Thursday, May 17, 2012

Apiary Part II - Stakes to Earth Moving


 Laying it all out

Something that should be stated now is that I am fairly thrifty,  you will notice throughout this that where possible I used free, used, or low cost options to get the job done. First good example of this is the staking of the various tiers using felled saplings. If you have all your measurements and a laser level (I have a Craftsman Laser Trac) the job will be much easier. 
Starting from 1 side I drove the stake (Side 1), attached the string, measured to the other side (Side 2) and drove the opposite stake.  For levelling I placed the laser level on the ground near Side 1. After measuring the distance in height from the laser light to the string on Side 1 I proceed to Side 2 where hopefully I see the laser light “marking” that stick.  Take the measurement from Side 1 and reproduce on the other side and voilĂ  you have a level string.  Do this for the rest of the strings, using a square when you are working the short strings between the tiers (moving downhill) and you end up with a grid that should match your design!

Following the design I had laid out I started hand digging the tiers and checking them for level across by measuring the distance from tier to string traversing along the width of the tier.  After an afternoon of digging here is the end result:


Wednesday, May 16, 2012

"Save to Google Drive" bookmarklet

Not entirely sure why I haven't been able to find a preexisting solution to save to Google Drive but I've just created a bookmarklet (tested in Chrome) for saving the current document(url) to my Google Drive:

javascript:(function(){document.location.href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=sv&url=" + document.URL;})();
Enjoy!