The tireman

We left Buchanan after lunch, headed west and then turned north at Watson.  I had planned to turn north at Wadena but we’ve gone to Saskatoon too many times so we were headed west out of Wadena before I realized what I was doing.  It didn’t really matter – our destination was Prince Albert so we had about 4 possible routes from Buchanan and they were all roughly the same distance.  I just haven’t been up that highway from Wadena through Archerwill and Tisdale for a long time. 

Instead of Archerwill we got to see the tireman at Daphne.  There’s not much left of Daphne.  Beyond the tireman, there’s really nothing left of Daphne.  The tireman on the other hand has been there as long as I can remember and we’re talking childhood memories now.  Early childhood.

I think he’s been rebuilt a few times.  My recollection is that the version from my childhood had a body made of tires as well.  And the original tires weren’t painted.  He may very well be like your grandfather’s axe – 3 new handles and 1 new head but otherwise the same axe he cleared the homestead with.

Today the tireman stands guard over a roadside store.  They had signs out claiming that they had fresh produce for sale so we stopped in search of new potatoes.  I detoured to take a picture of tireman and Marilyn went into the store.  Evidently she missed the sign which caught my attention as I entered.  I’m paraphrasing now but it said something to the effect of:

We love our children dearly so that’s why we let every bug in christendom shit all over our produce which we then sell to you.  We also don’t believe in sustainable production so we constantly mine the ground that produces the food we sell.

Like I said, I’m paraphrasing – but we didn’t buy anything either. Instead we went on to Melfort and followed the signs to the farmers’ market on the Co-op parking lot.  There we found Steve Rudy from Nipawin selling produce out the side of a panel van.  I used to sell Steve liquid fertilizer so I asked him if his potatoes were organic.  I think Steve is losing it a bit – he clearly didn’t recognize me but he immediately assured me that his potatoes were in fact organic.  I of course challenged him and he immediately agreed that he did use some non-organic inputs.  Where he is growing potatoes if he didn’t at the very least use potash his spuds would be scabby diseased monsters.  And the ones we bought were on the contrary, very fine specimens of potatoes.  And they tasted wonderful when we boiled some of them for supper.

It struck me though how quick Steve was to claim organic status, as if it was automatically good.  Clearly he had been asked the question before and equally clearly the right answer was to claim organic status, no matter how conventional his production practices might be.  After a very few minutes of conversation Steve launched into an explanation of the superiority of his cabbage crop and how essential it was to use insecticides on cabbages.  Evidently his neighbours are constantly asking how he can grow cabbages while theirs get eaten up by worms.  The answer of course is to kill all the moths that lay the eggs that subsequently hatch into worms.  Its really sad that a man who has figured out how to grow premium vegetables on sandy marginal land finds it necessary to lie about how he grows those vegetables.

A different kind of dirt

Its been pissing rain every day everywhere in southwest Saskatchewan. But the effect of that rain depends entirely on where you happen to be.

Two days ago I was wandering around near Cabri, Shackleton and Rush Lake.  They have the snottiest slimiest mud known to man.  I could scarcely move – two wheel drive or four wheel drive – it made no difference.  At one point I didn’t trust taking the truck down the road so I got out to walk and the road – which appeared dry on the surface – was too slimy to even walk on.  Another time I got sideways on a sideroad and spent over 15 minutes jockeying around in 4WD to get headed back the way I had come from.  That time I thought I was done for but I persevered and finally got out.

Yesterday I was in the Lucky Lake, Riverhurst, Outlook area and it was night and day different.  I actually drove through standing water several times.  Roads which looked too slimy to travel were easily handled in 2WD.  It is remarkable how different soil can be – if anything its wetter over here than it was by Swift Current.

Tonight we’re going to visit Jorgito’s new grandparents.  We haven’t heard from Glen and Cathy so we don’t know how he’s doing.  Obviously we hope for the best but I expect the little furball turned into coyote food sometime over the last year.  They weren’t at the summer reunion so Marilyn has been worried about the little bugger ever since.  Me too a little bit.

Other than worrying about the furball, we’re having a kind of down day, enjoying several espressos and listening to CBC’s Sunday morning programming (which is about the only thing left worth listening to on government radio).  We’re missing the big rain in southern Saskatchewan but only barely – its been dreary and drizzling here since we got up. 

A new toy

It may appear that I am collecting a yard full of random machinery but there is a master plan.  When Jack Boxall started his sand and gravel business in Nipawin I thought it was inspired.  For a relatively small investment he had a business that he could spend as little or as much time on as he wanted to.  Jack had some bigger equipment than I want to mess with but his concept was to fill a niche that the big contractors wouldn’t bother with.  He had a couple of gravel trucks and a wheel loader but he also had smaller equipment.  I’m restricting myself to equipment that I can drag behind the big Ford.  Anything that needs an annual safety is automatically off the list.

Clayton couldn’t resist trying it out – he’s a better operator than me but that’s setting the bar petty low.

Yesterday I picked up a little Kubota mini excavator.  I’ve been looking for something that will dig past 8 feet and that’s remarkable hard to find unless you want to spend big bucks.  Which I didn’t.  Eight feet is the magic number if you want to bury water lines below the frost line.  There was one came up in Saskatoon on Kijiji a couple of nights ago and it just happened that we were going to be in Saskatoon anyway.  Murray and I went to look at it and neither of us could see anything wrong with it.  Not that either of us is any expert on mini excavators.  Between the pair of us we maybe had half a clue. 

Then as luck would have it Murray’s neighbour wanted some digging done in his pasture so I was able to try the machine out.  I’m a pretty rough operator but I think the machine performed OK.  There’s a remarkable amount of technique involved.  At first I thought I needed a bigger bucket but the more I ran it the more I thought maybe I just needed a better operator. 

My little excavator is what Kubota refers to as a gray market machine.  That means that when it was imported it bypassed Kubota’s dealer network.  They say that also means that the dealers won’t honour warranty on it.  Given that it was built in 1998 I think I can live with that.  I’d really like to find an operator’s manual for it because gray market also means that all the decals are in Japanese.  I’m not real good at Japanese.  I was trying to figure out what all the little pictographs mean but after a while it reminded me of a story father told me years ago.

Farm tractors with mechanical gear shifts used to have numbers stamped into the transmission casting.  In theory the numbers allowed you to align the shift and thereby select a gear.  One of their neighbours on the farm at Kenaston had commented that he could tell more about what gear he was in by which direction he was going and how fast than he could by the little cast iron numbers.  I figured out what the controls did by moving the levers.  Some of them were a little tricky because there’s a diverter valve that you move and that way one lever does two different things, depending where you set the diverter.

Next item on the shopping list is a wood chipper for the little Fiat/Cockshutt/White.  That way we can charge for tree removal, chip the trees and then sell the chips.  And finally we’ll need some kind of a skid steer loader.  We’ll get a little coloured limestone inventory from the quarry at Limestone, Manitoba as well as some plain old crushed rock.  I’d really like to have some red shale inventory too but I haven’t figured out any economical way to get it to eastern Saskatchewan.   And shit.  We need a great big pile of good old rotten cowshit. 

A new toy

It may appear that I am collecting a yard full of random machinery but there is a master plan.  When Jack Boxall started his sand and gravel business in Nipawin I thought it was inspired.  For a relatively small investment he had a business that he could spend as little or as much time on as he wanted to.  Jack had some bigger equipment than I want to mess with but his concept was to fill a niche that the big contractors wouldn’t bother with.  He had a couple of gravel trucks and a wheel loader but he also had smaller equipment.  I’m restricting myself to equipment that I can drag behind the big Ford.  Anything that needs an annual safety is automatically off the list.

Clayton couldn’t resist trying it out – he’s a better operator than me but that’s setting the bar petty low.

Yesterday I picked up a little Kubota mini excavator.  I’ve been looking for something that will dig past 8 feet and that’s remarkable hard to find unless you want to spend big bucks.  Which I didn’t.  Eight feet is the magic number if you want to bury water lines below the frost line.  There was one came up in Saskatoon on Kijiji a couple of nights ago and it just happened that we were going to be in Saskatoon anyway.  Murray and I went to look at it and neither of us could see anything wrong with it.  Not that either of us is any expert on mini excavators.  Between the pair of us we maybe had half a clue. 

Then as luck would have it Murray’s neighbour wanted some digging done in his pasture so I was able to try the machine out.  I’m a pretty rough operator but I think the machine performed OK.  There’s a remarkable amount of technique involved.  At first I thought I needed a bigger bucket but the more I ran it the more I thought maybe I just needed a better operator. 

My little excavator is what Kubota refers to as a gray market machine.  That means that when it was imported it bypassed Kubota’s dealer network.  They say that also means that the dealers won’t honour warranty on it.  Given that it was built in 1998 I think I can live with that.  I’d really like to find an operator’s manual for it because gray market also means that all the decals are in Japanese.  I’m not real good at Japanese.  I was trying to figure out what all the little pictographs mean but after a while it reminded me of a story father told me years ago.

Farm tractors with mechanical gear shifts used to have numbers stamped into the transmission casting.  In theory the numbers allowed you to align the shift and thereby select a gear.  One of their neighbours on the farm at Kenaston had commented that he could tell more about what gear he was in by which direction he was going and how fast than he could by the little cast iron numbers.  I figured out what the controls did by moving the levers.  Some of them were a little tricky because there’s a diverter valve that you move and that way one lever does two different things, depending where you set the diverter.

Next item on the shopping list is a wood chipper for the little Fiat/Cockshutt/White.  That way we can charge for tree removal, chip the trees and then sell the chips.  And finally we’ll need some kind of a skid steer loader.  We’ll get a little coloured limestone inventory from the quarry at Limestone, Manitoba as well as some plain old crushed rock.  I’d really like to have some red shale inventory too but I haven’t figured out any economical way to get it to eastern Saskatchewan.   And shit.  We need a great big pile of good old rotten cowshit. 

Fixing tractors

Fixing tractors is my life.  I started the week by parking the 446 oil burner and firing up the 2nd of the two micro-Case tractors that I bought last fall.  That second one appeared superficially to be in worse condition but the engine is clearly in better shape.  It is a model 444 with a 14 or 16 HP single cylinder Kohler compared to the nominal 18 HP twin cylinder Onan in the 446 model but there is no comparison to the HP produced by the two tractors.  The little Kohler is pretty tired too but nowhere near as bad as the Onan.  We can actually mow grass with the Kohler and its not laying down an embarrassing oil fog while I mow.  I’ll leave the Onan hooked to the sprayer which it is more than capable of pulling but I don’t think I’ll ask it to do anything more strenuous than that.  My goal when I bought them was to restore one of them so it looks like the 446 with the Onan is the logical choice for that restoration.

Like I said a few weeks ago, my mistake was getting the 446 running and then thinking I could use it.  As I turns out, I think I actually can use the 444 so that may be the best possible outcome.  The 446 has a real 3-point hitch on it – the 444 just has a little piece of square tubing that fits into a C-section on the attachments.  I’m not sure what difference that makes but the 446 3-point looks like a real 3-point hitch.  The mechanism is pretty well identical.  The 446 also has slightly newer tin and its painted in newer Case colours.  If I’m doing a restoration I can choose whatever colours I want but all in all the 446 is the logical choice for a restoration so if I can use the 444 while I restore the 446 then that’s just a bonus.

There are enough of these little tractors still in existence that people have developed conversion kits specifically so you can install new engines in them.  I have to decide whether it is worthwhile buying a kit or whether I’ll just find a used engine and jam it into the tractor.  That’s a decision for another day.  At one point I considered some kind of a diesel conversion but right now that feels like too much work.

Once I got a lawnmower tractor working I started using the Fiat.  That let us get the yard at the little house cleaned up big time – we tore out the falling down fence at the back, cleaned up some dead trees, filled in some holes, hauled all the junk to the dump.  Fortunately I did all that before I noticed a big gap in the right hand rear rim.  I knew the rim was bad when I bought the tractor.  The tire was clearly leaking fluid and the calcium chloride had corroded hell out of the rim.  I didn’t think it was in imminent danger of rupturing the rim but that is in fact exactly what happened.  I think it happened before I pushed dirt at the little house.  If that is true then I got really lucky in that I was able to move the tractor back here and get it inside the garage before it collapsed in a messy heap in the road.  As soon as I noticed the broken rim I stopped using it but I think I had been using it for at least a day before I noticed the hole in the rim. 

When it comes to rims there’s good and there’s not good.  This is not good. 

I found a new rim online and the tire looks to be good enough to reuse so its not a great big deal.  The rim has a bolt in centre so all I need is the actual rim.  The centre needs paint but its otherwise in decent shape.  The rim on the left hand side looks really good but I’ll be dumping the fluid on that side as well.  There’s 200 pounds of cast iron weights on each side which should be more than enough for all I plan to do with the tractor.  If it isn’t I’ll find a few suitcase weights and hang them on the 3-point hitch.  Thirty years ago I changed the tires on my 70 John Deere with a lot less tools than I have at my disposal now so mounting the tire doesn’t seem like that big a deal.  The tire on the left hand side looks pretty rough – once I get the good one back on the right hand side I’ll see how I feel about changing another one.  At that time I may just go ahead and put a new tire on the left hand side while I’m draining the fluid anyway.  That way I’d start out with two dry tubes and I could paint the left hand rim to match the newly painted rim on the other side. 

I’ve also got some electrical clean up to do on the tractor.  Its got 30+ years of boogy farmer electrical “fixes”, most of which should just be ripped off and thrown in the dump.  At the same time as I do that I’ll rip out a lot of the original Fiat nonsense wiring.  Its a really simple tractor – a mechanical engine with mostly mechanical gauges so all it needs is a really spartan electrical system along the lines of what I did to the Onan generator on the bus.  That all can wait until fall and in the meantime the tractor is more than usable.  Well …….. right now its sitting on blocks so not that usable but once I get the tire and wheel thing sorted out it will be very usable.

Farmer electrical – yes, that’s cigarette paper wrapped around those fuses.  And there’s a lot worse that I just can’t easily take pictures of.  Effing European engineers.

Little house on the prairie

We finally got home just about dark Friday night.  Mind you “just about dark” is a lot earlier now than it was even a month ago.  It felt good to get home so I guess it was time.  No more Ford incidents – so far.  That little 6.0 litre diesel may be a rolling grenade but ---- dayum is it ever fun to pull with.  So far I can’t see much difference in fuel economy pulling or empty.  That translates into relatively shitty mileage empty and really good mileage under load.  We regularly get 18-20 MPG (real, genuine Imperial gallons), towing or empty.  My old 7.3s used to get as high as 25 MPG empty but our last rig – the 2001 7.3 pulling our 30 foot Savanna used to average 11 MPG on our Mexican winter trips.  That combo was a little heavier and had more frontal area than this one but still – 7 to 9 MPG is a big difference.

No Ford incidents but the Case garden tractor is another matter.  When I bought them I intended that they would be projects – I’d spend some time tearing them apart, cleaning them up, fixing whatever problems I identified.  Yeah right.  My big mistake was getting one of them running.  Then I naturally thought I could use it.  But it really needs some serious TLC.  Putting it to work mowing the yard at the little house is not what it needs.  I think the real danger is that I will wear it out driving it back and forth to the other place.  Generally I drive it over there, something goes sideways, so I drive it back here and fix for a while and then I do it all over again.

They have a really stupid arrangement for the mower drive and of course this one is pretty well worn out.  I’ve cobbled it together a couple of times now and it sort of works but the first time I got it working, after about 30 minutes the transmission oil up and expanded.  Evidently I overfilled the transmission reservoir because it was burbling out the top, blowing back on the engine and smoking like a slow moving forest fire. 

That time I finally had to quit because a lot of the oil ran down on the mower deck and when the belt on the deck got slobbery enough it jumped off the pulleys.  I figured out what had happened when I noticed that I was only mowing about a 16 inch swath with my 42 inch deck.  It was smoking so badly that I was embarrassed to drive it home so I walked home while it cooled down.  After supper it had cooled down enough that it didn’t lay a smoke screen on the trip home.  However, on those brief occasions when it is mowing, it does a very good job of mowing. 

After I got the oil that was slobbering out of the hy-drive reservoir under control I discovered that it was also puking a bit of oil out of the crankcase.  There can’t be whole lot coming out of there because it’s not using a bunch of oil.  However, judging from the smoke screen it lays down, its puking enough crankcase oil as well.  There’s also a lot of blowby which is bad.  It means that the rings are worn out and letting too much compression into the crankcase from whence it escapes by pushing oil out every possible gap. At one point it built up enough pressure to blow the dip stick tube clean out of the block.  That gave my right foot a hot oil bath – not good considering that I was wearing sandals at the time.

Sorry about the blurry shot - its pissing rain & I don’t want to get wet so I shot this through the screen.  It should be really clean because every time it takes an oil bath I pressure wash it and now its getting rinsed with rain water.

On another front, for some unknown reason, we seem to be attracting wasps.  Before we left 3 weeks ago I zapped a nest directly over the door on the little house.  For that one I used Brake Cleaner with the extension nozzle – it shoots a long way and evidently it was volatile enough to euthanize the wasps immediately.  There wasn’t a single one came out the hole after I blasted that nest. 

Saturday morning Marilyn spotted a wasp nest under the eaves on the east side of the new house and then almost immediately I spotted another one in the elm tree at the back porch door.  That one could have been really bad.  We’d both been working around it and the residents there were big black hornets.  They’d have really hurt.  I filled it with some kind of spraycan weasel piss that was close to hand and then lit it with the propane torch.  Then we had about an hour of mopping up with Raid and they were tough devils.  You pretty well had to score a direct hit from no more than 10 inches away in order to kill them with Raid.  That night I used the garden hose to flush the yellow jacket nest off the eaves.  They were pretty pissed but I also soaked the patch where their nest was attached with silicone spray.  That took away their enthusiasm for the eaves but they simply relocated to the remains of their abode which were lying on the ground under the eaves. 

Marilyn initially voted for lighting the nest under the eaves on fire and that’s absolutely the best way to deal with a wasp nest.  If you hold a torch under the hole at night then when they try to fly out their wings burn off and its all over really quick.  You want to do it at night and ideally while its raining because that will guarantee that everyone is home.  In this case it seemed to me that there was too much risk using a torch under the eaves so I vetoed that idea. 

Its a lot of work having a house – we had kind of forgotten how much and now we’ve jumped back in with two houses.  Between my smoke screen adventures and Marilyn’s efforts with the weed whacker we’ve kind of got both places looking presentable.  Our goal is to not look noticeably worse than the neighbours but some neighbours are harder to exceed than others.  We’ve got some pretty fastidious neighbours at both locations.