Wood Joinery (Part 3):

I was actually able to carve the entire log faster than I thought, still, an hour was more than I had accounted for. Regardless now that I had one of them done, I began carving an outline that I would have to cut in order to create one of the sides used to make the Hako-aikaki-shachi-sen-shikuchi. And although I did mess up once, I was still able to use the same log because of the extra wood, only needing to cut the now useless part of the wooden beam.

Once I successfully made the Hako-aikaki-shachi-sen-shikuchi successfully, I just carved a triangle on top of the edge as planned before doing the same thing on the other end of the wooden beam, followed by carving out the excess wood making it so that all that was left was a 1ft by 1ft support beam with wooden triangles connected to the top on both ends.

By the time I was done, it was already 11:25 AM and I knew that I didn't have too much time left before we had to go hunting, at least not enough to make enough progress to be worth waiting for, so I decided it would be best to just go hunting right then, which was the right call since everybody seemed to be hungry as well.

The hunt itself didn't take long and we were able to once again get enough food for two days, what did take long though was setting up the fire, mainly because Francisco wanted to try out setting up lunch by himself. And since I didn't have anything against him starting the fire by himself I just watched nearby in case something went wrong and waited.

In the end, thankfully nothing happened, and we were able to enjoy lunch without any setbacks. Plus, although it did take longer than usual to set up the fire, it wasn't a bad thing, as it had given me enough time to make a ball that everyone else could use. Although I wasn't able to make a normal soccer ball by weaving leaves, I was still able to make a small ball using nearby vines and turning it into a ball the same way you do for yarn.

I gave it to them before going back to where I had left off, all I knew was that they seemed confused when I gave it to them. Regardless I had to get going as soon as possible to finish the base before the end of the day while still having time to do my workout. So I did, honestly even ignoring the fact that I had to do this, I actually rather enjoyed it, as it distracted me from everything else happening around me.

I was able to finish all four beams by 4:35 and only had to set the whole thing up before I could finally stop for the day and get my workout done. Although I did enjoy doing this, that didn't mean that it wasn't exhausting. Even back at the academy, I had never felt this tired excluding the obstacle courses of course.

Moving on, I knew that I wanted to make the first house right next to the farmland, so I decided to set the whole thing up right next to the now 'empty' space created by the cut trees, by doing this though, I encountered another problem, no matter where I put the base, it always had a tree inside of it.

Knowing that there was no way to get around it without changing the design for the settlement, I had to settle for removing the tree completely. The main body of the tree itself was easy as it only required me to chop it down, which in turn gave me even more wood to work with, the problem came mainly from the stump left behind.

I decided on making a wooden shovel to make things easier for me. Removing a stump, although somewhat simple, was still really tedious without the help of machinery, requiring someone to have to dig out all of the land around the stump in a small-ish radius and cut off all of the roots before being able to remove the stump.

By the time I had dug a big enough area not only had an hour and a half already gone by, but I was way too tired to do anything anymore. Forget training I was probably not even going to be able to remove the tree stump right now. Thankfully everyone else noticed what was going on and came over to check on me.

By now it was already 6:04 pm and I still had to fill up the empty hole back up, not to mention cook lunch and set up the base of the house. It was now abundantly clear to me that I wouldn't be able to do my workout today, but that was just the way things were, not much I could do to change that.

The rest of the day went as expected and I was able to get everything ready before the end of the day, and although I wasn't able to set up the support pillars today, I was still able to start thinking about what I could use for the roof design, as I was able to simulate the top part of of the wall by using three of the wooden beams that were planed to be used on the base and was able to determine that all that was missing was a support pillar in the middle.

I already knew that I would make the roof into a triangular prism, so using the 3 wooden beams for the base as an outline, I would say that it would be best to insert a row of 5 wooden pillars to the top wooden beam and cutting them so that they would make a triangular shape that I could then use as one of the faces of the triangular prism.

From there I would just wing everything, as from the look of things it should just be as easy as connecting pieces of wood by making holes into some of the wooden beams and then using them to hold other wooden beams in place. As for the square base, it would just be made by using the Sampo-gumi-shikuchi technique (look it up).

Although I wasn't able to accomplish everything I wanted to do today, I would still consider it a success, plus, progress was still progress, I could only hope to get enough done tomorrow in order to be able to get back into my workout routine, although I had already been following it for more than a month, stopping for today meant that tomorrow would be twice a painful.