New toy

With Vik having been away over winter for 5 weeks, one thing that became clear was that none of the female members of the family were prepared to attempt to try to start a 2 stroke chainsaw and cut up firewood.

Since we were students still living in the UK we have scavenged firewood. This became a necessity for us at student times as the miners were on strike and we couldn't buy coal and we didn't have room to store more that a day or two of wood so getting it delivered wasn't an option. We lived in central London at the time so scrap from building sites kept us warm.

These days we still get a fair bit that's been left out as "free firewood" plus the bins outside furniture makers and broken pallets. Added to this is felled and fallen trees from the local area (quite a lot of it currently due to the stormy winter).

Without a Vik to cut our firewood, we used electric heating instead but realised that we girls really needed to become able to cut our own firewood (Vik has also been recovering from a broken pelvis) and we were considering getting an electric chainsaw.

So when the petrol chainsaw gave up after over a decade of service, we decided that rather that get it repaired we would replace it so we have a new 2000 Watt 16" blade Homelite CWE2016.

Its rather good. I've had a go and it was light enough for a WAFF to handle easily, didn't kick back at me (its got these funny teeth things that go wedge up against the wood to hold it in place) and if it did kick back its also got a cut out.

The fire has been lit again and the cats are happy.

The RepRap is running again printing out a new Y motor bracket (slightly reinforced) for Child but only small ones that can complete during the day as Vik hasn't yet upgraded the software to the version with a pause facility.