willedoo

I don't remember the last timber I cut with it but it would have been either brushbox, ironbark or bloodwood. I've never had it happen with the Stihl saw; maybe the Husqvarna case has a different alloy composition.

It was a good lesson not to leave a saw lying around in an uncleaned state for a long time. The chain oil residue mixes with the sawdust to make corrosive gunk. It ate a few decent sized pit marks on the inside of the aluminium drive sprocket case and even went right through in a couple of small areas. I think it's the acid or tannin in the sawdust that does it. When I get the saw back I'll do the old superglue + baking soda trick to fill the pits.

One step closer to those slabs. Yesterday I got the saw all bolted together, cleaned up, free of hornet mud and in to the local Husqvarna dealer to see if they can get it going. I gave it a few pulls before taking it in but saw no sign of any spark. Fingers crossed it won't cost an arm and a leg to fix. That's one job that's been a long time coming. It's been sitting around semi disassembled for a long time.

I had a plywood returning boomerang when I was a kid but it was a bought one.

Most plywood is imported, but I suppose the few remaining Australian manufacturers wouldn't be able to offer any better price due to the high production costs here.

Here's one possible scenario: it could start with a chainsaw wielding bloke in Borneo. The trees are cut, topped and hauled out of the jungle with a log skidder so a grapple can load them onto timber trucks for the journey down to the coast. There a crane loads them onto barges for the trip down to the main port where they are unloaded and loaded onto ships for the trip across the ocean to the port at Jakarta. There they are unloaded onto trucks and transported to the plywood factory where the logs are processed by peeling and cutting to size. Add lots of expensive glue, pressure and heat and a bit more sizing before stacking the finished sheets on pallets, strapping them and forklifting them into shipping containers. Then container trucks take the containers back to the port to be loaded onto a container ship bound for Australia where the importer will pay customs duty and a raft of other port and inspection charges on top of the freight and initial product cost. When the ship arrives here, the containers are loaded onto trucks and transported to the wholesaler/importer's warehouse where the plywood is unloaded from the shipping containers and stored. As orders come in the plywood is then loaded onto delivery trucks and taken to the big green and red shed, forklifted off and stacked in the building supplies section where the friendly staff will sell us a sheet or two and collect the GST for the government. But that's only a guess.

I wonder where you go to buy second hand stuff these days. Most of the demolition and scrap yards are closed down around here, Gumtree is nearly dead and Facebook Marketplace is inhabited by crooks.

I was at an old mate's 80th. recently at his nursing home (he has Parkinson's). He belongs to one of those born again churches and I think I was the only non church friend there. One of them was talking about the need to use cash and how cards are the mark of the beast referred to in the bible. I can remember working for some born again people back in the early 1990's and they were banging on back then about debt and credit cards carrying the mark of the beast.

I miss the dry inland climate. Here on the coast the winter is ok but for a lot of the year doors and windows stick and mould tries to take over.

They also do a lot of building stuff we can't do because of termites.

Thanks Pete. The one I have on it is a ripping chain for ripping fence posts out. I'll see how it goes on slabs. On the subject of fence posts, I saw these on Facebook Marketplace recently. They're rip sawn Gympie Messmate posts. Almost a shame to use such nice timber for a fence post. My weatherboards are Gympie Messmate. Wall frames, rafters, ridge boards and verandah joists are all very old recycled Iron Bark from the local RSL. Verandah posts and verandah floor boards are Spotted Gum, bearers are Blackbutt and the floor inside is mixed species, mainly Spotted Gum mixed with a dark red board that I'm not sure of the species. A lot of nice wood. I'm glad I built it years ago; good timber costs a fortune these days.

We get a variety here in this arrea. We get the swamp sheoak C.glauca, the horsetail sheoak C.equisetifolia, the river sheoak C.cunninghamiana, black sheoak Allocasuarina littoralis and the forest sheoak Casuarina torulosa which I have on my place. I also have a line of horsetail sheoaks I planted many years ago along the street frontage. They're nice trees - hardy, attract birds and fix nitrogen in the soil. If a sheoak blows over I usually try to cut it up as it's excellent firewood. If you pull the branchlet segments apart you can see the true leaves arranged around the segment join if you have strong glasses or a magnifying glass. A lot of the species have different numbers of leaves. I think from memory my forest sheoaks have five leaves.

If that was the photo you posted near your place, I thought it looked like brigalow. There's brigalow in your area as far as I know. It polishes up well as most acacias do. Belah is a casuarina. This is a turned brigalow bowl:

I'll see if I can locate it (buried in the shed somewhere). It's fairly similar to this one: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/405134261000?_skw=chainsaw+slabbing+jig&itmmeta=01J8HHQ5P1DP0QSFA9ABBGQJPE&hash=item5e53e23b08:g:dDUAAOSwv6BmqX7G&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA8HoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKkyax%2B7QtvSccvV7df9a%2FF14FZrsw2YGAsyXBf56FchguvkKxSI4slgbw%2FVpDSYgXv2CkWmPI7dLY39qNCMRyB64c4HU0rDfvG9K7dviaCHDnLc1%2Bji0rWHHC%2FR23M39Em978HLcw8IC%2FVbU6tLC7fCJM6l%2F4JyYpA2hav0tMzT9ArIRLROmaddoB2alEJJjSILggLkt%2FZQjkO7rrXC2h7Z5VHE8Yq2F9FEy%2B81ptO9zrLR0CmYO4R4lsmSszpBFLIwUG3nJPOeb60Itlhq3ClBkqsMK7c0et7AZatsQ0dp1A%3D%3D|tkp%3ABFBMjNvcscRk

Looks like Elle.

Nev, why don't you start a thread on it? I haven't found a better country. Beats me why people from around the world are breaking their necks to get into the U.S..

My Husqvarna is a 372 XP, about 70cc, and predates the newer models with fuel saving and emission technology. I looked up the newer system that Husqvarna calls X-Torq. They basically have air blowing in the cylinder to purge the exhaust gases.

I haven't built the log jinker yet but I've dragged out the big saw and started to clean it up before taking it into the dealers for some needed maintenance. It's been sitting for a few years so will need a good going over. I haven't got it reassembled yet to test the spark but it was ok last time I tried to start it. It wouldn't fire up on that occasion after sitting for quite a long time so I'd say it needs a carburettor kit. Same thing happened to the smaller Stihl saw after sitting around eg: the diaphragm drying up and going hard. Hopefully the Husqvarna won't cost a fortune to fix. It wouldn't have any more than five hours work on it so is fundamentally a new saw despite the neglect. Replacement cost now is over $2,100 so it's worth fixing. I'm keen to try out the eBay special slabbing jig I bought about three years ago and never got to use.

The Russians have been trying to replace their main intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-36 (NATO SS-18 Satan), with their home grown RS-28 'Sarmat' heavy ICBM. The Satan was Ukrainian designed, built and maintained for Russia by Ukraine until the war started in 2014. From 2014 onward, Russian technicians were supposedly using cannibalised parts from 'stored by treaty' decommissioned SS-18s to keep the ICBM force operational. To build the new RS-28 missile, Russia had to reverse engineer Satan's Ukrainian missile technology to make Russian knock-off technology and supposedly uprated engines. To cut a long story short, the Sarmat was supposed to be operational in 2021 but they've had their fourth failed test attempt of the combat operational stage RS-28. The latest one blew up in the silo. putler's big stick.

I suppose there might be some advantage having your local member as a member of the government rather than a member of the opposition. If the LNP take government as expected, our local member will become the police minister. I don't know how well ministers look after their electorates - I'd assume they would have plenty of staff to look after that side of things. If the LNP get in, hopefully the fact that the conservatives have only served two terms out of the last thirty five years might have knocked a bit of the born to rule attitude out of them and they will actually try to behave as if they want a following term. When Can Do Campbell Newman and the LNP won their one and only term in 2012 they certainly hadn't learned any lessons. That was a total disaster, but at least Newman served a purpose. He set a low bench for the LNP; they could only go up from there.

It's just over a month to go to the Queensland election and polls are predicting a LNP majority government. I heard a so called expert on the radio the other day saying the government knows they're gone and are working on saving some of the furniture by concentrating on winnable seats. If the LNP win government it will be their second term since the party merger in 2008, and if you include the former National/Liberal coalition, it will be the third conservative party term in thirty five years. I had a look at the candidates in my electorate and it's fairly ordinary with no independents running. Labor, the LNP, Greens and the Legalise Cannabis Queensland party are the only offerings. As usual around this time, plenty of promises and weasel words.

That anthropologist said he'd witnessed Pintubi elders levitating. I don't know about about that one; I think they might have given him too much pituri.

I know avocados.

From a cultural perspective, Kintore is a community of predominantly Pintubi people. There's a small number of Warlpiri and Luritja people from neighbouring areas but it would be a lot easier for the Pintubi to maintain culture than those in large mixed communities.

It's probably correct to a certain degree. Language is definitely stronger the more remote you go. Toward the coast most original culture and language has been lost. Some are trying to resurrect some of it if there's an old auntie or uncle who remembers some of the things their grandparents told them. I think some on the coast are making up new stuff as the old ways are lost forever. In the remote areas I think it would vary from place to place. Some communities are big melting pots of different groups and if they've been that way for a long time, culture might be a lot weaker than other places with mainly one tribal group. I remember once listening to an anthropologist tell of the years he spent living with and studying the Pintubi people. He had a theory of different waves of migration into the country (I agree on that one) and how the earlier people graduated inland as others arrived. He had a map of Australia with an overlay of concentric circles denoting different zones. His theory was that the closer to the centre people were, the more ancient spiritual knowledge they had. He believed the Pintubi were at the apex of this. I worked on Pintubi land for a short time and only travelled through Kintore so never spent time with the people, but from that brief experience I didn't see any of the cultural stuff. When we were there in 2010, we were told some of the people occasionally went walkabout out in the desert and that at that time a family was somewhere out there on walkabout.