Building INSANE Suspended BIG BALL CABIN! (Don Becomes a LORD!) - Completing the Outside

this video is sponsored by established titles there's gonna be more on that later hey guys guess what I've got my Cabela's Bass Pro binoculars my spy glasses out here and I've been I've been bird watching I think I think I can see an American Dipper or is that a is that a meadowlark I'm not even sure he's building a nest in the trees let's go check it out welcome back to the Pine Forest I'm creating my house ball as it turns out I'm in a little friendly competition with Zach Fowler over at Fowler's Bakery and mischief and he has challenged me to a build off building a mini house ball and I think that's pretty cool but as it turns out I may have misheard what he said he actually said mini house boat build uh and then totally blasting mine out of the water Battleship style I was like I gotta build a houseboat what am I gonna do with this giant ball I feel like I'm behind the eight ball on this one because uh yeah I haven't even started my mini house but I've got to get my mini house ball finished before I can even start my mini house boat build I don't know he's already gotten started on his mini house boat build so uh you guys can go check a look at his page to see how he's doing on his mini house boat and maybe you know you guys can leave some comments Down Below on what you guys think I should build for my mini house boat build I kind of I guess um I really dropped the ball on this one I've got to finish my house ball maybe you guys can give me some ideas on what you'd like to see in a house boat if you're just joining me I'll just do a quick recap of what we've done so far so we took some Old Wire spools we cut them up we used the circle that was left over and we made a sphere by welding them all together and then we added an equator we added a door and then we took the time and made a teepee out of some really big Timbers set it up and then winched it up in the air and let it hang that's where we are so far so this is episode two where we're going to take this sphere and we're going to clad it with some of the world's finest Cedar the Eastern White Cedar and we're going to close it in to make it a fully functioning cabin suspended in midair now let's get started you guys can see that that's the growth rings you can see how thin the growth rings are later on in life you can see down near the Middle where the tree first started it was adding growth rings very large growth rings up until about this point so the last inch you probably have about 20 or 30 years crammed in that last inch and then 50 or so years before that which is crazy how slow it grows once it gets to a certain size that's why they encourage you to plant new trees is because the old ones don't grow as quickly well Don and I are at the lumber store what are you gonna pick you're gonna pick the straightest two by four out there in the forest I think we already got the chosen one true we have been looking around a little bit uh because we're practicing good forestry management techniques here this is the cedar area of the forest so there's a lot of Cedar that grows here and uh practicing good Forest management technique generally speaking you would take a clump of three cedar trees and you would take out two of the three cedar trees if the clump of four you generally take out three of those clump of four and you let the other one sort of Thrive they only get to a specific size because they just don't have that many nutrients to uh to thrive because they're so tightly close together and they're also competing for Sunshine and whatnot so that's what we're doing right now is we're trying to select something that is going to allow everything that is left over to prosper so this guy over here this is this is the old the old bat in this clump of trees so I'm probably going to take this one down uh because I think it's going to be ideal wood for what I want to do with it and uh it's surrounded by a number of little trees that will Thrive having more light so this is an ash tree this is going to come down due to the emerald ash borer at some point so my plan is to actually use this ash tree kind of as a slide because I want it to slide down pull it out and not damage any other trees because I have some some budding I have some budding maple trees up here so this little guy this little guy here is a maple tree as you can see there's maple leaves on it and I want it to uh to prosper and grow but it is shaded so that cedar and then there's a big old there's a by big it's a tall cherry this is a tall cherry tree sitting right here and then we have some more Maple so the idea is to kind of you know you thin in it out you're adding more light to the forest floor you're preventing forest fires younger trees tend to grow faster with more vigor and you know sequester more carbon if you're into that sort of thing but there is a lot of up and coming new stuff this is an Old Forest and it has to be thinned out and I want it to be straight grained and all that sort of stuff so this is uh this is Eastern White Cedar I'm going to knock it down and hopefully it'll go smoothly and we get up to the mill and make our exterior cladding on our sphere you're a little sore from uh from yesterday yesterday we actually did we did firewood all day my arms feel a little bit longer today my legs feel a little bit shorter but does she go well figure well down this way I might as well feed the fish just to see you see the water Clarity seems to be pretty good and then we got some fish food watch yeah hungry little bloggers was that a backflip I give those guys a second helping they seem to be very hungry they seem to be very active I think if the water's cooling down and uh they're they're becoming more and more active so now is the time you can see them right there now is the time to fatten them up because we're gonna let this thing freeze solid for skating in the winter time [Applause] you guys need fish Linden's Fish Hatchery is where we got these trout they're very Hardy fish so like acrobatic trout I'm really excited to talk to you about today's sponsors it's established titles in its historic Scottish custom to Grant land owners in Scotland the title of Lord Laird or lady in English what I've done is I've secretly bought a square foot of land for Dawn I've got the official Proclamation right here and this is uh certifies that Dawn is a owner of a plot of land it makes him Lord Dawn so Dawn doesn't know what this thing is here here Don you get to you get to read it what do you think that is it's it's it's a gift for your hard effort what I think is also really cool is Dawn could possibly change his name to Lord Dawn on his dating profiles or even his plane tickets or even a credit card that's a nice ring to it Lord Dawn I think he's going to be so excited for this what's also great about established titles is they plant a tree for every order with global Charities called one tree planted or trees for the future it is a great effort for reforestation of the planet and I think you guys also might be interested is that the first 200 orders of established titles you could be Dawn's neighbor you guys have always wanted to be neighbors with Dawn now you got the chance so if you use my link you can get a plot of land next to Dawn in Scotland that's pretty cool 200 people first 200 people that order it's a really cool title we could be neighbors we could have like modern self-reliance Kingdom and Edelson Scotland established titles makes a really great last minute gift check them out right now you can use my coupon code modern self-reliance you get an additional 10 off it's kind of like an early Black Friday sale uh you'll check the link in the description below again use the coupon code of modern self-reliance so establishtitles.com modern self-reliance and you can get yourself your very own plot of land so don doesn't know what this thing is here here Don you got to you get to read it what do you think that is it's it's it's it's a gift for your hard efforts oh wow a proclamation whereas Lord Dawn Hereafter referred to as the Lord having by way of petition delivered unto us the intention to purchase and us with the intention to accept established titles has agreed with the Lord this day for the sale of the plot of land of one square foot in particular the plot of land identified and described with there's a plot number and the dates and on behalf the title established titles uh signatures do you think you can build a cabin one square foot wouldn't take long that's that's awesome so there's the plot Number actually I don't know if so people the first 200 people can be your neighbors so is this in Wales is that the no that's uh edelston Scotland oh okay yeah so I've got a square foot of land and you you can now change your dating profiles your credit cards and your uh to to Lord being a lord lord Dawn I would have never guessed enough Isn't that cool that is cool that's like the guy that has everything that and now I have a square foot of land in in Scotland anytime you can clean your logs of the debris and the sand that uh accumulated on the log when you were skidding it up it makes your blade last significantly longer Cedar tends to have a lot of sand in it already so your blades don't have a lot of Life Milling cedar because I think if they suck up the sand when they grow but there was a significant amount of sand sitting on the the side I ended up using the uh it's a Woodman's pal Woodsman pallet's got a tapered Edge on the one side so it doesn't dig in and it seems to be working really well to get the actual bark off the uh off the one side where the majority of the sand was you can't get all the sand off but once that's off then we can we can start Milling it hopefully our blade lasts a really long time well that was a successful trip to the lumber store we got ourselves a couple of white ash trees we're gonna Mill up or just drag them over to the mill and we're gonna Mill them into some really really thin slices because we need them to bend they don't add your favorite stuff to work with look I've already got done how did you already got done an old t-shirt oh okay how did you you always seem to get construct cities it doesn't matter what we're doing you get it on you you got the gloves now right but all by the end of the day I'll have some on me look on your somewhere yeah all my eyelids glued shut or something we'll check back we got some construction adhesive with the pl stuff and we're going to glue it onto the steel [Applause] all right now that we got all our wood sorted out we can start cladding our sphere so it's really hard to attach wood to Steel so what I'm going to do is uh well Dawn's getting me a hand he's here with uh we got some 5 8 plywood we ripped up on the table saw and what the plan is is to use some tech screws screw it to the frame of the sphere and glue it at the same time and that gives us a good nailing Edge because we have to do uh Cedar around the entire we're going to start at the equator the equator of the sphere to do the cedar but first we like have to get the the longitude and the lines that's right longitude are they Latin what's latitudinal equator that's the Equator the latitude and the line the latitude and the line is how we're going to run our Cedar in the longitudinal the longitudinal lines is how we're going to run our plywood and then we'll run our Cedar perpendicular to that wow geography lessons it's crazy let's get uh let's get started uh we had a sort of a rain delay today and it's just sort of dried up now so we've got our sphere all dried off we've actually lowered it to the ground so we can actually work on it a little easier which is really convenient so we've got the the come along up top there we've lowered it to a nice working height uh that'll actually be a godsend because if anybody's ever worked in the air They Know It uh it's not easy if you can move your stuff down lower that's ideal I guess I'm not quite used to this new world material this is is quite Stark comparison between the old plywood and the new plywood I had a couple of pieces left over some like a two foot by eight foot chunk of old Plywood And this is like again it's construction grade 5 8 square Edge Board you know good no sides and this is old plywood and you can see it made the radius no problem didn't Buckle nothing and then the new plywood that I bought the other day okay it broke here it broke here it broke here oh that's the joint so and like it kind of repeated itself everywhere kind of like why did that delaminate and explode I don't know like it happened again over over here like it's not super critical because this is a nailing Edge but uh it just goes to show you that uh I think we're going the wrong way foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign I took the time to grab my angle grinder and flatten out all of the spots that were sitting a little bit proud because whenever you're bending something around something else you always kind of want no sharp edges because that's what it tends to break now all we got to do is find out will it Bend yeah we got we got it all milled up how many square feet do we need you know the near the equation on that what was it like uh I'm not sure I don't know I don't remember it either it was like pi r squared sphere half of double or something anyways we got a lot of we got a lot of Cedar milled up it's uh half inch by three inch it is a Fresh Cedar meaning it is green we're gonna put it on hopefully it bends it doesn't break like our plywood does or there'll be a lot of swearing in the forest with Kevin the plan is to bridge one of the spokes so we go from one spoke skip over the other spoke and then have it screwed or stapled we're actually gonna staple it to the third spoke and then we're gonna run our seams along there and that's hopefully going to give us a nice uniform ball-like sphere because I want to look as much like a ball as possible and then I've got some other plans for the seams and some waterproofing techniques so that's our oh yeah our waterproofing techniques I'm glad I talked to you guys you guys just reminded me I got to put strips of waterproofing on this stuff before I do that so I'm gonna do that now and uh you guys can see it right now got my waterproofing all on and my theory is that when the water hits this and the screws or nails or Staples that we're going to put in here are going to seal around the wood and then prevent this from actually getting wet and then once it gets to here I'm not really worried about it because water would have to flow uphill and the whole thing's going to be cloud with cedar which is naturally water repellent so I don't think I'll get any water in but I'm also going to waterproof it from the inside afterwards with another product but I have to get my cladding on first so let's get some cedar see if we can bend it up I'm hopeful it's going to bend easy well we've run into a little bit of a situation and uh I'm not exactly sure how to solve it hmm maybe you guys can uh figure this out for me so we tried to go from the equator horizontally and what's happening is you can see we're getting it straight up and down we keep stacking it on each other but then if I look over here we spin this guy around we did like the old natural and just kind of let let it flow to where it wants to go and it seems like we've got we got literally one screw on one side one screw on the other and it kind of it's kind of like naturally gone around that and I don't know if at some point we're going to get to a spot where it doesn't want to bend I'm not sure I kind of I kind of like the natural natural swirl but I'm not sure if it's gonna if we get like four rows in and then we can't bend it anymore hmm maybe we'll go the natural and see if it uh how far we can get hold on if we figured out what the heck we're doing yet looking pretty good it's getting there I I think what what our plan what our technique now is to go five rows at three inch and then change direction so we're always kind of going around the center of the ball because if we go beyond five what happens is it starts to try to not it starts to stack on top of each other and it doesn't it doesn't twist I don't know it's my first time building the ball this is your first time building the ball which certainly is it's very yeah we're coming around the corner I I hope so yeah it's kind of like a mismatched sort of I don't know what would you call that is there a word for that like organic almost like uh wrapping up all the yarn ball of yarn yes like wrapping a ball there and you always kind of you always kind of keep changing direction so you don't get like a big puffy spot on the one side so how do you feel about that that cool is it cool it is cool today but uh you got your cool on it's got my cool on yeah so it's working really well it's stopping the wind right it does yeah yeah it's very comfortable it's soft yeah it hasn't rained on it yet so we don't know how waterproof it is but like it's your hands looking slick I'm also wearing the cool stuff I've got the Hat the hoodie and the pants and what I like about the pants especially is that they tuck over top of my shoe so I don't get any sawdust in my shoe how's that for bending we made pretty good progress yesterday left on it overnight and I think we're on the right track to get it all done we've uh this is our kind of our secret weapon and this is a really bendable plywood it's actually that's what it's designed to do is Bend plywood and we're using it as a scab piece when we don't end up on one of the ribs because if we had to wait until we got to a rib we'd waste a lot of material so we're just scabbing the flexible plywood wherever we need to kind of carry on I think what it's going to look like at the end of the day is a big ball of yarn which is really cool as you guys can see it's it's coming along we just gotta kinda just trudge through it and kind of work our way at it don't stop and just keep working at it because that's how you finish those monotonous tasks and uh to be quite honest with you I don't mind those tasks I in a former life used to do a lot of um repetitive tasks when building you know really really intricate stuff and this is kind of right up that alley so I don't mind it Don are you on the same page sure let's get let's get uh let's get uh this on there just gonna quickly demonstrate what I'm doing here and this is traditionally what happens in wallpaper hanging is you do a double cut now right now I'm not going to do a double cut I'm going to go do a single cut but I'm using the back board to line up my front board because otherwise kind of lining up anything on a round sphere is hard so I've made these long and they just kind of carry on past I don't use a straight edge and I kind of look through the board and see the piece behind and I mark it like that and that gives me an idea where I want to cut it now where it takes a little bit of skill is you're going to use the skill saw I guess you could use a handsaw and then you're going to cut through but not cut all the way through and hit the metal and you can see the cut there and then what I have to do now is just cinch in the boards and you'll have it tight against the thing there you go now repeat the process a couple hundred times the old Woolly Bear Caterpillar you can tell how bad the winter is going to be based on how long its fur is as you can tell how long that guy's fur is just give you guys a little bit of an update we're really coming around on this thing we have got I don't even I don't even know how to tell how much is left to do because it's around I don't know what percentage what percentage would you say it's like a pie chart but it's round 75 percent the problem is is the the really the five bands of the long stuff went really really quick and then the little infills it requires a cut like a custom cut on both sides so we're running into a little bit of uh you know methodical sort of time thing it's just taken a lot of time to do the infills and you guys are probably thinking why did you just keep going with the long ones well as I was telling you guys the uh you can only go five bands before it changes the actual the uh the fifth band tends to stand up straight so we're uh we're kind of we have to go on an angle like Dawn just fit in there so we got the the straight bands and then we got we're alternating directions on the on the infills in order to kind of give it a little bit of style but it is a long ago it's been uh it's been a long journey but we're making it we're getting there getting there we even actually started uh we started earlier we actually worked late in order to get a lot of this done so we're just gonna we're just gonna keep plugging away and hopefully we can show you the final product before the end of this video at least no okay do you want how much more do we want to roll actually that's that's a nice working height I think As the World Turns these are the days of our lives how long did that take us that section yeah actually that was our fastest one it was like an hour and a half uh about an hour an hour and 10 hour and 20. not bad so if we do the math on that we got about uh two more days yeah all right well come on in guys coming into the ball it'll be a lot easier to get into this thing once it's upright the door currently is on the bottom side it's going to be sitting a little bit more horizontal when everything's said and done we just got it rolled so we can work on the little slices a little bit easier as you can see there's a little bit left to do and by little I mean quite a bit this is the time consuming part of any job most of the jobs you know you get it going and you get it started and you're like oh my god look how much progress we're making and then the 10 percent the 10 is what gets most people in trouble is that they either like get the satisfaction from the 90 and then they leave the 10 and they just go huh I'm done and never get anything done so I'm the guy that gets I I like to get everything done because it kind of uh I'm a very linear dude so I always like to get ahead of the the build and kind of think past my nose when it comes to stuff like this I was thinking about uh what to do for waterproofing and then making a little bit more solid and I was on princess Otto's website the other day and they've got uh fiberglass resin and I was thinking of maybe coating the upper sphere the upper hemisphere of my globe with fiberglass resin to kind of waterproof it and make it really solid like a really hard shell um but I'm not certain of that yet due to the kind of confined spaces of the ball I don't know if I want to be huffing fiberglass resin for that long uh but that's currently on the cards or um I have a plastic tarp that I could inlay into the slices and then I've got some really heavy duty silicone that I can butter up all the edges and then maybe like spray these of it to the thing because I'm not really worried about the cladding I'm just worried about the water getting inside the sphere and kind of dripping down so that's what I'm dealing with I don't know if you guys want to weigh in on that and maybe leave your suggestions down below to uh maybe you guys have an input on on how to waterproof a ball now a lot of people are going to be like why didn't you waterproof it from the outside well there's a couple of reasons why I didn't do that and uh it's because I'd be poking a billion holes in the thing by putting the cladding on now there is self-healing membranes like blue skin that that sort of stuff is is an exterior grade product and if I put it on the roof I'm kind of making it interior grade product because I'm not I'm not um I'm not sealing it I'll let you guys weigh in on that and uh in the meantime I'm going to button up my holes because that's the first step in in kind of including closing the space and making it whole so this is near the uh North Pole and I'm having to fill in these little areas here but uh it's becoming well it's not that's becoming an issue it's time consuming so what I have to do is actually take little pieces of uh flexible Plywood And and splice them in and that allows me to kind of bridge the gap so this little guy here is going to go in this location so what I'm having to do is cut and fit every single little piece like this and what I'm doing is I'm actually screwing them in lightly and then I'm taking a shim and putting it under here to give me the curve that I need in order to maintain the sphere because otherwise it'll look blocky and square and I don't want that I want it to be round foreign Pillsbury cinnamon buns to go with it nice and you've you've looked at this recipe and we're the method we're cooking it is on a cast iron frying pan uh yes I looked briefly online for a second and seen that other people do it and figure we can make it work we should try it right so like we got uh we got our Cast Iron cooking let's preheat it ready I'm exciting that wasn't that exciting no sizzle what do you think beans how did you get a coffee so soon I brought it with me from home oh yeah this is satisfying my way refreshing it's refreshing is it's more fresh mine is more refreshing what'd you make over here buddy it's fire it's a fire yeah I tried making her but it's my um my little buddy Evie yeah he's involved he's evolved yeah yeah he's an evolved Pokemon yeah nice is Frankie helping oh no I think this the pan was kind of not centered and these ones got a little burnt cast iron isn't your friend you put enough icing on anything it'll taste delicious what do you think camping yes Don you got any words of wisdom how are we uh how are we managing and to do this this is uh we're going okay on this thing or I think we're making good progress yeah we're we seem to have a technique down now near the end we're learning a lot yes near the end near the end of the of the cladding of the uh the ball we're we're getting to the point we're experts so next time we build a ball which is going to be never at this rate we'll know how to do it it's always the first one that's hard right are you concerned about the quality of the uh cinnamon bun too hot it's too hot yeah I just burnt my fingers yeah can you smell that Dawn it smells delicious doesn't it smell delicious it smells like uh like a Fall Fair isn't it there you go here's your custom made charcuterie board with your cinnamon bun it might be made of lava take a tiny try it try it it's cooked is it cooked is it good you're eating the icing well we're good they're cooked I think it tastes like a marshmallow I'm gonna choke on my cinnamon bun we're gonna enjoy our treat and get back to work because this thing isn't going to shoot itself all right so we're making some pretty good progress on our ball and I figured I'd come down and show you guys a little bit about the houseboat build so here here's my boat I don't know what exactly size Zach's boat is but I think I might have him beat on the size I might have the world's smallest house boat when I'm done mine this is what I've got to uh to build on now as you can see it is pretty tiny you guys have to check out Zach's boat to see which one's tinier we'll probably do a measurement at the end of the day to determine square footage wise but this is sort of my blank canvas to build the mini house boat so what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually throw it out there I am going to challenge Zach Fowler over at maker Zach's makery and mischief on a mini house ball built I've already started my mini house ball so you're behind the ball now on that challenge and I am going to get started once I get my ball built on the mini house boat and we can really see who wins this challenge all right we're at The Final Countdown we got one little well it's actually two little slivers left and I finally figured out the optimal way to do it I've got a fancy tool I don't know if I've ever introduced you to this tool here this is uh I guess the brand or the the kleenex version of this is called the theme tool this happens to be a Mastercraft version of it from Canadian Tire and what it does is it's like a little oscillating tool I call it like the dental tool in the construction industry and what I'm using it for is what I'm doing is actually placing the piece of wood on the ball and then using this to strategically precisely cut it to fit it gives me that angle it gives you my size all at once this could have been a game changer on speeding up the whole process other than this isn't gone very fast at all it needs me to do another thing you ever heard the saying balls to the wall it's interesting to think where do those things come from and uh so I looked it up and as it turns out back during the Vietnam war the fighter jets had the ball on the top of the joysticks to control it I don't know I've never drive driven a fighter jet before but as it turns out balls to the wall means Full Throttle in uh in in aviation terms and uh it's kind of like you know paddle to the metal sort of thing in automotive terms that's uh that's my fun fact for the day let's go balls to the wall boys get this thing done and girls another fun fact I only screwed my finger once I got my pinky finger the other day and uh my pinched my finger it hurt but uh it's healing up I probably should have got a stitch I kind of got the tip of it and it kind of uh yeah there was a lot of swearing in the woods with Kevin I've got my fire extinguisher here I've got my welder because I forgot to attach a piece of metal to the door to screw my wood to test it so this is a two and a half gallons of water and a pressurized container and uh hopefully I don't need to use it but if the welder decides to set my ball on fire I have contingency plan I'm going to hook up my welder to my eco full Delta Pro and hopefully that'll power it in order to tack on some strips around the door in order for the wood to actually have something to attach to otherwise it's just a kind of a door with nothing to attach to just little little pieces of metal I figured I'd get it all ready first I got to cut all these guys down so I can actually see what I'm working with and make sure the door works well that opens up a whole new world of possibility I'm just checking 93 I started at 96 percent I used three percent battery power on the ecoflow Delta Pro to weld up or just tack all of these metal strips to the side of my door which is crazy I didn't realize that I could uh actually do that turns out it works really really well so now I can attach my Cedar all the way around my my Edge because that's going to be my uh my flange I don't want to have it proud or sitting in front of it because I want to have a door jamb here so I want to have a wood inlay inside the door so when you look at the door all you see is a door with cedar inlay burning the old midnight oil last night I ended up getting a couple more cross braces to ensure my curve goes all the way around so I welded those guys in place and they'll help support the curve in order to fit my door I ended up using more of my Cedar but instead of putting it on top of the steel structure I actually inlaid it inside of the structure now I took each piece and I used self-tapping screws to screw in around the perimeter of the door being careful not to split the wood so what I would do is actually screw it in and then back it off and then screw it in again and that provided a pilot hole before finally securing the piece of Cedar in place and then I worked my way down the door securing each board as I went in order to maintain my Bend and when I'm done I got a pretty cool looking door [Applause] well all we got left for the outside is the little crown hole the crown hole is gonna go through my chain it's gonna go off inside there and look at that it's pretty good and Cedar tends to expand and contract with the rain so what's great about the exterior of this thing is it's going to swell up when it gets wet and add a little bit of weatherproofing just by Nature itself that's pretty cool oh it looks like a game of Plinko a little bit of work in here grinding all my screws off well if you guys got any suggestions on how to finish the inside of this thing drop a comment down below I've got a couple ideas myself but maybe you guys got a better idea well guys I think that's a pretty well-rounded episode we got a lot of the exterior done we just got a little bit of around the door to finish up but I think we're running out of time so anyways I hope you guys enjoyed this one and join me the next time when we get around to finishing the inside of the sphere

Channel: Modern Self Reliance

Views: 87,254

Keywords: building, tools, hand tools, power tools, sawmill, cabin construction, how to build a cabin, tiny house, forest house, small house, log cabin, construction, cabin design, sawing, cutting wood, off grid, homestead, cottage, tiny cabin, self reliance, solar powered house, small home, axe, saw, build, logs, nail, wood, cut, hammer, woodworking, woods, nature, outdoors, timber, mill, milling, how to build a log cabin, screw, drill

Id: fWOubTpCYzk

Length: 37min 24sec (2244 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 22 2022