The undoing of a japanese window frame

This is a sequence of pictures taken during the undoing of a window frame of a 60 old japanese house. You'll find it long and tedious (tell you from now...) if you're not into carpentry and how to make a good house or follow any of the very many schools of ecobuilding house making... Anyway
At moments it got to look like some sort of mind game to play fair and easy... but it end up being a dusty demolition, with a big wealth of insight on the oldtime japanese building techniques, the quality and the materials of a really well made type of house.

This is the top corner of the window we have to dismantle. Notice that the vertical pieces, painted in that blue grey color, has a precisely carved notch running all through the profile of the horizontal piece... it's quite amazing and feels too bad but we are meant to do it... c'est la vie!

When we remove the roof cover of the frame and the win the fight against the top piece, this is how the left side looked like. Amazing carpentry! 

Here is couple of detailed pictures of the left corner of the base (the sill) of the window.
This notch was inside the lowest part of the piece described in the previous pictures. Please notice the nails *very well hidden* under an about 5mm-thick layer of wood... note also that the vertical pieces did not make it and ended up smashed in pieces.

The right corner of that same board of the window sill, still partially inserted in the vertical piece.

Here is a detail of the center of the window sill, showing the notch that was holding the central post.
Notice that the profile of the piece entering here was a good 7mm wider and perfectly sealed.




 Amazingly long board but unfortunately had to be cut in the process...

There is no way out of the series of tricks of multiple notches. So here is what we ended up doing to take out the top post...
Soon after starting we have always been against the nails so pretty much working with all the nail bits that you'll see later on pointing against you... 

Notice in this section that this top post is actually made of two separated pieces, one not planed on top of the one with the glossy brown finish. Between the two pieces it sticks out the inserted portion of the table that was closing the window sill box. You'll see it better in the next picture.  

 

 The central notch of the top beam.

This is the outside of the window after grinding and demolishing the external 30mm of some really hardly compacted dark grey cement layer under the peach color rendering.

What a mess of noise and dust!
In the next picture, as you can also have a look here at in the lower right corner, you can see the frame of the floor of the the room where we are connecting into.

 Other details of how various parts were connected together. Still rough surfaces but amazingly precisely cut. 

This is an interesting detail of great quality: the blue metal piece is the last bit of the top-right corner of the roof of the window box. 

As you see it's fixed under the horizontal board but was sticking out passing through the lower board, already missing in this picture... too fast steps sometimes, too fast to take good pictures at!

The second day of work we proceeded taking down the plastic cover another section of frame, the one holding all the rendering boards and the cabinet that was behind it. We are still debating on the posts to insert as we'll cut through the last section with the fan on top. Proper planning required in the next days so you'll see other updates soon.  

Gifts on a japanese cupboard

Here's something that can be easily found in Japan, both in regular households and in the most common shops and hardware stores: it's binchotan, or sumi in japanese language that is charcoal, or biochar... wood matter transformed into its full content of C-carbon element, through a finely elaborated process. 

In this case, this remarkably heavy chunk has been placed on this shelf to absorb moisture and the smells of cooking... excellent piece indeed.

I am looking forward to start producing stuff like this... really soon!

Farmers in the jungle

You live for 40 years... all your life in the middle of the jungle then someday, somebody discovers you and blogs about you on a touch screen. Wouldn't you run for the jungle again right away, would you???

This is a truly amazing heart breaking story, about a father you lost his wife and their two older kids due to an american bomb, during the Vietnam war. and runs into the jungle with the youngest kid... and he raised him there in the jungle, growing vegetables and hunting for all his life! The kid is now 41 years old and his father is 82 years old. Read here the whole story.
Waw... they must be masters farmers... the real masters! Learning everything from the jungle! Think about it... what a deep knowledge!

Interconnected geodesic teepee structures

Here is a couple of faded pictures of a new sort of design that I've been having in my mind lately. It's a sort of hybrid teepee geodesic using the framing support of teepee (with multiple crossed "A" frames), all natural materials like wood, bamboo, coconut leaves, earth, straw, clay, possibly hemp fiber to make hempcrete filling of the framing facing north of wind exposed area... which are expected to be very small, considering a surrounding set of fruit bearing trees and bushes.
Further updates of this design will be posted also in Geodesica, a dedicated facebook page dealing with geodesic concepts and inspiration.

Vertical windmills along the highway

 

In the last car driving tour across Japan, I kept having this project-vision in my mind: it's about setting up a series of small vertical axis windmills within the guard-rails of highways with separated lanes: just need to place the windmills with their turbines rotating accordingly to the flow of traffic... and it's done: they will always turn, even when there is no wind at all! I want to see this around every japanese highway! Please pass it on and make it happen, there is way too many energy sources that get wasted every day!

The fire in a log

On some sort of creative way of ecological thinking, there is number of ways in with you can transform wood into thermal energy for cooking.
I had already seen this technique to cut a fire log but this is the first time I got the chance to take a picture of it. You can actually put a pot on it or move it reasonably safely up until a certain point... and that's something to do with an open fire. Enjoy the sequence and please notice the hexagonal patter ;)

Surely it works also binding smaller branches together with a couple of rounds of good wire. Something to keep in mind and try someday.

Being this still just a simple open fire it's maybe a little better than a 3-stone-fire, because of its inbuilt draft, being possibly more fuel efficient and manageable... but at the end you "only" get a pile of ashes. It's better to produce biochar, of course! Cool though! 

High tech from the past

In the last days I was compelled to consider an interesting evolution of one of the most daily human and animal activities... the one that is linking ourselves with the very source of Life, the soil where we grow the food we eat: I am talking about releasing our bodily products.
Well... in this magic moment, we are totally One with the Universe, letting go and allowing Life to pass through ourselves feeding our body. We are again animals (with anima = soul) and we are truly creators! How is it possible to disconnect our Soul from such an amazingly simple but profound activity?
Something has been going on quite backwards in the way we got used to do this in the latest generations... I am now in Japan: land of high-tech development and fascinating traditions. Nowadays something this is pretty common:
 A fully automated device with custom heated seat, spraying warm water to our bums or to the front for ladies and automatically flushing away our productions!

Actually in some of these devices you can also make it play a water flushing sound to inspire your moments! Amazing... amuzing... but really high-tech? or too much tech? and if there's a black out? and what about water? where does it all go?
Disconnected from what we are really doing, how and why... is it really something so un-natural?
In the reality, japanese people truly know how to do it and why! Indeed it's been just since the end of WWII that they have been forced to change: many houses still now and even in the middle of crowded towns do not have flush toilet but kept the old style "hole in the ground" and subscribe a regular and efficient service of pick-up and disposal managed by the local administration. Surely and sadly enough they do not handle it in the same way they used to do it in the past and they do not aim anymore at the production of human-compost also known as humanure. Indeed we produce the best fertilizer to grow what we eat...
I was so happy when I learned that: everything made so much sense as every cycle of Life appeared finally and perfectly closed. But check this out: it's indeed a marvelous piece of high-tech from the past!

It's a mechanic device created by Mr.Moule a long time ago... in 1873! It's an earth closet and instead of wasting (usable+drinkable) water it pours an appropriate amount of dry earth to cover up our fresh productions! The aim in this case is to manage (odorlessly) the whole process and produce at the end the very best fertilizer to grow our food. This indeed is the way to go and it's possibly much easier and straight forward, compared to the usual "scoop of sawdust" of a regular compost toilet. I cannot wait to set up some device like this as soon as the space/time will allow me to manifest it again... Thank you Mr.M! ;)