmedley]

We've all got one.My closest neighbor hasn't cut his grass this year and the roof on his porch is falling in.He's several years younger than me and him and his wife both have good jobs.Can't see him from my house but I can hear his dogs bark.

[SawyerTed]

It could be worse.  

My wife's brother is that neighbor.

[Old Greenhorn]

Yeah sorry, I just realized that last post had a lot of whining and I really despise whining, especially when it comes from me. I am really not that guy and get along with every other neighbor pretty well. For some reason, many of them give us gift cards and such for favors they perceive we have done for them.  It's just this one guy that makes me crazy. (along with everyone else.)
 I guess many of us here have one of them and there is little that can be done. You can't fix stupid and I long since gave up trying.

[Resonator]

Could be worse. Friend of a friend bought a house and moved to town after living in the country, and in the first 3 months the city police have been at his neighbors place 6 times.

[Old Greenhorn]

It can always be worse, but I am not hoping to see what form that might take.
 The good news is they came and took the min-ex away today.
Now we just have to wait and see what he dreams up next.

[aigheadish]

Tom, after my visit I could see how that neighbor would grate on my nerves quite a bit...

I have a neighbor that just moved into the house next door, a couple hundred feet through some woods, so I can't see them, but the house was empty for several months and prior to that an older lady lived there, and we didn't hear much from her.

Well, we started seeing some action over there, though no For Sale signs or anything like that, and finally determined that a family had moved in. It seems that there have been several families that own several of the houses in the "neighborhood," I live in one where the previous owner (now deceased) has family in 2 other houses down the way, so I think that's what happened next door as well. The older lady was the daughter of a family around the corner from me.

Regardless of any of that... My street is barely a lane and a half wide and in there front yard is a concrete wall, kind of a bridge, I guess, and at first the neighbor would store 3 of their big garbage totes on the street along that wall, forcing you to almost go offroad to get past. The first and/or second trash days they'd had piles of trash in the ditch and I was dreading what was bound to happen in the future, and if I'd need to go talk to them. They moved the trash cans after it looked like someone came by and hit them with a truck, they now live in the front yard. Luckily, I haven't seen more than normal amounts of trash in the ditch anymore...

We have however, seemingly, traded that for at least 3 dogs that bark almost constantly. I'll go sit on the back deck and they are just close enough that if we talk or I cough or something the dogs get all worked up and start barking their fool heads off. My dog hasn't quite learned to do this yet, but I'm expecting it.

...neighbors...

[Old Greenhorn]

Well as Res said, it could be worse. A couple of decades ago we had some neighbors about 4 places down who both worked night shifts and would leave the dogs out in a kennel in the yard all the time. Those dogs would bark almost continuously, taking turns, it seemed, at every little noise or even wind. If I coughed in the yard after dark they would go off for 5 minutes easy. Since we had enough distance, we never called anyone or complained, but their immediate neighbors called all the time because it was constant, 7 days a week, year round.
 What bothers me about barking dogs are not the dogs, it's the owners who never spend time with their dogs training them, setting rules, or building some confidence in those animals. It is almost always a human problem, not an animal problem. Take the guy next door, they got a beagle for the kids, but no training, except teaching him to poop in other folks yards and not their. They put the dog on a run leash in the yard and it barks at everything. I can't move in my yard without it going off. Zero training, and even worse, zero training for the kids on how to raise and treat a dog, which means they will make he same mistakes when they grow up. Stuff like that burns my bottom when I hear a dog left alone to just bark away. Stupid humans.

[Old Greenhorn]

Well I am in piddling mode this last week or two. I should be blowing and going with the better weather, but frankly the mornings are so clear and sweet smelling that I can't resist enjoying them by being lazy. These are rare days and we only get a few of them. I thought I might start some firewood today, but it got hot and quick. That makes me smile because my attic kiln hit 130°+ today, but also makes me remember I need to mill wood and get it up there to dry.
 I sanded up some new pegs for the tenon table I am refinishing. The old pins don't work since it all dried, twisted, and settled in. Tedious work shaping each peg to fit each hole, they are all different. I had recut the pegs holes yesterday and made them longer (they are 'D' holes).
 Then I switched over to moving some new stuff into the trailer for the next show. I had to move a little bit of stuff over to open up some more room in the rack for another bench/stool pairing. As I get into this I am more and more appreciating that rack design. I can get a LOT of stuff on that rack and seem to keep adding. 

 I am up to 9 benches and 8 stools at this point and could fit a few more stools yet. I also had not trouble fitting the new chair in by the back door after just shifting some things around a little.  I could probably fit just a little more of the smaller stuff or more than a little, but frankly I am beginning to wonder if I have too much since it takes so long to set it all out and pack it all back up. For a 4 or 5 hour showing, it seems like a lot of stuff, but then, every piece is unique so I'm not sure what is right. I'm still trying to work this out in my head, but mostly I am hoping these shows start selling something to help pay off the investment I've made in this trailer and inventory.
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Now we just have to wait and see what he dreams up next.

Yeah well, that barely took 24 hours. Now he just started out there with a plate compactor and he seems focused.  Maybe I should wait until he's done, then start cutting some firewood?

[SawyerTed]

My neighbors, relatives included, have complained when I cook a pig or shoulders..."the smell makes us hungry".  I don't know maybe they are looking for invites for the next one.  

So maybe a couple of pork shoulders on the smoker when the wind is blowing his way will help you feel better knowing he's over there salivating for hours (and not invited)

[WV Sawmiller]

Tom,

   You may have mentioned in previous threads but what do you do about ventilation in your "attic kiln" if you have pretty green lumber up there shedding lots of water?

[Old Greenhorn]

Well, I don't throw green wood up there except some cookies and they will do whatever they want, mostly crack.  The other stuff I put up is air dried at least a year and right now I have nearly nothing in there (I have to get to milling my own stuff again). Also, it's not like a regular schedule, because every night it cools off pretty well. I have standard gable vents and that allows for airflow around the clock. The wood kind of normalizes everyday because of this heat/cool cycle.
 Seems to be working. Today was partly cloudy and it still hit over 120°. Since I put mostly hardwood up there I don't have many bugs in it, but I am still waiting to find some on the floor one of these days. Once I get back to the mill, I will try throwing some green stuff up there, just for laughs, and see what happens. It's a good question.

[doc henderson]

It seems the grandsons should be approaching an age where they might enjoy helping grandpa out.  It is a lot of work to move many boards by hand.  Teach the to sticker.  do you have fans up there for things like maple, or does the air dry get it dry enough, fans are not needed.

[Old Greenhorn]

Well Doc, it's complicated with the boys, given all the devices these days. The oldest has some minor emotional issues and is very sensitive to loud or sharp noises, He is not an 'outdoor guy' yet, but we are working on it. He does like fishing, but only for short periods. The middle one is kind of whiny and needs to mature a bit more. The youngest is the one is who is pretty much game for anything that is hands on. He spent a half a day with me yesterday and asked if we could start working on a simple bookshelf for his room, so we picked out a piece of 1x6 pine, but it had bug holes, so we mixed up some epoxy, masked it, and filled the galleries. This, of course included a lot of explanations.
 Then we went down to Bill's and wandered in the woods looking for white birch trees for a special order. No joy there, but we walked a mile or two and he never stopped talking the whole time.   He found a garter snake, some bear scat, and a box turtle that let us study him for a while. (He calls them 'boxing turtles' and wonders where the name came from because they don't look like they can box very well.) On the way in we also saw a doe with a brand new wobbly fawn in the road by Bill's house and watched them for a bit until the fawn could get safely away and momma calmed down. She actually approached the truck to warn us off. It was a nice adventure for him and he had lots of new stories to tell his folks and brothers.
 So yeah, when he gets a little bigger we will see. The problem is splitting them up and just taking one makes the others whine and complain that they want to go too, until they get 'there' and then get bored. One on one, they are mostly fine, but in pack they are a handful and the job at hand takes twice as long. I can't do that at a show.

 In the attic, I have no fans, it's all passive. Since all the wood I have put up there is at 16% or lower, mold doesn't seem to be an issue at all and I think with the stickering, the temps are consistent all around. I could make a project out of it, but I need some lumber to work with first. It's pretty amazing how fast pine will come down to where I can't get a reading on my pin meter.

[thecfarm]

I would enjoy walking in the woods with you too.
You find more stuff then I do. 

I have a friend with grandkids. They are all grown now but one. He would come over with a couple and they would walk way up in the woods to find me.
Must be a half mile.
I could hardly get my grandson to walk down to the mailbox, a 500 foot walk.
Sometimes  his grandkids would bring friends over and they would walk up in the woods too.

[mudfarmer]

Do what you can with them, you will appreciate it now and later and they will appreciate it later if not now 

thecfarm I bet those boys still remember walking "all day" back in the woods to find "the old wood cutter grandpa knows" 

[Old Greenhorn]

Weird day, bare with me and eventually I will get to something stupid.
 SO I had a mushroom client needed a pickup load of hardwood chips for a mushroom bed. As it turned out, Bill is doing a land clearing job for an institution less than 5 miles away and he was still dropping trees today. SO I went over and arrived just as they had the chip truck about filled up, so they pulled that away from the chipper and I backed up and we dropped a handful of maple and RO. We filled my bed in about 10 minutes. I pulled my truck away and covered it, sort of, then spent another hour or so helping them clear and feed the chipper until they broke for lunch. While they were deciding where to get lunch Bill asked me if I felt like fixing a 372 for them. His guy Mike was without a saw because of a broken spring. They were unclear as to what was wrong, but I got 'throttle spring' out of it anyway. Sure, why not? Where's the saw? In the shop by the bench. OK.
 So they had lunch and I delivered my load and came home and looked up this spring, they told needed ordering. It's about 5 bucks and called a presence sensing and throttle trigger spring. But I was working off their verbal description (rarely a good idea). Since I am ordering parts, I wonder if there are any other incidentals the saw might need.  So I run down to Bill's and search for the saw. Sure enough, it's not where they told me. I look around. I find it, the label is rubbed off, but it's a high top saw and I see that the spring is hanging on one of the air cover clips, must be the right saw, presence sensing bar is not working, throttle trigger locked up, must be it.
 I bring it home and have dinner, then got out and start messing with it. They told me I had to order the part, but there is a (used) correct replacement spring hanging on the cover clip. I have to tell you getting that presence lever out of the pocket, removing the broken spring and getting to new one in is not picnic.  It requires a lot of cuss words and mumbling, after 3 re-grouping and calming down sessions, I finally got it back together. But the pivot pin had been removed before I got the saw and I needed that to complete the job.
 So I called Mike, told him I had the saw and found the replacement spring hanging on it and got it in, but where is the pin? He is very perplexed about the replacement spring, he didn't have one and can't guess where that came from. 
 Well at this point in the conversation, Bill shows up at my door for no particular reason, I hand him a beer as I am talking to Mike and we are trying to figure out where this spring came from and what pin I am talking about. Bill finally chimes in, smiling. He says " you took the wrong saw". What?!
 So as we continue to talk on the phone we go out to the shop and Bill explains I grabbed his 394 instead of the 372. The 394 was broke too, but Bill gave up trying to fix that dang presence lever, and gave up for a better day. Well, I fixed it and it just needs the pin put back, he has the pin, so I'll do that tomorrow. I guess I will also go find the right saw to work on this time.
 Very weird, kind of dumb that I fixed the wrong saw and I did offer to unfix it, but Bill declined.  I had a lot of trouble getting that thing fixed. I know a guy like Spike would take that apart and have the new spring in while he drank coffee and talked to you and in 3 minutes he would be done. But I am not Spike and I never had that section apart before, so I am just glad I got it done and didn't break anything. What a pain in the butt. I can see why Bill gave up on it, I did...3 times, until I finally got it done.
 I think it's the first time I ever fixed anything by accident though.

[Hilltop366]

A happy accident.

[Old Greenhorn]

Yeah, I guess. Bill will get his saw back today, not that he is missing it. This is his spare 394 with a 36" bar, a gutted muffler, a cracked air cover, and half the pull handle broken off. It doesn't need a cleaning, it needs an exorcism. But poor Mike has been suffering along with some little toy saw (he says, probably a 562, maybe a 550) and missing his beloved 372, apparently for a while now. Bill has saws everywhere around his place, and all his trucks have at least one saw on each. The bucket truck has 3 or more, there is usually one laying in the yard in front of the shop, 2 or 3 over by the OWB, and 2 down at the mill right now. At any given time maybe 5% are having some kind of issue. He is building a saw shop upstairs in the new shop addition which will be dedicated just to saw work and parts. There are already a couple of saws sitting up there waiting for attention when the shop opens. These boys are tough on their saws, ask Spike. (Yeah @Spike60 , this is the straight gassed 372 you fixed last year.)
 So it's kind of a small miracle that I found one of the saws that needed fixing and got that done. Now I have to find the other one. I did some research last night after getting a better picture of what's broke on the 372 and either I will need to order a whole new carb, or do a farm mechanic fix because it sounds like it's the throttle plate return coil spring that is busted. That one, I think is on a shaft that is peened over at assembly? At any rate, the part itself does not seem available, so I may have to either make a new one or alter the broken one. It's not going to be a 'one evening with a beer' fix, I suspect.

[Spike60]

Well, don't those last few posts set the table.    

 Talked to Billy yesterday and I'm planning to stop over his place tomorrow evening to pick up a few saws that need attention. Not sure what to expect, but don't ruin the surprises that are apparently in store for me. He did mention a 572 that may need a screen clean and the magnetic filter. (the blue one). Binging a tweeked 394 that he may want to buy. As you know, the 94/95 chassis is his favorite. 372's are small saws for those guys. 

But I know how this will go. "Oh yeah, there's another saw over here......" So I figure I should bring the truck and not the Jeep.