Moving on down the internet highway

OK - so I wrote up a short little rant yesterday morning which I am reproducing here for your reading pleasure (or annoyance, depending on your socialist persuasion).  But this will be the last post on this location.  I have put up with a lot of irritation from this weblog service (Blogspot/Blogger) and I no longer am interested in enduring the irritation.

That doesn't mean that blogging by Bob will cease but the location will change.  More on that later - first the rant which I titled "GREEN SPEAK"  ............

In the category of “No sacrifice is too great for my readers” I provide you with the following simple chart which will enable you to speak with authority to the greenest of listeners.  As the techno-guff emerges from the so-called Climate Summit in Paris this weekend you will need to be prepared to discuss it intelligently with any socialist friends you encounter.  I’m sure you will find this tool sufficient to create enlightening conversations with even the most dedicated green loon. (you'll have to click on the graphic to get it big enough to read unless your eyes are a hell of a lot better than mine.)

 

Simply select an adjective phrase from the first column, a target noun from the second column and a mandatory action from the third column.  Feel free to use big words like “and” or “however” to create run on sentences because lefties believe that the longer and more convoluted the sentence the more likely it is in fact accurate.

Future posts will occur here:  www.bobandmarilyn.ca

Take note that is a "DOT CA" address.  Trying to get to us using dot com simply won't work.  If you typically access this bit of nonsense via Facebook or Twitter then nothing will change for you.  If you have a browser bookmark that you use then you may want to update that bookmark to reflect the new location.  Sorry for that inconvenience but its a lot better option for me and I think you will see that it offers a lot more functionality - ie more pictures - for you.

See you at http://www.bobandmarilyn.ca

It looks like shit but it works

When I wrote last about how simple it is to change hubs on a Superduty Ford that was the voice of inexperience speaking.  In theory its simple.  In practice there was a gotcha.  That gotcha is a serious snap ring, or more properly a circlip.

That’s the famous circlip to the left of the two pairs of snap ring pliers.  Or maybe “one pair of snap ring pliers and a homemade abomination”.  That is a very solid snap ring.  Its size belies how difficult it was to remove.  It doesn’t help that its buried deep in the hub.  I raised a couple of blood blisters on my palms trying to get it with my 7” pliers.  There was no hope for 2 screwdrivers.  Monte’s pliers were no better than mine, although in fairness to Monte he couldn’t find his big set.  I finally ordered a 14” set of pliers from Princess Auto online but then I couldn’t sit still so I built Version 1 of my pliers.  They were so fugly they made the truck cap look attractive.  And they didn’t even come close to working.  But I learned enough from building them to try again. 

I built Version 2 last night and actually they didn’t work either.  This morning I went to work on Version 2 with the angle grinder and after I got them trimmed down I finally got the passenger side circlip free.  You can see in the photo how long the nose on the “pliers” needs to be to reach in to the recess where the circlip sits.  The problem is that there isn’t much room to expand it – initially the prongs on my pliers were fat enough to prevent them from spreading wide enough.  The challenge was to grind off enough metal to let the pliers work without grinding off so much that they would just bend under the strain.  By some freak I got it right and, once the first circlip was free, I knew it was only a matter of time until the second one had to admit defeat as well. 

I was by no means certain that I could put the new ones back on but I had my Princess Auto set (which still haven’t arrived) as a backup plan.  As it turned out getting them back on was much easier than getting them off.  Late this afternoon I got the wheels torqued up and took the truck for a spin around town.  I was pretty sure the 4WD was locking up when I left the alley – I thought I could feel it fighting the steering but just to be sure I went over to the little house and deliberately got stuck in 2WD.  Sure enough the auto hubs locked as soon as I turned the little button in the cab and I walked right out again.  That auto lockup hasn’t worked for at least a year now.  I’ve been running with them manually locked whenever I thought I needed 4WD so my repairs have been a success. 

Fixing the 4WD evidently isn’t the end for the Ford repairs.  On my way to the little house I noticed that the battery icon on the dash was lit up.  When I got back to the shop I confirmed that the genuine piece of shit NAPA rebuilt alternator that I put on 2 summers ago in Shaunavon has quit.  Bastards.  The NAPA rebuilders were so ashamed of their work that they didn’t bother to put any identifying marks on the alternator. None. Nothing. Nada. Zip.  I took it off  before I phoned my terrorist friends at Karam Automotive thinking that I could give them a part number but there are no identifying marks of any kind on the alternator I bought from NAPA in Swift Current.  Not even a casting number.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, SWMBO has been busy.  Last week she was particularly busy as her art group got ready for their show and sale last weekend.  In between baking things that I wouldn’t get to eat and setting up art that I had never seen she got the tile finished up in the bathroom and started work on the counter by the freezer.

Marilyn bought that little tile saw at the Re-Store in Regina while she was doing the tile in the bus.  She bought a new blade for it this week because its got a lot of tile cutting ahead of it.  This little project on the bathroom and hallway is just a prelude to a much bigger flooring project next fall.  She intends to lay ceramic tile in the kitchen, part of the dining room and in the bathroom.  The rest of the upstairs will get redone with laminate flooring.  Getting rid of the disgusting carpets can’t happen soon enough as far as we are concerned but we need to work from the ceiling down to the floor.

 I haven’t posted any pictures of the outside of the shop for a while.  I got it wrapped with building paper before it got really cold outside.  I never had any intention of getting the tin on the walls this fall – I need to finish up the electrical before I do that.  I’m still not 100% sure but I think I will tin the outside and inside next fall.  The advantage of tin on the inside is that it is finished but its not cheap.

That’s what $2200 worth of Ford front end parts looks like – not much to look at is it?  2 hubs and 2 lockers.  I kept them all but – unlike my dear buddy George – I did not repack them in the new boxes and seal them up so that from the outside they look like new parts.  I still occasionally get fooled on the boat by some derelict part that he carefully boxed up in the box that the new part arrived in.

Kids and trucks

So our most exciting news from yesterday is that Marlan and Jenna got engaged.  In other words, there’s hope for grandkids on the horizon.  Last spring when the kids were all here to pick up the Malibu Jenna made it clear – no rock – no kids.  Meanwhile Marlan’s twin brother says he won a bet with RJ regarding the timing of the announcement so maybe that twin link isn’t a myth.

I got my not too ugly truck cap out of the shop yesterday morning but I’m sad to say it turned out pretty fugly. It may only ever get used for this one trip so I’m not really concerned.  On the other hand, if it appears that we might use it more than once, I can always sand it down and shoot some more paint on it.  Painting is all about the prep and I simply didn’t do anywhere near enough prep.  My main focus was hitting the weather window for painting and – let’s face it – I’m not the most patient guy so getting it done trumped prep.  It needs a good sanding followed by a couple of coats of high build primer with heavy sanding in between each coat.  Then it might be ready for a repaint.  As it is it will look OK from 100 yards and vehicles approaching from behind likely won’t really notice how ugly it is until they pull out to pass.  By then it won’t matter and we’ll probably never see them again anyway.  There’s also an element of security in having the ugliest truck in the parking lot.  That approach has served us well with our dinghy – having the crappiest dinghy at the dinghy dock eliminates the need for elaborate dinghy security arrangements.  So perhaps having the fugliest truck in the parking lot will offer some security to whatever is covered by the cap.

From this distance and with this lighting the fugly truck cap looks passable but trust me – up close it looks like shit.

With the truck cap out of the way and sitting on the truck I was able to finish up the wiring on the trailer and get it moved to the little house for winter storage.  Then I put the truck on the hoist to get some winter oil in it and that’s when I discovered a disaster waiting to happen.  My front hubs were likely original which means they have roughly 340,000 km on them and they were showing their age.  The seal that initially caught my attention turns out to be a notorious Ford POS that fails within a few thousand miles of installation and really doesn’t matter because its just a dust seal.  But it got me poking around the 4WD stubs and it quickly became obvious that the driver side bearings were really bad and the passenger side wasn’t far behind. 

Somewhere I’ve got a set of straight snap ring pliers but the key word is “somewhere” so I wasn’t able to finish pulling the hub.  The pliers I can find have a bent nose so they won’t reach deep into that hub to remove the circlip which is all that is holding the hub on now.  I went through this with my 2001 Superduty but I didn’t do the work myself that time.  Ford front bearings are not replaceable on these trucks – you have to buy the complete hub.  That increases the cost but it makes the bearing swap pretty simple – you pull out the old hub, slide in the new one, tighten four bolts and replace the circlip.  No bearing pre-load to set – Q.E.D. as father liked to say.  I’m going to replace the locking hubs at the same time because the old ones are pretty tired.  That will make the project a fairly expensive one because I am using genuine Motorcraft parts but I shudder to think what it would have cost if one of the hubs had failed on Roger’s Pass or worse on Vancouver Island.  When I went through this on my 2001 I first noticed the bearing failure going through Claresholm on the way to Calgary.  As I recall that was roughly a $3,000 bill by the time I got the truck back from Marlborough Ford and we didn’t replace the lockers that time.  That was over 10 years ago so its not likely that the cost has decreased in the interim.

SWMBO has been in a baking frenzy for the last few days.  Mind you, the baking frenzy will in no way benefit the residents of this house – her art group is holding an art and bake sale as a fundraiser.  So I get to smell the baking but if I want to eat any of it I’ll have to buy it back this afternoon.  In between episodes of baking she got the ceramic tile mostly finished up in the bathroom and it looks really good.

Truck caps that don’t look too ugly

I wrote here that I might have to build a truck cap out of 1/2” plywood in order for us to have a cap in time to take it back to the boat.  Then almost immediately I found a very old fibreglass cap about an hour away from here.  So last Sunday I drove to Churchbridge to pick it up, brought it home and promptly cut into it with my Sawzall. 

I was too busy sawing and gluing to be buggering around taking pictures but you can pretty easily see what I did from these early stage pictures.  The cap is roughly the right width at the back but was about 3 inches too narrow at the front.  Which worked but it looked REALLY goofy.  I may have succeeded in trading “goofy” for “ugly” but its too soon to tell.

The little 2x4 bumps on top are the mounting points where I will attach a set of cross bars that we originally bought to put on the Exploder.  They didn’t fit and we never ended up using them but they’ll work just fine for this purpose.  When we come back we want to bring the two Hobie kayaks with us.  They’ll ride on top of the cap on the roof racks. 

Right now it looks pretty ugly (and it may very well end up looking ugly when we finally use it) but a coat of paint hides a host of sins.  I’ve got some gray metallic paint left over from the bus painting project and the weather forecast is unseasonably warm for tomorrow.  So my plan is to sand the hell out of it in the morning and blow some gray paint in its general direction tomorrow afternoon.  Followed by some clearcoat.  It will be whatever it will be but I think it may end up not looking too fugly and being really useful.

I finally got around to mounting the pushbutton switch for the lift and hooking up the safety switch.

You can’t actually see the safety switch in this picture – its on the back of the column and is activated by the horizontal bar that is visible under the top frame member.  That octagon box gave me a dose of peril when I was mounting it.  Not too much peril mind you but a bit of peril nonetheless.  My shop floor is smooth trowelled – the contractor and I had a big discussion when we were pouring the floor and he warned me that it would be slippery in the winter.  I wanted it shiny because they’re easier to keep clean but when I stood my extension ladder against the lift upright I didn’t consider the implications of an aluminum ladder on a slippery shop floor.  A few minutes later when I was dangling by one arm from the top cross member looking down at my runaway ladder I was acutely aware of how bad a combination that really was but it all worked out OK.  And the bruising is already mostly going away.

This is awkward

As we were bombarded all day with climate crap from the so-called “summit” in Paris I had this strange feeling like I’ve heard all this before somewhere.  Sure enough, a little searching turned up this gem:

“….then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. ………….”

Does anyone recognize that little bit of hyperbole?  Think back 7 years.  If you puked your way through the big zero’s acceptance speech when he won the Democratic nomination then you may recognize that clip from the closing paragraph. 

So to summarize what the chosen one announced today in Paris “my climate policy has been an abject failure for the past 7 years but its all good from now on”.  Mind you, he said it a little different – it was all about how the oceans are relentlessly rising and small countries are submerging on a daily basis but it seems to me that either we turned the tide in 2008 or we didn’t.  And according to the Pres today, we didn’t.  

He’s in great company mind you – our nitwit PM, dizzy May, BanKee whatever from the UN – they’re all a bunch of Polly Annas.  Anyone who believes that any of the hot air generated in Paris over the next 10 days will result in actual productive effort is every bit as much a nitwit as the leaders themselves. 

If there was a serious commitment to reducing the use of fossil fuels they’d be talking about nuclear power.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for that conversation to start.

Close quarters

That’s my trailer mover.  It started out life as a quick attach plate on a pallet along with another one like it at a Ritchie Brothers sale.  It was cheaper to buy the pair of plates than it would have been to buy a single pre-built trailer mover.  A few bits from Princess Auto and an hour or so of welding resulted in a perfectly functional trailer mover.

The trailer mover was pretty well essential because my gooseneck trailer is a tight fit.  I think I have close to an inch to spare.  There’s not a chance I could have manoeuvred the trailer accurately enough with the truck.  I might have got it in the door but getting it in the right spot so that I could close the door would have been out of the question.

The trailer won’t quite fit between the uprights on my lift.  Its close – so close that I thought it might squeeze between them - but there’s enough brackets and hinges protruding at the back end to just barely prevent it from passing between the uprights. 

I’ve been having intermittent electrical gremlins on the trailer so I want to figure out what is causing them before I put it away for the winter.   Then I’ve got some service to do on the hoe and I think I’m going to have to build a cap for the truck.  We’ve got a lot of stuff to bring home with us in the spring and we want to bring the kayaks back too.  That pretty well means we need a cap for the truck and I just haven’t had any luck finding a used one that will fit.  A couple sheets of plywood, some screws and some white paint should yield something ugly but utilitarian.

Peak disruption

You’ve likely heard of peak oil.  In the fertilizer industry there is talk of peak phosphate.  Two days ago I think we reached peak disruption in our home renovations.  We may approach the level of disturbance we experienced this week when we get to the flooring but its hard to believe we could be any worse than we were this week. 

I like to ease into my day with a couple of hours of news and coffee every morning but that was flat out of the question for the last two mornings.  Just navigating around the displaced furniture and boxes was a challenge – the living room was completely out of control and the TV was in the laundry.  Last night we beat the living room back into submission and cleared a path through the rubble that occupied the balance of the house. 

That’s a little better shot of the marbled ceiling effect we have been achieving as well as one of the light fixtures that have caused us serious counting challenges.

I’ve always been reasonably good at math but clearly my counting skills are impaired.  I was unaware of that impairment until this week but I can see no other explanation. 

Our reno plan has been to start at the top and work down.  The whole house needs a refresh from the dated paint to the disastrous flooring so our plan is to start by painting the ceilings, move to painting the walls and finish by replacing all the flooring.  That way the paint that drips from the ceiling to the walls and eventually to the carpet is not an issue.  Marilyn has spent the last year getting the surfaces prepped – filling a multitude of holes and patching drywall disasters.  We were finally ready to start spreading paint about a week ago and the entire main floor ceiling is now painted with our marble effect.  Yesterday we started painting top coat on the living room and hallway walls.  Once the ceiling was painted we replaced all the light fixtures with matching low profile fixtures – like the one in the image above.  And that’s where the counting issue surfaced.

First we counted all the existing fixtures and came up with 5.  Then we decided that we would use matching fixtures for 4 of them and use a fluorescent fixture in the hallway.  So we came home from Saskatoon last weekend with 4 matching fixtures from Rona plus a fluorescent.  But when I started putting the fixtures up we discovered that we needed not 4 but 6.  That was disconcerting – that our count could be out by 150% seemed impossible but it was what it was and I was going to Agribition this week anyway.  So while I was in Regina I braved another trip to Rona – I detest that store in general and the Regina store is their second worst store in Canada.  The one in Duncan was worse but it has now closed so I suppose technically the Regina store is now their worst store in Canada.  But I digress.

I braved the mental midgets in the Regina store and actually talked with the idiots long enough to purchase an additional three fixtures.  I had checked their online inventory ahead of time and knew they were supposed to have 21 of our style but of course they had them well hidden once I got to the store from hell.  We only needed two fixtures but we thought with 6 matching units we should have one for a spare and they were only $23 per each so it seemed prudent to get an three rather than the two we actually needed.  As it turned out it was more prescient than prudent because, once again, when I started putting up the new fixtures we discovered that we had again miscounted.  Its hard to explain how we could have initially counted 7 fixtures and arrived at a total of 4.  Too much paint fumes I guess.

The previous owners had a complete disaster in this area.  SWMBO says she may have pictures but I don’t.  The “cabinets” that used to live here survived about a week after we moved in and we purchased these replacements shortly after but they have remained unassembled until this week.  The master plan calls for a deeper counter top over the lower cabinets with mosaic tiles laid on the counter and a broom closet to the left of the cabinets.

(edit)

SWMBO came up with a few before pictures.  Ignore the goof who is tearing the old crap out.