An Ideal Day

Actually, this day started in the middle of last week when I decided I needed to clean up any batteries I could find from Alvin's place and take them to the dump.  I don't like lead strewn about the property.  I don't mind designated bullet traps but just having batteries leaching into my future pastures doesn't seem like a good idea.   There is, not exaggerating, maybe a decade's worth of cleanup on his property and I decided I could chip away at it a pickup truck bed's worth per week.  I removed seven or so batteries in various states of decay, one of them being simply lead plates and the surrounding dirt which I shoveled into a feed sack.  On Saturday I went to the solid waste transfer station (dump) and asked the attendant where I should put the batteries and he said to put them in the back of his truck.  I asked if he was going to J&Js in Farmville and he said, there is a new place on Rt 60 between the courthouse and Duck's corner that pays better for scrap.  Wait! What?  That's fantastic news.  I love junkyards,  J&Js is great place but it's forty minutes away.  This new place is 3.4 miles from home (I measured).  On Monday afternoon I took a break from work and dropped by for a visit.  They will take junk cars and scrap steel at $9 per hundred lbs.  I was talking to the owner and at our feet, tipped over, was an antique stationary gasoline engine.  I asked what he was going to do with it and he said he was going to scrap it.  I looked it over.  All the parts, minus the electrics, seemed to be there and there were no cracked castings. I asked him if I could buy it and he said, "Sure, go into the office to get the weight on it and the lady there will prepare the bill."   I told them I'd be right back and hurried to the ATM and then home to get the trailer.    It weighs 375 lbs and it cost me $55.  I paid the lady, the forklift came by and set the engine on the trailer and here it is.  Once I got it home I realized that not only do the castings seem OK, the flywheel turns and the piston seems to be moving inside the cylinder without any apparent problems.

I don't have time to restore this.  I'll keep it under cover until, whenever.  I just could not allow this bit of mechanical history to get melted down.   It's an Ideal Model M 2 1/2 hp.  Here is a similar one running.

 

Space Invaders!

Felicity caught this little fella at his peak of ickyness.  I kind of forget about them until they tentacle-out around this time each year.  I guess I should be more concerned about them now that I have planted apple trees but there is no way I will eradicate the cedars on this place.

Counting Calories - Wild Turkey Edition

Spring turkey season opened on Saturday and I spent 4 hours walking and sitting.  Heard two gobblers off in the distance and saw one fly out of a cedar and run away from me at precisely 12:04 so my gun was unloaded (couldn't sex it and there was no way I could have taken a shot).  I estimate I need 3000 calories a day to maintain my weight.   3000cal/24 hours=125cal/hr.  So I'm 500 calories in the hole so far.

2013 Redbud-o-Meter says SPRING!

I took this picture yesterday, the 14th of  April. This picture was taken on March 19th last year.  That's a 26 day difference for the same level of bloomination on the redbud-o-meter.  Looks like two extreme years back to back.  It was in the 80s for 4 or 5 days last week with one day hitting 85.  Ma Nature put the pedal to the metal and everything is now bursting out at high speed.  All the transplants in the orchard are showing signs of life except for one of the pecans. In a fit of stupidity, I took off the plastic tags on the trees that identified the variety so if it comes to having to get my free replacement I hope there is enough morphological difference between peruque and colby so I can know which to ask for.  If not, I'll have to get one of each. 

Permaculture 2013

After living here almost fifteen years I finally got around to starting the orchard in the fenced acre in front of the house.  I  had planted a couple of tiny apple trees there the first year and they were promptly eaten by rabbits.  We pastured sheep for on it a couple of years followed by a couple of years of the horse.  It has been fallow for the last few so there are no more excuses.   The clock is ticking.  If we want to see any fruits and nuts before we get planted, I figured I had better get to it.

The week before last I planted two apples, a nectarine, and an apricot that I picked up at Lowe's.  Last Saturday we drove an hour to Edible Landscaping in Afton, a hippie dippy nursery with a huge assortment of edible plants. We purchased two pecans, two Asian pears, two hazelnuts, and a fig. I wasn't really concerned about which varieties to get because I'm not savvy on such matters so I asked the salesman to select them for us and he picked cultivars that cross-pollinate well and do well in our climate. The plants all look healthy except for the pecans. They seemed a little dried out but we have a year guarantee so I took a chance rather than waiting for the fall which is supposed to be a better time to plant them.  These eleven trees and bushes set us back close to $400 (the pecans were pretty expensive).  That sure seems like a lot of cash for those little sticks poking out of the field.

My wife and I got home too late on Saturday to plant the trees so I made planting my Sunday project and that turned out to be a pretty nasty experience because of a snowstorm. Ah, springtime!

Somewhere in there is the orchard.

By late afternoon the trees were in the ground but I had not placed any protection around them. The salesman at the nursery suggested putting a circle of one-inch mesh chicken wire around the trees.  I purchased a roll and made my circles and set them around the trees in the wet snow with a promise to anchor down the wire as soon as I could.

Two days later I was checking on the transplants and dang if the fig wasn't nearly dug up. Some unseen bundle of pure evil, now named the Buckingham Fig Devil, knocked over the  chicken wire and practically re-excavated the hole.  It dug deeply on both sides of the root ball and damaged some of the roots.  I couldn't wait any longer to anchor the chicken wire so I made these pi-shaped anchors from a livestock panel with the bolt cutters .



Wire anchor cut from livestock panel

 The next day I went to check on the fig and the cursed cryptid tried again but was thwarted by the cage and anchors.  However, it did worry one of the anchors half way out of the clay so I needed to beef up security.  I added three more anchors, placed a chunk of firewood at the previous entry point and sprinkled wood ashes around for good measure.




Take that! Buckingham Fig Devil!
 

 So far, so good.

Sad thing is, all this effort now seems like a waste because, judging by the weather, we have apparently entered a new ice age and the orchard will most likely be buried under fourteen feet of snow by midsummer. 



Better Living Through Electrochemistry

Nothing ground breaking here.  Just my experience with rust removal via electrolysis.  From my internet search I found out that one simply takes a battery charger and connects the negative terminal to the part to be de-rusted and the positive to a piece of sacrifical metal.  Then the part and the metal piece are set in a plastic bucket and the parts are submerged in water with washing soda (sodium carbonate) mixed in at a concentration of 1 TBS/gal  which serves as an electrolyte.  I used el-cheapo automatic diswasher powder.  Make sure the two pieces are not touching then plug in the charger and let the reaction go for several hours.  I picked an adjusting wheel from the surface grinder that I'm cleaning up, connected everything, plugged in the charger and... nothing.

Turns out my battery charger has a brain and didn't detect a battery.  I headed back to the house and mentioned what had just happened to my wife.  She too has a brain and said (essentially) why don't you grab a car battery and put it in parallel in the circuit to fool the charger into working?  That is what I did and here are some results.

First the setup with charger, battery, and plastic tub with part and electrode.

 

Here's the part in the drink fizzing away.  The uninsulated end of positive wire is wrapped around an iron spike which becomes heavily corroded.  Bare copper from the negative is wrapped around part of the part.  This picture was taken as soon as the reaction started.  The water gets brown and ugly quite quickly. 

 

 

I let this reaction go on for about 8 hours. At some point the rust was gone and there was no further progress although the bubbling continued as long as there was power applied. I disconnected everything and took the part to the sink.  A black residue forms as part of the reaction.  This came off easily with a plastic brush and water.

 

Locking nut before

 

 

 

and after

 

Well, that locking nut was pretty corroded and beat up.  It is functional but still ugly.

This knob was chromed.  It cleaned up better.  What remained of the chrome stayed on the knob.  Also, the aluminum dial was very corroded and cleaned up rather well but where it was pitted it remained so.  This process won't fix pitting.

 

 

Here is the Z axis screw.  Again, this won't fix pitting but I'm pleased with the result.  I cleaned this with a steel wire brush so there is a bit of a confound since you can clean up rusted parts with just the brush.  But it was a light brushing, just enough to take off the black residue.

Before

 

 

After

 

Comet Hunter

Yesterday, my wife read about comet Pan-STARRS being visible just after sunset.  Around sunset she walked up to the highest spot on the pasture, set her new(ish) digital SLR on the tripod, fired up her Star Walk app on her iPad to locate the still invisible moon, and went hunting.

click pik for better view

 Look to yer left matey. Thar she blows!  The most interesting part was that the comet wasn't visible to the naked eye. She had to do a 3 second exposure at ISO 1250 to collect enough comet light for it to show up in the picture. 

Chilblains

I've been on this earth over half a century and up until two days ago had never heard of chilblains.  Then I encounter them two days in a row.  On Thursday, it was in an excellent article about an Aussie sniper during the Korean war  (thanks Mushroom) and he was listing the physical hardships he endured and chilblains was mentioned.  I had to look it up.  Then on Friday evening I'm watching Black Books, a British sitcom, and the hapless trio are complaining of the maladies they suffered on an ill-fated vacation and what do you know, chilblains again.  So I asked my wife, who knows many things, if she had ever heard of chilblains and she said yes but she thought it was one of those old-timey diseases that nobody gets anymore like dropsy and carbunkles (I  believe we have a couple of their albums).    Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?  Close. Coincidence?  Closer. Coincidince with a side of Baader-Meinhof?  Yeah, that's it.

Come to think of it, about a month ago, Alvin, my elderly neighbor, didn't  properly drain the 150 feet of black plastic hose from the hydrant to the corral.  It froze in places and his cattle needed water and it was one of the few snowy days this winter  and he called me up and asked me help him thaw it, with him being elderly and emphysemic and all. 

I was wearing sneakers but didn't think it would take too long.  There were several trips from his trailer to the hose, through the snow, carrying  gallons of hot water which were trickled on the frozen sections followed by much shaking of the hose and turning the hydrant on and off and sticking the end of the hose in my ear to listen for water flow.  No luck. 

After over an hour of futzing around,  I wrestled the 150 feet of semi-flexible hose into a
six-foot-diameter, snow-encrusted coil and rolled it to his trailer, through the bedroom and into his bathroom to melt the ice with the shower.  I had to do this twice.   Alvin was sitting on his bed looking at me funny and mentioned through a haze of thick blue cigarette smoke that he would have just used a propane torch to melt the ice.  I said thanks, but if I had thought that would have worked I would have done so.   A more helpful suggestion from him was I could use duct tape to bind the coil and he handed me a roll.  After the second trip to the shower the ice was sufficiently melted and the hose was hooked up and the cattle watered. 

I got home and took off my soaked, frigid sneakers and socks and thawed my feet in a nice hot shower, looked down, and there, on my toes, chilblains!  Except I didn't know that's what they were called at the time.