Wood 'n' Soul

I went to the monthly contractors’ breakfast this morning. The main topic was about mold: how to detect it, how to eliminate it and the problems associated with some of the scarier stuff. Because of the potential for high dollar litigation, this can be a very expensive issue. It can be a very serious problem, and there is a lot of hype and fear associated with it - largely unfounded according to the biologists that talked this morning - difficult to find the real facts from pseudo-facts. If one catches it in the early stages, it is a very simple problem to resolve.

Fortunately for me and the things I build, mold and the problems associated with it aren't much of an issue. Plain old everyday wood mold - which is on most construction lumber, is completely harmless and I don’t see much of that even. The talk made me glad I’m not a general contractor with that 10 year liability for it!! Still a very interesting morning.

The had an infrared camera there - cost about $20,000 and they passed it around for us to see [don't know that I would have had the stones to do that, but I know the folks better than they did I guess]. It was really cool to use it - looked at a couple of my buddies with the infrared - weird looking at people with it - one could easily see the warm and cool spots on people's bodies. They took a barely wet sponge and wiped a couple of places on the wall and it was very visible with the camera. Still, I liked looking at the people best.

I glued up the second sample panel today - using Domino, of course. It makes for superior joinery in a jiffy! After I pulled the panel out of the clamps, it only took a few minutes to sand to 220 grit - just about ready for a seal coat - the alignment was nearly perfect. Here you see it clamped to my MFT for sanding.


It needs to be trimmed to final size. Then I’ll put a seal coat on in the morning and maybe even get a coat or two of topcoat on tomorrow. I think we do about 5 coats for this sample.