Home briefly

Last weekend I drove Marilyn to Saskatoon where she rented a car for a fast trip to the Okanagan.  She was pitching a training program to some grape growers association.  Her reunion in P.A. went well, wrapping up with a breakfast at the golf course on Sunday morning.  We left from the breakfast for Saskatoon.

While she was driving across half the country I finished up some Assiniboia files across the north of the province.  Then I came back to Buchanan via Bjorkdale so I could look at another skidsteer loader.  It was pretty tired and overpriced.  The guy who owned it wasn’t home so I told his wife he could call me when he got real on his expected price.  So far no phone calls.  The guy in Big River with the bastard Thomas loader, on the other hand, has already called me with a price reduction.  I may end up buying that one.  It seemed pretty tight – he obviously is negotiable on the price – and its a very simple machine.  Simple = good in my books.

Meanwhile I’ve been cleaning up the little Kubota.  I spent about an hour washing it yesterday.  Next I need to figure out why it has no working gauges and I need to replace the shutdown cable.  Right now when its time to shutdown I need to reach in behind the engine and feel blindly for the shutdown level.  Which is actually pretty simple now but my arm ends up really close to the muffler and its kind of a pain so it needs to be fixed.  The vendor had already bought the cable but hadn’t got around to installing it so he included it in the deal.

Marilyn came home with a bad cold so we’re taking a couple of days for her to recover and I’m happy to have the time to get things ready for winter.  Then we’ll make one final trip to wrap up the farm visits. 

A friend has asked me to help him with his harvest so that’s where I’ll likely end up by the end of next week.  Marilyn’s plans are still fluid.  There could very well be snow on the ground by the time I get back here again so yesterday and today I was busy getting my various antiques ready for winter.  I spent most of today dinging up the little Kubota.

Revere seems a little extreme but I’m certainly coming to appreciate how good a deal I appear to have made on the little Kubota.

I started the day with a new grease gun and by the end of the day the first tube was empty.  That likely means I have too many pieces of equipment.  Along the way I discovered that my Kubota does have glow plugs after all.  They weren’t connected to anything but when I did they clearly work because the little 3-banger fired on the first turn.  I was suspicious that my alternator wasn’t putting out so I tested it and sure enough, it wasn’t doing anything other than turning.  A few jumper wires later I had confirmed that there is nothing wrong with the alternator.  There’s a lot of boogy wiring to be cleaned up – I expect as I get further into cleaning up the wiring more of the bits and pieces will start to work again.  The defective shutdown cable turned out to be as simple as connecting the cable that was already in place so now I have a spare shutdown cable if I should ever need one.

Here’s a good example of boogy wiring – random wires going to nowhere, lots of black tape.

In the past I’ve always hired someone else to do my sandblasting and that was likely very wise.  However I have several projects coming up that will require sandblasting so I now own a genuine Princess Auto piece of crap sandblaster.