Blog

Hello to all of you,

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I’ve been without reliable internet access for a while, and so I’m catching up now on some of the recent goings on. We’ve been in the final stages of preparing to begin construction, and despite the fact that the construction foreman I hired bailed without notice, we are moving ahead nicely.

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We need a way to sift out the small rocks and clumps of earth from the murram soil we will compress to make the bricks we will build with. So Gilbert and I, and later, Raphael, our new truck driver, went to work and came up with this.

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DWS and Raphael, our new driver working on the frame of the device to sift the dirt (murram) we will use to make the compressed earth bricks for building. The seive\'s proper name is a \"riddle.\"

We were cutting a joint for a cross member here.

This one, in fact.

We needed to get the sheet of expanded metal I had bought for the riddle cut to size. It\'s too thick for our basic cutting tools, hacksaw and wire cutters, so Gilbert and I loaded it into the pick up and took it to the local welder, whose \"shop\" is at the small police station that has recently been established at Daystar.

The Police commander and I, and someone who just jumped into the photo.

The welding machine was down, so he couldn\'t cut it with his torch, and his hammer wasn\'t going to do us much good.

But he remembered his grinder, newly repaired with the wiring securely wrapped in a plastic bag.

So after measuring and marking, he went to work right there in front of the station.

He rolled up his pants to prevent a fire, and in these death defying action photos I had to shield my eyes from flying metal sparks, but he went at it with his naked eyes.

Cutting away,

and scoring the concrete underneath in the process.

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We took the resized sheet of diamond-shaped expanded metal home and fitted it into its new frame.

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Next we will cover it again with galvanized coffee mesh which has forty nine square holes per inch and we will be all set.

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I’ll end this section with a beginner’s algebra problem.

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If Chubbysean, the black teenage dog pictured below, ate 60% of our new hatch of chicks –which he did and is still in hot water for–and we had two chicks left after his murderous set to, how many chicks were in the hatch?

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Yours for sharpened minds and well-behaved dogs,

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David