Sunday hard-chaw 300417

City-boys and softies can go back to their lattes for this one because I going to dump out some material science.  It's about how to shift things without busting your back or using the work of a petrol engine [and thereby destroying the planet].

• Archimedes said "give me a place to stand and I can move the world" in reference to a lever and fulcrum. By pushing with a small force at one end end of a log and moving it a long way, you can shift a heavy weight a small distance on the other side of a fulcrum. A pulley is essentially the same in a pull system. With a suitable arrangement of pulleys you can pull a rope a long old distance and move a large weight a short way.
• A child's explanation of how pulleys work
• Ditto for adults
• Make a pulley-block: beautiful and functional
• A lots of string to lift stacks of shipping containers
• Using the theory and 45:1 leverage to uproot a tree . . .
• Woodworking. Once the tree is out of the ground you will want to use the wood.
• But you want to cut wood safely so you need a lesson auf Deutsch in how and where to cut wood under stress
• For firewood there are 100 ways to split the stuff into manageable lumps without using a saw and splitting maul. Less ecological but mighty high throughput. An engineers wet dream.
• If time is money, and it is for the power company, you'll want to trim back the encroaching forest as quickly as possible; even if that means using a bank of circular saws dangling from a helicopter
• Tree huggers will feel all guilty now, so you'll want to watch how to cut out a 6x6 [15x15cm] beam from a tree-trunk with hand-tools - you've used your quota of gas on the fire-wood. The bird song is almost as loud as a chain-saw!
• Starting from a single beam with hand-tools and time, you can build an entire off-grid home
• Or a bigger project try restoring 2200 hectares of Texas limestone desert to a watery paradise. It's like The Man Who Planted Trees . . . but with grass.
• Other miscellaneous materials:
• Moving 20 tonnes by hand Wallimedes of Michigan 
• Using Secureset (tm) expanded epoxy resin to set fence-posts or 20 ton blocks upright. Much lighter and easier to handle than concrete.