Day 10?: Chain Saw Problems and Brilliant Weather

Today was meant to be Day 10 of the construction project, but it wasn't to be. The weather was brilliant, with blue sky and the low midday Sun making the tree tops glow in warm red-orange light. The photo above was taken long the road out of Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory. Also last night was clear, and northern lights were seen north of Sodankylä.

The plan for Day 10 today was to clean up after the ground works. Due to the location of Our House and the water and drainage pipes, quite a number of trees had to be felled. These are now scattered all over the place, and I planned to use the chain saw to cut off their branches and then pile them up somewhere neatly. However, the chain saw – which I bought second-hand in October and never used since – decided that waking from winter sleep isn't desirable. I wasn't able to start it up. It ended up on the "operation table" in our kitchen, got a new spark plug, cleaned air filter, fresh two-stroke fuel, and a carburettor adjustment, but all that didn't help. Thus it'll go back to the shop on Monday, and I will ask them to sort it out. One possible problem might be that the grid in the carburettor is dirty and plugged up, but I couldn't figure out how to take it out of the machine in order to open it. Anyone having any advice, message me. So Day 10 was not to be – for now.

Day 8: Moulds Removed, Concrete Drying

Today not much happened at the site. In the morning, the moulds were removed, and the walls were covered by large tarps. Also the heating system for the concrete was removed. In the early afternoon, I met the site supervisor at Our House, and we discussed the work so far. First, however, we used a very fancy thermometer to measure the surface temperature of the concrete foundations. It turned out that they were frozen in some places (which is bad), and clearly above freezing in other places (which is good). Later in the evening I returned and with the help of my colleague Juha, we covered all the remaining walls. Now the chemical reaction in the concrete is the only source of heat. Let's hope that is enough. The countdown is definitely running: the house will come in a week's time!

The instrument, when pushing a button, projects a crosshair with a laser onto the surface to be measured, and then it does the measurement instantly using the infrared radiation from that surface. In the photo above I am checking out constantly cold floors in our current flat with the instrument. The minimum and maximum temperatures are the ones observed during the same session, and in this case I had pointed at the cold window, and at a halogen spot light. The device is rated to measure temperatures between –35°C and +950°C with an error of less than a degree. This comes at a price, the IR thermometer costs roughly a thousand euros, but fortunately we were able to borrow this one for free.

Since no new photos were taken today, here's an old one from 18th December, when the company, which owns the local electrical grid, brought the cable to our plot. Since we will be slightly off the main road, Rovakaira needed to place three poles to suspend the cables from, and then continue underground to our plot. From there, we had to bring the cables to the house, which happened on Day 5.

A very handy tool

Today I tested a tool I bought recently on the recommendation of a friend. Do you know these ratchet lashings used for securing cargo on a lorry or trailer? They are flat sturdy belts with a hook on one side, and then a separate ratchet mechnism with a hook. Have you ever thought you could use that to pull or lift some heavy stuff just a little bit?

Well, it does not work, because the belt is wound up on a small roller, and since this is only meant to tighten just that last bit to secure a load, the roller can only hold very few turns of belt.

Now, here comes the Swedes, who invented just the tool that can do both:

It comes with a 10-m long belt, and then a ratchet mechanism that's slightly more complicated than the usual setup. It has two alternative ways of feeding the belt through it, thus turning it into a cargo lashing system, or a small hand winch. The best part: it packs into a very small space due to soft belt instead of stiff steel wire, and it is very lightweight. In fact a lot of people here carry it under the seats of the snow mobiles as recovery equipment.

Today I had to pull a euro palette loaded with over 200 kg of stuff about a metre on the wet flat bed of a trailer into a better position. Easy as pie with this thing.

Here are the instructions, which are in Swedish, but the pictures basically tell everything that's important.

Another very nice feature of this winch is that the loose end can just be pulled straight through the mechanism. The locking system auto-releases and thus makes it possible to pretighten very quickly before using the handle for doing the tough stuff.

Is there any minus to it? — For heavier loads (I don't know yet how heavy, this is rated up to 400 kg), the lever of the handle is a bit short and it might get too hard to operate. But that just serves as an over-load protection.

Click on the images for larger version.

You want this? — You can get it in well-stocked tool shops across Finland and Sweden, and I guess elsewhere in the Nordic Countries, too.