goodbye solar kiln

The solar kiln has been with us since our first year on  a parking lot off of Hall Street. There was no structure for sheltering lumber there so we moved to that "structure" on Brown that you can see from the back of our current location on Farlin. That is where it lived for years cranking out dry lumber for 6-8 months a year:

Since it only was effective for a portion of the year it soon became a bottleneck for getting dry wood into bins for sale. After we moved to our very own lot with better electrical arrangements we slapped a dehumidifier kiln on the front and extended the drying season to all but the coldest month or two.

The two layers of deteriorating polycarbonate that form the slanted solar roof were poor insulation for those cold months so it was better than nothing in, say, March, but it did not work as well as a dedicated dehumidifier kiln should. After 14 years and two moves it was time to replace the solar kiln completely:

We considered a sea container but for the price of an uninsulated one we found an old beer distributing reefer truck:

Our plan was to remove the insulated box and jettison the remainder of the truck. First Joe cuts off the sheet metal hanging below the floor:

Need more cutters.

That's better. Other side too and unbolt the underside. All loose and ready to be lifted off the truck frame:

Some creative strapping to the forklift and we hope it is enough to get it into the air. It is!

Here it is shoved into its new home behind our building. Those long fork extensions allow us to load the pallets from the end:

Plywood for the floor:

And its first load of walnut and cherry:

Just as when we allowed sawyer issues to build up a backlog of saw logs, the accumulated kiln bottleneck will take some time to relieve completely but this is an arrangement that should convert air dry to kiln dry in a week or two and catch us up.  It was recently 120 degrees Fahrenheit in there on a 30 degree day.