Day 826 - Almost had a Heat Stroke, Splitfire 4090, and burn pile

PP03 is supported by Timber King sawmills. For more information on my 1220 CRZ mill or one of many Foley hydraulic options, go to TimberKing.com. Good morning. 7.17 in the morning. I'm having a hard time getting going. I couldn't fall asleep last night. We're going to be working outside today, but I want to show you a couple things here in the shop. On the woodworking channel, I've been building this CNC machine and got it up and running. I still have to build a cart for the computer. I'm just using the jointer as a computer stand right now, so I've got to get some type of mobile cart built and cable management. I'm parking this thing right here tucked into the corner so the dogs don't run through here and rip cables everywhere. Anyway, I'm going to pick up with the next video on that channel with the MDF to make a spoil board. That's fun, but today's a day outside, so we're going to work outside. Also, over here, see that? What is that? That's an air conditioner. The humidity inside the shop just finally got too unbearable. This is a 36,000 BTU mini split, and it's slightly undersized for this space if I was to want to cool this space down to 70. I don't want to cool it down to 70. My objective is 80 and low humidity. That's all my objective is with this, and it works just fine for that intended purpose. I put a filter box over the top. If you haven't seen my filter boxes in my last shop, I did this to all three of the mini split heads in my last shop, and after several years, took the filters off and looked on the original filter, and the inside of the machine looked spotless, looked brand spanking new. So this is the filter box special. I just used cardboard this time to make a little box around it to hold the filters and taped all the seams, and it works. But 80 degrees, low humidity, that's perfect. I don't want to go anything more than that because, number one, the cost of the the cooling unit itself drastically increases. The cost of having insulation put in here or me putting insulation in here drastically increases, and this shop is not energy efficient as it is because the big roll-up door is not sealed all the way around it, and it faces south, so it gets a little bit of sun. So yeah, we did a thing. Jamie has also been harvesting out of the quite regularly. This is about three days ago, I think, she took this batch out. This one is from yesterday, and each one of these, this is probably the, I don't know, maybe tenth or twelfth little harvest like this. She's been getting a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers, and she's making pickles with her cucumbers. So she makes two different kinds. This kind is your typical hamburger pickle, right, sandwich pickle. This is used some seasoning right off the shelf at Walmart made for pickling cucumbers. And then this style is more of a homemade brew, and she said that this is more of a salad pickle. I haven't really tasted these, but these are really tasty. Today's first objective is to tackle this. We got to get the chainsaw going. We could probably do all this with a top handle chainsaw. It'd be a little bit easier, but chop all this up a little bit smaller, park the chipper over there, and turn this into a usable resource, and also a pile of firewood for later. That's task number one for outside. I'm soaked, and it's not because of the rain. I overheated real close. We have 10 percent left, just a little bit left, and I got too hot. I got to be careful. The first summer we were out here, we had no shade, no shelter, other than a vehicle, running a vehicle with air conditioning, and I overheated pretty bad. I thought something bad was happening, like a heat stroke, and it took me quite a while to recover in the truck. And ever since then, heat bothers me when it gets extreme like it is right now. So I feel it starting to kick in, and I'm like, okay, got to shut it down before something crazy happens. So we brought the cameras in, and as soon as we brought the cameras in and parked the equipment under the shelter, it just flooded, just rained for a second. So we'll pick up in the next couple days, well tomorrow, but Jamie's got first shower, I got next. I'm done for the day. I got to be careful. It's getting hot, really hot. Good morning. Another day working outside, but first this video is supported by Brunt. This is the Brunt Marin boot. This is their flagship boot. All kinds of different options you can get it in. This is a six inch height. You can get it at an eight inch height. You can get it with a composite toe or a soft toe. You can get it with the Brunt toe composite, Brunt toe soft, and the Brunt toe, it just adds a layer of reinforcement up here at the toes for better wear protection up front. And the soles are very similar to the Bullduck boots that I have from Brunt. The soles are heat resistant up to 572 degrees Fahrenheit. They're slip and oil resistant. There's a lot of ground contact here, right? There's no heel. This is like a wedged sole. So you have a lot of ground contact, a lot of traction, and it's comfy. Oh, it's comfy. That's what I want to talk about. This is what's on the inside of them. They have this cushion system, really thick and soft and squishy insole. And below that is a smaller piece that that's how it comes to you. And if you want a more of a regular fit, you leave that in there. But if you have wide feet and want more room, or you want more of a relaxed foot, relaxed fit, you take this out and you get more of a relaxed fit. I've got really wide feet, so this has to come out on all of my Brunt boots. But this goes on the inside, and it's really comfortable. Also, I didn't mention there's three different welt options for this, where it's the method of attaching the sole to the boot itself. Oh, waterproofing, you can get it waterproof or no waterproofing. For these, I chose to go with no waterproofing, because if you live in a hot climate, that extra protection on the inside is going to trap moisture and heat just a little bit more. So just from the nature of waterproofing. So I went without the waterproofing to make this a little bit more breathable. And I've noticed that it's a little bit more breathable on these super hot days. Anyway, super comfortable boot. Had them for a couple days, really like them. And these are now my daily drivers, which is nice. If you want to check out any more boots or apparel from Brunt, you can do so by using my link and using my coupon code to save yourself a little bit of money on your first purchase. Anyway, thanks to Brunt for supporting this video. Time to get to work. All right, back in business over here. And that's how much we ended up with when we had to quit the other day. So I'm going to knock this out real quick, fire up the chipper one last time for this job, get this all taken care of. But that being said, we've already got a huge pile of chips, which is really nice. We'll just spread this out over here probably. And all of this is good firewood for the upcoming outdoor fires, you know, this winter. This has been down for quite a while, so it's starting to dry out and check on the ends a little bit. It's going to be a little bit wet for this season, but for an outdoor fire pit, totally fine. I'm not going to save this for inside once we get the wood-burning stove in there. Yeah, getting some good resources from what we have available. Sure does feel good to check the box and get this task done. There wasn't a lot of work here today, but it was an unfinished task, and I can't stand leaving myself unfinished tasks to finish another day. That's just aggravating. Kind of situational with this particular project. Real quick, Nolly has completely recovered from whatever was wrong with his neck, that snake bite that I thought, I don't know what it was, completely recovered from that. But we had to put him in a cone because he goes in the pond so much that he got a hot spot on his rear end that he just won't leave alone. So he's in the cone of shame for a couple days until that hot spot heals up. And look how much I've had to duct tape it. Nolly boy, I've had to duct tape this. Somebody in the comment section called Belgian Malinois Belgian Missiles, and that is just an unbelievably accurate description. These dogs are missiles. They go through everything. They don't go around stuff, they go through stuff. And Nolly, if you won't sit still, I can't record you, but hey buddy, sit. Nolly, sit. Thank you, sir. Belgian Missiles, they go right through stuff, and for the most part, Grace is an obstacle avoider. She's smacked into a couple things here and there, but nothing like Nolly. Nolly is just a bulldozer. He's not as agile and as limber as Grace, so he just plows through stuff. Isn't that right, buddy? Yeah, he's just a big old teddy bear. He's just a big old teddy bear. Look at that. You're a good boy. He's probably like, well, I can't scratch my head, daddy, and it feels good, and it feels good. So yeah, gosh, look at that cone. Anyway, Nolly's doing good. Nolly's doing great. Speaking of doing good, this chipper, this is the Splitfire 4090, and I like it. I really do. So there's a big, wide intake chute right here, so you're not getting clogged up as much as far as the wide branches and sticks when they're so wide that they can't fit into the intake. A little nice, big, wide intake. You can get a lot of stuff in here. As far as big, wispy, wide branches, you can just pile it in and shove it down, and as soon as it grabs down there, it just sucks it down. So that's working out good for us. I do like the chute to be able to more direct locate where your chips go, and this doesn't throw them ridiculously far with the chute on. Of course, I have this tilted down a little bit, so it just kind of goes here, and I watched some sales videos, I guess marketing videos, from Splitfire, and they ran this without the chute. I believe this chute's actually an accessory. Oh, speaking of which, looks like I have a little gap here, so I've got to adjust my clamps. Okay, noted. Got to tighten that up a little bit. Where was I going with that? So yeah, the marketing videos of them using this without the chute, I mean, they were blowing a pile of chips, you know, way back there, and it was starting to accumulate back there, but it just ripped up the grass all the way from A to B without that chute on there, and I guess that speaks for how much this thing just violently ejects chips. It's a basic setup. It really is. It's just a flywheel down at the bottom. Gravity's going to help pull it down or push it down, and then as soon as it hits the chips, chips, as soon as it hits the blades, then it just pulls it down naturally anyway, so you don't have to mess with an infeed roller, which I really like. I didn't really enjoy the infeed roller on our last chipping setup. And then I did have a couple clogs in it, and popping those four clamps off, you can take this whole chute out, and then boom, there's your flywheel. Cool thing about that is this chute has a tab. I don't know if it's even showing, but there's a tab right there that depresses down on a safety switch, so if this chutes off, you're not going to get spark on the engine, so you're not going to run it, so that's a pretty good safety feature. Anyway, thumbs up so far. One thing that I wish on this machine, two things actually, and I think they're both Honda related. Well, one of them is. I wish the fuel tank was larger. We run this thing quite a bit per session and run out of gas every single time we use this thing. Start it with a full tank, we're going to run it out guaranteed. That's the first thing that I wish, but I think that's more of a Honda thing than it is a Splitfire thing. Second thing is, I wish this thing had a hour tachometer, so you could see how many hours is on the engine, and better monitor maintenance for fluid for oil changes, really. But you know what, it's just a small engine, change the oil once a year, that should be pretty much fine with one of these. We're not going to, this is not a commercial application, so I think that should be fine. But so far, so good on this tool added to our arsenal. I haven't used the trailer pull behind feature just yet, because I don't have something that's really convenient to put right there to gather the chips. Not yet anyway, I've got some things in mind. Keep in mind the capacity of that chipper. It's only a three and a half inch diameter chipper. Well online it says four inches as far as the capacity, but on the intake chute there is a steel cutout that shows three and a half inches. So there's a little, which is also handy by the way, because I can just stick my piece of wood right up here and be like, oh too big, or yes it's able to go with it or able to chip it. But that's like a known consideration though, because when we were trying to figure out our next chipper for the property, we could either step up to something much larger to handle like, you know, five, six inch diameter stuff as far as a standalone unit. But I think for us it made more sense to not do that, because that's the perfect size material for outdoor fire pit, outdoor fire fires, which we really enjoy, especially when it's not 16 bajillion degrees, which today it's going to be a hot one, but it's overcast, which is helping a lot. So this meets our criteria as far as capacity. We can chip all the small stuff, chip all of the pretty long medium sized stuff, but once it gets to that size to where you're going to grab that piece of wood to throw it on a fire, then for us, don't chip it, save it for the fire pit. Because like I said, when it's cool outside, I love sitting around a fire. Not only do I love sitting around a campfire, but when you go inside and you can like smell the fire on your clothes, I don't know, that's nature's cologne or something. I just love the smell of campfire soaked clothing, if that makes any sense. That's pretty handy too. We have some family from out of town coming to visit for an unfortunate reason. Another family member on the other side of the family passed away. So they're here visiting for that and they're not in good health visiting us. So we're going to cut out and go eat supper with them. But I guess the rest of today is just going to be kind of one of those boring necessity days. I've got to get some of this grass knocked down all over the clearing and random spots all over the place. I think, yeah, Jamie's got the cart out. I think she's going to get the grass going for putting in the compost because we've emptied our compost already, which is great. Someone said in one of the comments that you know how you're getting, one of the ways that you can tell you're getting old is if you make the comment of, look at that compost, that's some good compost right there. And I guess that's what's happening. So hey, I turned 40 in a couple months, so there's that. Got me a big old sun hat going on now. Speaking of big old something or other, we got a burn pile that's much taller than I am. And we still have a couple root balls in there from the original clearing job on this two acres. And they still haven't burned yet. We've had so many fires over here and there's still a couple in there. So I think tonight when we get back home, the sun starts to set, all the dew starts to fall because, you know, everything gets soaking wet every single night because of crazy humidity here. I think then we'll go ahead and light this and back away because everything in there has been quite dead and dry for quite a while. This log garden is just exploding with life. Look at this watermelon. She got a watermelon going on in there. There's a big one right there. That one's not quite ready. Another smaller one right there-ish somewhere hidden in there is another one. And then the vines come way out here. There's a couple more watermelons started on this side. This primson rose just blossomed. It was huge, or it is huge rather. It was just a small little itty bitty transplant. And on this side it's overgrown with those watermelon vines as well. I'm not too sure if there's any watermelons on this side but I don't want to weed eat next to this and chop up the watermelon vine. And then this is southern dewberries mixed in with something else. I think there's a weed in the middle of there. And catnip. We're about to harvest this catnip. Let me get the watermelon vine out of it. I'm about to harvest this catnip and let our cats relax. And speaking of relax, I think that's what I'm going to do for just a little while. We've got, like I said, a dinner date with some family in just a little bit. Also, look how much grass has already grown back. I was talking to Jamie about that earlier and I thought, you know, next year we may end up actually having to buy a typical lawnmower, a riding lawnmower of some kind because we're starting to starting to have a lawn. And the more we tinker with stuff around here and keep putting stuff in the burn pile, the more clear everything gets. And I think a lawn has begun, at least on that side anyway. We're still over here near the sawmill. Still spotty but not too bad for not planting any grass, not spending any money on grass, and letting nature do its thing. There's Jamie for scale. Bye-bye, root balls. Yeah. Let me jump in and pause for just a second to talk about the sponsor of this video, which is Brunt. You know, I've got so much Brunt stuff now. It's all good stuff. These are the Bull Duck boots and they are a slip-on boot, which I prefer for a mud boot. So these are waterproof. You can get them with or without waterproofing. But I wanted to get waterproofing so that way I had a dedicated go-to comfortable, rainy, crummy kind of outside day boot. So these are my waterproof mud boots and dirty mucky muck boots. They are really comfortable and that's because on the inside there is, if I can pull it out, a pretty nice cushioned insole. I've been wearing the snot out of these, so this is probably filthy and stinky. But anyway, nice squishy insole to go in there. There's another one that goes down below it right out of the box, but you remove that if you want a little bit more of a relaxed fit or, like me, got really wide feet and you take that layer out and you've got a much better, much more comfortable fit for a wide foot. Foot. Foot. I just combined boot and then foot. It's a foot. Anyway, I really like these boots. You can get them with or without waterproofing, with or without a hard toe. This is the soft toe variety. The soles themselves are really comfortable and I can actually squish them with just my fingers. Soles are comfortable. They are heat resistant up to 572 degrees Fahrenheit. They're slip and spill resistant and they're barnyard resistant. You know what happens in a barn, right? A lot of stinky stuff going on. Well, just hose that off at the end of the day. Anyway, if you want to check these out, I really like these boots. I also have the Merins. There we go. The Merin boots. Those are my daily drivers now. They're a little bit shorter. I don't know how tall this is, but the Merins come in a six inch or an eight inch shaft length and I got the six inch. So they're my daily drivers. These are my mud boots. Lots of other great stuff from Brunt. I've got their pants and shorts as well. Check them out. If you do want to check them out, I'll have a coupon code that you can use to save a little bit on your first purchase. Oh, and also you can try these on the job. If you don't like them after wearing them on the job, send them back. That's pretty cool. Not a lot of companies do that. Oh, another company actually that does that. Not a single one. Anyway, check them out if you're interested. Use my coupon code to save a little money and thank you Brunt for sponsoring this video.