State of the Farm: The New Shed, July 2026

I haven’t posted much about woodworking for a while here. 

 

The truth is, the shop has been a bit restrictive of late. I have some interesting ideas but when I get started, I find just getting it organized a problem. 

 

I started with the main shop on one end side of the garage. Originally, it was just a workbench space open to the garage space. Then, after we’d lived there for a few years, I put up a ceiling, walls, and a various workbenches. But the place is still quite small. 

 

I came up with what I call the trolley system: I put equipment such as a bandsaw, lathes, etc., on wheeled trollies and dedicated a portion of the shop to house them. Then, when I needed, say, the drill press, I wheeled it out and did what I needed, took it down, and put it back. It worked quite well.

 

But, as time went on, I found I needed more equipment stations than I had space for. I have multiple sanders for different jobs. For example, I store the spindle sander under a table. When I need to use it, I have to put up a work table, bring it out, set it up, do the sanding, then break everything down and put it back. There’s not enough room to have more than two stations open at once. If I need the spindle sander and the belt sander and the drill press on the same job... well, you get the idea.

 

Some time back, I was given permission to repurpose the left bay of the garage. We weren’t using it for a car—one of our two cars wouldn’t fit, anyway—and I needed space. But I had to share that space with other equipment like the snow blowers, the shredder, gasoline, etc. I had a miter saw stand, router table, and table saw and could not figure out how to fit them into the garage space with those other items. Not to mention the idea of generating a lot of sawdust next to explosive fuel made me a little queasy.

 

The solution was to get a shed to move all of that stuff out of the garage and then make it into a real shop.

 

But first, I needed said shed.

 

I could have built it myself—I’ve built other structures—but I wanted the shed done. I didn’t want to wait on it. So I researched shed manufacturers, sellers, etc. Up here in the north east, there are a lot of vendors to choose from.

 

I had some requirements: 

1. I wanted no particle board or other “fake” wood in the construction. The interior would get wet—it was, after all, going to house the snowblowers. Fake wood can be made waterproof but it doesn’t last forever and when it does fail, it’s not pretty.
2. It had to be big and tall enough to fit everything I wanted.
3. I had a location in mind and whoever was going to sell me a shed had to fit to that location. There was a hill and other obstacles.
4. That suggested this requirement: the shed was to be built on premises. I’d dealt with delivered sheds before and 1) they were almost always made of fake wood and 2) they had to be maneuvered into place. The location got in the way.
5. I needed some help and guidance in site preparation.

These requirements narrowed things down considerably. No Home Depot or Lowe’s sheds need apply.

 

It finally came to three shed manufactures: Eastern Shed, Reeds Ferry Sheds, and Parker Sheds. They were all comparably priced. All of the sheds looked like quality work. 

 

We went with Eastern Shed for a single reason. While all three were quite detailed about the site preparation, Eastern was the vendor that was most committed to helping. They, in fact, gave me two excavators they had worked with before that knew what Eastern wanted. 

 

For excavation, we went with Mike Tuttle. Not only was it a good price, he also was able to schedule within a week. Getting that done quickly gave me a leg up on the ordering process with Eastern. When I could tell Eastern that the site prep was completely done and ready, they could take advantage of that and work me into the schedule sooner.

 

Here is the site as they were figuring out how to proceed.

 

 

Here is the site after they’d done the initial clearing.

 

 

 

This is the site after it had been graveled in.

 

 

 

This is the site finished. Note how they built out the slope up to the front edge of where the shed would be.

 

  

I planted grass on the slope where I knew there would be heavy traffic.

 

 

 

Sure enough, about three weeks after I’d made the order, Eastern contacted me about installation and we set a date. 

 

I had already cleared most of the way into where I knew the truck must enter. Now, I scrambled to finish making sure everything was ready.

 

On the appointed day, they showed up at 7:00 AM with their truck. I was quite glad I had overcompensated in my clearing because they needed it. 

 

 

Eastern Shed (and, I suspect all of the others) prebuild as much as is humanly possible. 

 

 

 

So, construction on site was more assembly than actual building. This was fine with me.

 

 

 

 

Here is the finished product.

 

 

 

 

 

From start to finish, the process took three hours and twenty minutes. Part of that efficiency was pure factory prebuild. A lot of it was building to suit the assembly process. There were a lot of little bits here and there that made what could have been a tough job easy. I’m sure all three of the vendors I examined have a similar if not identical approach: 1) build as much in the factory as possible, 2) engineer the product for easy assembly, 3) train the installers within an inch of their lives.

 

 

Here, I’ve started putting garage material into the shed. I expect to fill it.

 

 

 

My point here is not to be an advertisement for Eastern Sheds or Mike Tuttle, though I am very pleased with their work. My point, instead, is to show how these sorts of exercises ought to work. 

 

I took a year to figure out who the vendors should be, marshal up the funds, figure out the site, and decide what would be the best shed for the money. That work, on my part, paid off because I ended up finding the right people. 

 

The right people are out there. The right companies are out there. 

 

All we have to do is find them.

 

The End of America as We Know It

This was not a  post I wanted to write.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

The post World War II United States—and to a large extent the world—was built on science. 

 

Not just science, mind you. The US was the Big Boss after the war as the only powerful country that wasn’t in one way or another gutted by the war. England was bombed flat. Fance, Germany, Russia, Poland—everyone had to rebuild a country after all that devastation. 

 

We didn’t.

 

It was pretty clear after the war that science and engineering had helped win it. Engineers build things after scientists discover the underlying principles and formalize them. 

 

The importance of medical research goes all the way back to 1887 with the nascent National Institutes of Health. long pre-dating the war. Truman created the National Science Foundation in 1950 and all through the fifties and sixties, its budget grew. 

 

My point is that there are political forces that recognize the need for both medical (NIH) and non-medical (NSF) research. It’s not the only source of scientific research—there are private grant systems and industrial funding. But more than half of American research funding went through NIH or NSF. 

 

Another interesting thing about the NSF and NIH is they weren’t run by political appointees. Grants were reviewed by fellow scientists, not an administration. Not to say that the political environment didn’t have an effect—remember the War on Cancer? But the grant funding was selected by scientists.

 

Similarly, there were advisory councils created during the fifties that cycled scientists into executive administrations. This happened in defense. In the FDA. Anywhere that a given administration wanted to understand the science of a given field. I’ve met people on some of those councils and they have said that they were not given a political agenda to follow. Sometimes they were listened to. Sometimes not. Often for political reasons but the scientists were not required adhere to those reasons.

 

That said, there are also political and cultural forces that don’t like science and don’t like scientists.

 

I’ve never understood this. 

 

Maybe it’s because science is an attempt to discover how nature actually works rather than how we might think it should work. Politics doesn’t seem to work that way.

 

(Side note: I tried to study to be a scientist but realized part way through the process that I do not have the patience. Instead, I went into engineering where the principles are better known and the reward for effort quicker. If I help on a rocket project, that rocket is going to go somewhere and do something. (Or it gets cancelled. Been there, too.) I’ve known scientists working on projects that take a week to set up, another week to run, and a third week to get a result. Three weeks to find out if an incremental part of what you’re doing even worked and with the possibility of a misstep at any point along the way derailing the entire effort. 

 

But I admire them. )

 

Science, then, follows murky paths that may or may not end up being useful. 

 

Take the GLP-1 drugs, for instance. These peptide mimic a hormone system that regulates appetite and insulin action. They were looked at for medical use for years but were frustratingly difficult to work with since they were metabolized almost immediately in the body.

 

Enter the Gila Monster.

 

In the 1980s, it was shown that the venom of different reptiles (notably the Gila Monster) caused enlargement of the pancreas. Later, in the 1990s, John Eng found that article and through that might be interesting. He was doing research in diabetes and found the Gila interesting because it could go for long periods without eating and still maintain a constant blood sugar. He analyzed the venom and discovered a compound that resembled GLP-1 but did not degrade. From this, the GLP-1 drug family derived. 

 

CRISPR is a technique for the precise editing of genes. It’s been incredibly useful in the last twenty years. The CRISPR/Cas9 system was discovered in bacteria as an immune system targeting bacteriophages. No one knew when CRISPR was discovered whether it could be turned into a biological tool. That came after the discovery was made and published.

 

My point here is that you don’t know what research is important until it is. This was the basis of the funding model of NIH and NSF: use a broad brush for basic research. Deny crazy research? Maybe—as long s the definition of “crazy” was clear. Was investigating the properties of Gila Monster venom crazy? Not as it turned out.

 

So, in my opinion, funding mechanisms like the NSF and NIH should be getting lot more funding over time and not less.

 

That, unfortunately, is not the case. NSF and NIH funding for years has been essentially flat. Given inflation, that really means the funding has effectively been cut. Scientists have been oddly mistrusted by politicians such as Nixon and Reagan. (A good history is here, but Scientific American has a paywall. Sorry.)

 

And now the Orange Voldemort. 

 

The most recent budget submitted by the administration to Congress included a 12% cut to NIH and a 54% cut to NSF. Since the start of this administration’s term, many billions have been cut or clawed back. These were awards that had already been given. This included cancer research, social research, immunology research, and many other areas.

 

No scientific area is safe. 

 

If you look at medical history, the first big success story is public hygiene and public health. The second is vaccines. After these two come everything else. 

 

Vaccines seem to be a curious target for this administration. This doesn’t much surprise me since vaccines have been targets for close to the three hundred years since they were discovered. It does surprise me that both the president of the country and the head of the Department of Health and Human Services—both established institutions dedicated to the welfare of the American people—are so hard over to destroy one of the major mechanisms that successfully keep Americans safe. 

 

He’s gone after the measles vaccine. That’s been a rousing success—for measles.

 

Further, RFK is especially down on mRNA vaccines. To the point that his Department has suppressed studies that show their effectiveness. Nor will he publicly back his own proposed CDC head when she is in favor of vaccines. Moderna has developed an mRNA based flu vaccine and wants to get FDA review. They’re having trouble. The hidden success story is that the mRNA technology has been successful in vaccinating against cancer. It’s likely that will be denied to the American public. But Europe will get it.

 

Oh, and those scientific advisory panels I mentioned before? RFK has fired a quarter of them.

 

Then, the OV signed a new executive order to model the US approach to vaccines after Denmark—a country that has a much more homogenous population, is significantly smaller, and—surprise!—has universal health care. He has—again surprise!—not suggested the US have universal health care. I’m sure Denmark’s guidelines are fine for Denmark. They seem a rational country. Our vaccine guidelines used to be geared to the needs of the American people. Now, not so much.

 

Also, apparently the OV thinks RFK should be more hard over against vaccines. And he should prove a non-existent connection between vaccines and autism. Good luck with that.

 

Of course, RFK is a multifaceted problem. He’s also going after antidepressants and mammograms.

 

Essentially, the OV administration is in the process of destroying medical research. 

 

But don’t think it’s just RFK. RFK is the OV’s sock puppet. Have you noticed how he is so supportive of gas stoves? A group was commissioned to determine the effect of gas stoves on asthma. To do this, they planed to take a population of asthma sufferers that had gas stoves in their home and replace them, measuring the nature of their symptoms before and after. They were part way through the study when the OV pulled the plug on their funding. But these researchers didn’t go down without a fight: they published the results they had. You know? Gas stoves are bad for asthma sufferers. 

 

I pretty much thought that these were the sorts of things the OV would attempt—even if I hadn’t, pulling out of the World Health Organization was a pretty big clue. I had hoped that the institutions would prevent him. I did not expect the complete roll over of both Congress and the Supreme Court. 

 

This isn’t a single administration problem. The OV is trying to change how science is funded. How civil servants are hired. How agencies function. He is trying to set his vision of America—run by and for the rich with charity toward none and avarice as its guiding principle—in stone. Scientists are voting with their feet. 

 

This could be the OV’s greatest gift to science—to China.