willedoo

A problem with some sawmills is that the faster they cut timber, the more money they make. Pushing it through too quick results in blade flex and consequent variation in timber dimensions. To do a good job they need to do it slower and more accurately but they end up with less production. That happened to me with my verandah floorboards. Our local sawmiller would always do a good job as he was a perfectionist, but on that occasion he was flat out with work and got another mill to supply the boards for him. It was 5x1" spotted gum, green off saw, and there was quite a noticeable difference in thickness from one side of the board to the other side. If boards were laid low side to high side the height difference would have been enough to catch your boot on while walking across the deck. It took a bit of extra work sorting the boards so they were laid high side to high side and low side to low side alternating. It was a bit wavy but at least there was no protrusions to catch on. Once laid it was only noticeable for a while; you get used to things and they become invisible in time. Being green off saw timber I butted the boards up to each other and used a temporary cramp to just firm them up to each other. I don't remember the shrinkage rate I calculated on but I think I was expecting about an 8mm gap which turned out about right once it dried. I like the bigger gap. It doesn't look too excessive on a 5" board and a lot less dust and debris gets caught in between. All it needs it a blow out of the gaps with a leaf blower now and then. On the plus side, all the spotted gum floorboards were top quality timber, no sappy stuff.

Patsy.

Most youtube videos are in Europe or North America cutting soft pine. With Australian hardwood, I'd say it would be a lot slower cutting and a lot more band sharpening required.

If you have a lot of ongoing slab or board cutting to do, the extra work in building a band saw is worth it. It's quieter, gives a better surface finish and less waste. Some of these Russian outfits are a bit rough around the edges.

I make my own dark chocolate but haven't done it for a while. You can buy cheap latex chocolate moulds on ebay. Two cups of cocoa powder to one cup of coconut oil. Heat the oil up until it's hot but not boiling. Stir in the cocoa powder and anything else you want. I don't use sugar so usually add raisins and a bit of desiccated coconut. Pour it in the moulds then put them in the fridge. It can be a very messy job.

I wonder if the side case has a considerable magnesium content and if so, whether that would have a bearing on the corrosion. The crankcase is magnesium.

Checked out the chain and it's a skip tooth full chisel chain, so should be all good for cutting slabs. The saw originally came with a regular chain but I seem to remember buying this chain to rip out some fence posts. It tests the memory when you haven't used something for a few years. The beast returned today in full running order. I thought it was a pretty good deal from the chainsaw place. I dropped it off on Wednesday and picked it up the following Monday. $225 all up including labour and GST. That was a compression test, ignition test and new plug, flush the fuel tank and fit a new fuel filter, clean and adjust the carburetor, clean out and dress the bar rails and sharpen the chain, fit a new air filter, replace a crook top cover screw and re-fuel.

There's history of it. It will be a setback for a while but they'll survive again. Israel killed the previous heads of both organisations yet they survived and grew stronger.

The worst movie I've ever tried to watch is 'Canopy'. I've had two goes at it and haven't made it past the 15 minute mark. There's absolutely no incentive to try a third time. It sounded good - a WW2 Australian fighter pilot shot down over Singapore and trying to evade Japanese patrols. The reality is it's an excruciatingly tedious arty-farty independent so-called 'suspense drama'. Absolutely nothing happens in the movie from what the reviews say. To be fair, there's supposed to be five or six words of dialogue somewhere in the film. Good luck if you can stick it out long enough to hear one of the characters speak. It's one of those films where the camera will spend five minutes focused on a drop of water falling from a leaf. That's the suspense part. Where the drama is eludes me. This movie is not just slightly worse than some others; it's in a league all of it's own. It doesn't matter at what stage you turn the movie off; you won't miss anything. It's the same shite all the way through apparently. I'm waiting for the sequel - 'Two flies crawl up a wall'.

A journalist once asked him about the separation of powers and he had no idea what the journalist was referring to.

I only see drongos here two or three times a year. About as frequent as cat bird appearances.

Nev, you would have liked to have been with us in the early 1970's when myself and a couple of other blokes got a guided tour aboard a big roll on/roll off ship unloading in Brisbane. It was during the cement strike and we were there picking up loads of Tasmanian cement from a local freighter. It was a slow day with the wharfies continually stopping, so we wandered down the dock to have a look at the big ship. As we were standing there looking up at it, the ship's 2IC (1st officer?) approached us and invited us aboard. He gave us a fairly comprehensive tour through the ship, including the officer's mess, the galley and down on the cargo decks. The highlight was when he took us into the huge engine room to see the three great big engines. From there we went up up to a mezzanine deck which was the engine control/instrument room. It was a fairly new state of the art ship at the time and belonged to a Scandinavian/Australian company. It was built as a roll on/roll off vehicle transporter and had a full load of Mercedes Benz cars. It was controlled mayhem unloading it with swags of drivers ferrying cars out from multiple decks with traffic control people with stop/go signs directing them.

I spent a year as a deckhand on a prawn trawler which was an experience. Working the shallow water in the summer months was tiring. Lots of short shots and not much sleep. The deep water season was a lot easier with longer shots and time to have a bit of a sleep between shots. During the deep water season we had enough fuel to stay out about six nights before coming home but the shallow water was daytime work within sight of land and we'd go back to port every day. It wasn't a big boat, a timber 45' wet boat with a very noisy GM 671 bird scarer powering it. You spent most of your time damp, tired and smelling of sea creatures but it had it's good points. Like watching all the leaping dolphins silhouetted by the rising sun as you steamed toward the reef to anchor up for the day with all the seagulls forming an overhead escort. Another good sight was those rare days when the ocean was a mill pond. It's a strange sight being miles out to see and water like glass with not a trace of a ripple. The water would have a silky effect as you cut through it.

Someone on the radio pointed out that if the LNP win next month's Queensland election, it will be only the second general election win for the conservatives since Joh Bjelke-Petersen's last win in 1986. The LNP did one term from 2012 to 2015. The Borbage coalition government (1996-1998) didn't win a general election. The court of disputed returns ordered a re-ballot in one seat and the coalition won the by-election which caused the Labor government to lose their majority. I've used the term conservatives to cover all three conservative entities that have held government since the Bjelke-Petersen era - the National/Liberal coalition, National Party on their own and the merged LNP. Bjelke-Petersen won his last two elections out of coalition with a National Party majority.

They're very normal birds. If any deserve the title of drongo, it should be the noisy friarbird. The friarbirds are total drongos.

Some of these ebay sellers must laugh themselves silly when they make a sale. One example - a Gorilla brand bow shackle on ebay for $34.95 plus $9.95 postage. You can walk into Bunnings and buy the exact same thing for $14.80. My guess is the ebay sellers get an order from a sucker, then wander down to Bunnings and buy the item to send away to the buyer. A bit like dropshippers in a way.

Until you mentioned birds of prey, I'd never really given them a thought here at my place. I'm on steep hilly country covered in thick timber and now that I think about it, one reason why there's so many smaller species here is because of the protection the terrain and tree cover gives them. The hawks and occasional osprey hunt out on the floodplain adjacent to my place. It's mainly covered in open paddocks or sugar cane. Cane land is a real breeding ground for rodents and it's good open swooping country for the birds of prey. There's nowhere on my place where they could safely swoop with all the tree cover.

The weather prediction for this area is turning out to be a fizzer. There was supposed to be an inch of rain today but looking at the radar it's all gone south. Brisbane seems to have got the rain.Have probably only had 5mm here at most overnight.

It's interesting how the different bird species get on with each other. The raven and the butcher birds seem to tolerate each other ok although they compete for food. All the honeyeater species get on well together and the butcher birds get on with them ok. It's not unusual to see a butcher bird and honeyeaters rubbing shoulders around the bird bath. Yesterday a butcher bird was having a bath and he had an audience of noisy miners standing in a ring around him waiting for their turn. It's only a small bath consisting of one of those enamel wash basins you buy from the camping places. I've seen a similar thing before when the raven was in the bath. Because of his size he takes up most of the bath. He was happily splashing away while directly above him perched on the guttering was a line of noisy miners with one lone butcher bird on the end of the line, all looking down at the raven. They don't fear the raven, but for security the smaller birds keep a few feet distant from him. The kookburras on the other hand are disliked by all the other birds. They're like the beagle boys of the bird world.

I once had a 60lt drum as a water heater. It was on it's side on a frame with legs long enough to build a fire underneath. For the water outlet I screwed some threaded gal pipe into the bung hole which was positioned at the top. At the other end of the drum I cut a round hole in the top. Into this went a length of gal pipe that ran almost down to the bottom of the drum. The top of the pipe was brazed to a half cut 20lt drum that acted as a bucket. You would light the fire, heat the water up, then whatever amount of cold water you poured into the cut 20lt section would go to the bottom of the drum and force the hot water up and out the outlet spout. A fairly primitive donkey. This is a rough sketch done by a mouse:

The 60 litre oil drums were handy for a lot of things like that. I don't know if they still make them or not; I haven't seen one around for a long time.

Meanwhile, up here on the highway there's a big billboard advertising Australia Zoo with Robert Irwin having metric tonnes of fun. Some things just aren't right.

That's ok Marty, if he gets arrested we can all chip in with a character reference.

When I went to ag college it was a two year course that was the equivalent of grade 11 and 12 high school. The college owned a bush block up in the hills and in the middle of the second year we all had to go up there to do a week long timber camp. It was real back woods stuff. Accommodation was a long corrugated iron hut with one big long dormitory room full of bunk beds and a second room on the end with a kitchen and eating area. There was no electricity, just kerosene lanterns and a wood stove with an old shearers cook toiling away with the biggest, blackest pots and frying pan I've ever seen. He could cook bacon and eggs for a dozen or more people in one go with that frypan. It was freezing cold at night with no showers on site. We all had a bogey in the dam after work and it was that cold, you had to strip off and run in, scream and run out to soap up, then run back in again to rinse off. It was like those Russians jumping in a hole in the ice for Epiphany. We didn't do any chainsaw instruction until the last day of the camp. The rest of it was all cross-cut sawing to drop the trees and stump and top them. A little Cat crawler (D3 or D4?) would snig the logs up to the flat area where we would bark them, cross-cut saw them into fence post lengths then split them into posts with wedges and sledge hammers. They also made us adze the rough split edges of the posts. I think it was supposed to be one of those character building things. When my dad did the same camp back in the 1930's, he sunk the adze blade into the side of his foot and ended up with a stay in the local hospital.

1988 was the same year I bought my Stihl which is an 034 Super. The Super was about 61cc so an extra 5cc on the 034. It's been a good saw. I don't know what the smaller Husqvarnas are like but the one I have was the most used saw in forestry work around the world at the time I bought it. The professional range seems to have a fairly good name in the industry although I don't know much about the new model that has replaced mine.