We finally finished the bulk of the wood for the bridges and docks after two straight weeks of cutting and hauling. The man I hired to help, Muttell, turned out to be a great decision. He is one of the most experienced chainsaw artists in the area and proved to be a responsible and hard worker. I learned a lot by watching and asking questions. There is no way I could have sawed up that much lumber in two weeks. In the end, he sawed up everything for the bridges (beams, supports and floorboards) while I sawed up the posts for one of the docks after observing how he went about the process. I had already sawed up the floorboards for the dock using the Logosol M7 portable sawmill that my buddy Claudio Adriazola, the Makita rep in town, has lent me.

We are building seven short bridges to cross drainage ditches on the access road we are building behind Alejandro’s house. We decided to go with 3 10cmX10cmX3m beams per bridge, plus crosspieces and floor boards. That meant that a lot of trees would need to be sawed up. Since we want to limit the number of live trees we are cutting down, we started by looking for usable deadwood, both in the forest and along the shore. The lake is at its low point right now and the shore is strewn with old fallen trees, most of which spend a good part of the year under water. A lot of them have very nicely preserved wood inside and we were able to get a lot of beams and boards out of these. Muttell also found a number of usable trees lying on the forest floor (actually, slightly elevated off the ground), so we limited the number of live trees we cut to just a few. All of the wood is Coigue (Nothofagus Dombeyi). One of the first trees we cut into on the shore turned out to be Tineo, or Palo Santo as it is called here. It is a beautiful wood, far too good to use for bridges, so we cut it up into some nice slabs. I hope to be able to dry it properly and make a dining room table and other furniture out of it.

Of course, sawing the lumber was only half the job - the other half was getting it out of the woods or shore, onto the raft, hauling it across the lake, and then getting it to the site of the bridges. I should have guessed ahead of time that the jeep would only last long enough to crap out on the beach as soon as we were ready to haul the first load. One of the locals has a team of oxen, so I was able to hire them and get the wood off of Alejandro’s beach and over to the access road in two days. We still have at least one more day of hauling, but it doesn’t seem like such a daunting task anymore now that we’ve done it a few times.

In the end, I think I’ve more than made up for all of the hard labor I may have ever weaseled my way out of in the past, but it was all rewarding and I even learned to saw beams “al pulso” (by hand). I know this is only the beginning, but all in all, I’d say we’re off to a good start.

As always, click on the image to open the photo gallery.

Here was todays adventure - in the morning Cristian (our neighbor to the south side of our property) and I hauled a bunch of the boards we’d sawed up over the past few weeks across the lake and built a raft using four of the styrofoam floats I got for the docks. We used a total of eight 4m length boards and eight 3m lengths (I’ll post photos of the milling process before long). It took exactly a one-kilo bag of nails to put the thing together. The last nail we put in was the last one in the bag. In the afternoon, we towed the raft across the lake to Cristian’s place, where he had an old jeep that they’d taken across on a makeshift stryofoam raft a couple of years ago to use for hauling firewood. He wanted to get the jeep back to town to sell it, and I wanted to borrow it before that to haul all of the 10inx10inx3m beams I’m having cut for the seven small bridges I need to build on our access road.We towed the barge (which ended up being called El Colono) tug-boat style, one boat on each side. You can’t see that in the pictures because I had to break away in order to take them, but it takes two boats to steer the raft. With one, you end up going around in circles. The jeep had been sitting in the rain for a year so I took our car battery. Crisitian siphoned out the two liters of gas that remained in the tank into a soda bottle and plugged the fuel pump directly into the soda bottle. We cleaned out the spark plugs, which were all gunked up, and the jeep turned over just as soon as Cristian gave the fuel pump a few shakes. We got it onto the raft with no problem and got the raft unstuck from the shallow water with no small amount of muscle. The raft didn’t creak or moan once on the return trip across the lake. Needless to say, I have no doubt that these floats were the right way to go for the docks.

As always, click on the photo to open the gallery.