I make a ten-dollar bill

Not an actual ten-dollar bill, since the Treasury is so lacking in humor about such little japes, but an example of the bill’s namesake:  a sawbuck.*

Ever since The Shedding Tree dropped that last big limb, I’ve wanted a sawbuck to hold up the pieces while I chainsawed them into usable firewood.  I found some nice plans for a buck with adjustable supports here, and this morning I went over to the Despot and bought thirty-two feet of treated 2×4, four feet of 1¼” doweling, a spade bit and some decking screws, and started.

I found that next time I do something like this, I need not to buy sixteen-foot boards; they turned out to be very hard to cut with a table saw, which was all I had.  As the cuts get longer, they bend and bind on the blade. But I managed anyhow, and only cut one piece really wrong—and even that I managed to salvage and use as a cross-brace.  After I cut all the arms, I drilled out the holes for the center dowel on which everything rotates, and found that drilling into lumber that’s still damp with the impregnating treatment makes it hang up and yanks the drill out of your hand.

Everything after that, though, was uneventful and at the end of three hours or so, I produced this:

(I’ll get a better picture later, but this one at least gives an idea of it.  The log on it is a four-foot section of the limb the Shedding Tree threw down.)

While I was doing all that, T went round and sprayed things with Roundup, and her bf, whom she brought home this weekend to Meet the Parents†, mowed the lawn, which saved me a lot of effort and Dressing Up in earmuffs and respirator to do it myself.  (I’m a sight in full lawn-mowing gear.)

* The earliest ten-dollar bills had the Roman numeral “X” on the reverse to identify its denomination, and the resemblance to a sawbuck gave the bill its nickname.

† This one is serious, folx.  T is talking about marriage year after next, which hasn’t happened with previous ones.