The little Case has come a long way in a short space of time. Its only about 3 weeks since it was lying in bits scattered around the backyard. Now its substantially together and today I hung most of the decals on it. I have to pick up a rattle can of clearcoat to keep the decal edges from lifting and I need a few more electrical bits to finish it up but its real close now.
I spent a bunch of time this afternoon giving the Onan that came out of the little Case a gasoline bath. I know you’re not supposed to do that anymore – maybe it never was a good idea – but its not the first engine rebuild that started out with a gas bath and it won’t be the last one either. I’m not doing a rebuild by any stretch but I do want to clean it up a bit. Right now I’m waiting for a new crankcase breather plate and then I’ll start bolting everything back together. I pulled the heads this afternoon and scritched a bit of carbon off the deck and pistons. I’m going to cheap out on replacing the head gaskets. I’ve read in several places that I can coat the old ones with several layers of aluminum paint and slap them back on so that’s the way I’ll be doing it. I’m not real sure what I’m going to do with the engine if I manage to get it running again but these little Onans are pretty rugged engines and they still bring a lot of money if they are running.
Other than futzing with the tractor I haven’t cut a very wide swath this last week. Of course we’ve been watching the Jian fiasco unfold and I am hoping that – since he seems to like rough sex – he’ll get a chance to experience rough sex in a prison environment. I never liked the little SOB. I can’t claim to have known anything about his sexual perversity but I just didn’t like him. It always seemed to me that he had an unhealthy interest in interviewing perverts. Pervs of a feather flock together.
About a week ago the mayor consulted me on the purchase of a fancy transfer switch to sit between his house panel and his generator. I’m not sure what my authority is to speak about transfer switches but it got me thinking about our own generator and the fact that, when the power goes out in Buchanan, it generally stays out for a long time. We got spoiled in Nipawin. Sask Power makes most of the power for the whole province within 40 miles of Nipawin so, on those rare occasions when our power flickered, that usually was all it was, a flicker. Buchanan, on the other hand, is at the end of a very long extension cord. If that cord gets unplugged it can take a very very long time to get it all hooked up again.
We sat through a day long power outage here a few years ago in the bus. At the time it really didn’t impact us because we could run the generator. We still have the generator but it wasn’t a bunch of use 3 blocks away from us in the back end of a dead bus. So early this week I started unbolting it and on Friday I pulled it out and loaded it in the back of the big white Ford. Its pretty dirty so I thought I might as well take it with us to Saskatoon this week and give it a bath. Then I’ll have to jury rig some kind of fuel supply and a battery but it should be relatively straight forward to get us a backup genset. Gary bought his fancy transfer switch online so – whenever it arrives – I’ll have a look at it before I decide if there’s one of them in our future too. The same switch is available in Canada for a mere 2 times the price that it sells for in the US. So if we do buy one, it will be coming across the line as well. The post office lady is getting used to me coming in to pick up parcels.
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