Day 10654

One of the big things I want to do when writing is be truthful with my successes and my failures. I think people generally highlight their successes and gloss over their failures. Reading some blogs online make things seem all to easy, which can be discouraging to the amateur. I am that amateur. When doing something for the first time, you are bound to make mistakes, which can often be embarrassing, expensive, and time-consuming. With some research and brainstorming you can avoid some of these pitfalls. Some of them. I want this blog to be that kind of resource for any like-minded frugal yankee-ingenuist, so I highlight my failures here in the hopes that the next guy may learn, and won't repeat them.

Buying a "new" used truck became one of these learning experiences.

During this last school in Pennsylvania, I found a Ranger on craigslist not too far away. It wasn't the fabled 2.3L 4-cylinder with manual transmission, four wheel drive, and long bed which I've been trying to find for nearly a year. They were made like that between 1994 and 1996, and up here in New England those pickups have long since returned to the Earth as rusted steel. This truck is a '94 with the slightly less fuel-efficient 3.0L V6 motor on a clean frame, with 50,000 miles on it.

After looking over it and taking it out for a spin, I told the guy I'd take it. He was firm on his price, but we settled a bit lower than what he was asking. I had sworn off dealerships and new vehicles. I had made my last few vehicle purchases on craigslist as private sales. The guy selling the truck ran a good-sized used car lot... so it must be somewhere between a wallet-emptying car dealer and private sale, right?

I got took. This truck has 150,000 miles on it, and the dealer knew it. I didn't save the craigslist ad. I can't prove it. I signed the title where they wrote out the actual mileage in blue pen on blue paper, while distracting me with idle conversation. I opened the owner's manual in the glovebox when I got it back to the Fort (thanks for the help, Jared!) and saw a note the last owner had written about brakes and tires being done at 103,000 miles. Ultimately, I still would have purchased the truck given the condition of the frame and body. It will easily last another 100,000 miles with some care. I thought I was getting something that was going to last 200,000 miles with some care. If the dealer had been honest, my initial offer would have been lower. I'm still frustrated with myself, and disappointed that I let my guard down. I'd be a horrible businessman. I wouldn't make any money.

Ready for the slow trip home.

My main inspiration for the Ranger was Mr. Money Mustache's blog post "What does your work truck say about you?" I really enjoyed his breakdown of vehicle cost per mile, and found that a Ranger costs a bit more than half as much as my F150 to operate. Moving forward, I want to try to do some of the vehicle modifications listed on the ecomodder website to improve fuel economy. I'd like to put a solar panel on top of a bed cap, and use it as a small stealth camper. The Ranger will be the long-distance light-duty vehicle for trips between the North Country and work in southern NH. The F350, once repaired, will be the heavy-hauler for equipment and materials as I build, and the plow truck. I will also have the ability to run vehicles that burn different fuels, should fuel costs climb again. I don't expect the F150 to last much longer; the frame has started rusting, and there's too many circuit boards and design flaws. It has 172,000 miles on it, and has broken down on me twice this year. It isn't strong enough to pull equipment regularly without destroying the transmission, and it's too bad on gas to use as a commuter vehicle between the Northern and Southern ends of the state. I will run it into the ground and squeeze every penny out of it.

Did I mention it was a manual? I don't actually know how to drive a manual. Jared, from my class in Pennsylvania, patiently let me stall it a dozen times as I got a feel for the clutch. Now I feel like a kid cruising around on a bicycle with no training wheels. Thanks again, Tennessee.

Over the past few months I have been taking the solar panels purchased this winter off of their steel frames, and assessing their damage. Many had smashed glass, some had corrosion, and most have some kind of cosmetic blemish or tweaked frame. Almost all of them, including the smashed panels, are still perfectly usable in some way. One rack must have been left in a salty puddle upside down, leading to their internal contacts at the junction box being completely eaten away by rust.

With no connection, these otherwise perfect panels couldn't produce any kind of power for me. Not wanting to let these panels go to waste, I took one of them apart to see how hard it would be to solder in new connections.

After some YouTube research, I found that the flat wire leads coming from the cells should have some material under the paper that I could potentially solder to... generally. The videos I saw online were for another kind of panel (these are 75W Siemens SP-75's.) I had nothing to lose and I was winging it. I used a very thin and sharp putty knife to score around the junction box, and pried it up. Sure enough, there was still material there. You can see my grease-pencil notes on the back of the panel; "#35, X TABS, DEAD."

With a #11 X-acto (the regular pointy one) and a flat chisel tip, I carved away some of the paper backing, exposing more of the tabs. The one good one of the four I broke off for uniformity. They appear to have been tack welded to the junction box terminals. The welds break without too much force.

I cut some small strips of 12ga copper wire. I pre-tinned each end with solder, and after a few attempts I was able to get them to stick to my freshly exposed tabs. I had to clean off a bunch of old adhesive in order to get the solder to bond to it. This was a slow, delicate process.

With my new wires installed, I slipped the junction box back on the panel, and soldered the wires to the junction box contacts (a little awkward in the tight space.) The loose junction box had enough play that I could reapply a line of silicon to hold it on, and keep it water tight. 

Checking it in sunlight outside on the multimeter, I measured 21.5V open-circuit, and better than 2 amps short-circuit. Not bad! Significantly better than 0.0V and 0.0A. One less solar panel in the land fill. I have another four of these dead panels to repair; good rainy day projects.

With all the panels off the racks, I reloaded the trailer with the rusty steel frames. Then I threw in the backhoe's old control tower, which I had changed out last year. The last large chunk of metal in the backyard was an ancient, rotted, unusable snowmobile trailer. My tractor wasn't quite powerful enough to lift the thing up. Neither was my dad's Kubota. I had an idea, though...

What could go wrong?

The buckets both have an inch of purchase on the trailer's frame. My dad set the Kubota's parking brake, and I left my Ford in neutral while we slowly raised the trailer, so that our buckets would stay tight to the trailer as I gently rolled downhill. With the snowmobile trailer elevated, I backed the loaded trailer underneath, then we set the stricken snowmobile trailer down slowly.

Next stop; the recycling center. Let's see how much we can get for a ton of old steel.

Day 10626

Since last post I have spent a few weeks in Pennsylvania, a few weeks in Virginia, and now I'm back in Pennsylvania; all for Army schools. One of the road trips turned into an odyssey; engines refused to start, patience was tested, the go-bag and boots were utilized, foreign foods were tried, and much later a chicken was murdered by a friend.

To start us off, my venerable F150 is showing it's age. In Pennsylvania I heard a BANG followed by  the snap of compressed air in time with the engine. The engine was making a decent side-to-side vibration. I thought I blew off an exhaust manifold. I opened the hood to troubleshoot, and the problem wasn't immediately apparent. I wasn't getting any codes on the Scan Gauge, reinforcing my thought that it was exhaust related. But why do I smell fuel? Everything appeared fine... all the spark plug boots were installed. I called around to find a shop to fix an exhaust, and with a buddy in his car to follow me on a noisy trip, it finally coughed up a code for #3 cylinder misfire. A-ha!

I popped the hood one more time, and found the spark plug still sitting on the top of the engine (two inches right of the bright flashlight spot; see the ceramic?) The engine had ejected the plug from the aluminum head, tearing the threads out.  The spark plug boot dropped back into place. That's why I had smelled fuel. A quick google revealed this as a common problem with the Triton V8's. Next call was for a flatbed, and another call to a nearby Ford dealer. After a helicoil install, my truck was back on the road. The Ford Dealer got my travel pay.

Telling this story at work, Ed the former-Ford mechanic told me about some of the other common problems with my model year. This conversation would haunt me days later, hundreds of miles away. Driving to Virginia in the rain, my engine died in Delaware on Route 1. It would eventually restart, run rough, and die. I called AAA.

On a Sunday afternoon, the only open shop nearby was a PepBoys. The truck started, and the test drive was fine. A crusty mechanic with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth told me it was the catalytic converter clogging up, choking the engine as it got hot. Here's some zen; vehicle maintenance isn't cold logical diagnosis, it involves a lot of feeling and establishing a relationship with the vehicle. How did it stop working? How has it been acting? What were the conditions? The person operating the vehicle knows these conditions and feelings better than anyone. A good mechanic knows what questions to ask. It wasn't running rough; it just died. I had air, I had spark, I had crank... it must be the fuel. But again, I didn't have a code yet. PepBoys wanted to cut the welds on the catalytic converter, but they wouldn't be able to weld it back together until the next day. It was now running fine. The rain had stopped. I asked for my keys back and kept going South.

An hour later it started bucking occasionally. It had started raining. Finally it died again, and I pulled off to the side. I gave it 15 minutes to sit. In that time I put my phone up as a hotspot, and used my laptop to look around the area. I was three hours from my destination, and at this point, exhausted. There was a town 25 minutes west with a Ford dealer and a motel within walking distance. If it started, I would keep going. If it didn't, I was calling it a night. I called home, called my platoon sergeant, called the school. After a good wait, I tried to start it... the engine caught, ran rough, died, and gave me a code! Low fuel pressure. I called AAA, again. Lenny and Debbie gave me and my disabled steed a ride to Salisbury, MD. We talked chicken farming. Lenny even gave me a ride to the motel; what a guy!

( credit to Bill Watterson, and "Nucking Fut-bar" on deviantArt )

So there I was; down to my boots and my backpack in a random eastern shore town in Maryland. I checked into the motel, then hoofed it back to the dealership to get food, coffee and a change of clothes from the bags buried in the back of the truck. Like Spaceman Spiff ship-wrecked on a deserted world, I took stock of what I had. Google revealed the only places to eat within walking distance were food-tainment (you know, I can microwave my own food for a lot cheaper) ... except an Indian & Pakistani restaurant down the road. Had I had it before? Nope, but I liked some of the Afghan dishes! I set out on foot. I got some rice and vegetable dinner that was very good despite being full of curry. I enjoyed a conversation with the waiter, who was NY-born and Pakistani raised, about travelling and eating food around the world. I passed out around 7:30pm.

The dealership rolled my truck in the next morning. I set up camp in a lobby blasting classic rock hits that put you in a car-buying mood. The dealership replaced the fuel sender (which is what Ed told me to check out several days prior,) and I was back on the road. The Ford Dealer, again, got my travel pay. The fuel sender, located above the spare tire, rots out on these trucks and exposes the circuit board to the elements. When it got wet it stopped working. What a great design. I would not buy one of these trucks again. I wouldn't buy anything with a computer "smarter" than a pocket calculator.

If I was to make the curriculum for the aviation maintenance courses I was attending, then coordinating the repair of a vehicle in extreme conditions far from it's support base, while still accomplishing the mission would be one of the most important things to know. I'd like to think I crew chief'ed the situation quite well.

These two adventures, and three tow-truck rides in a month's time, have encouraged me to step up my search for my next vehicle. I need a pickup, but after reading Mr. Money Mustache's article "What does your work truck say about you?" I want to go down a size for something with better mileage. I also want something I can actually work on, not something designed for a dealership. I may have found that truck here in Pennsylvania, we shall see.

While in Pennsylvania, Tyler of Kentucky and Caleb from Ohio and I attended the Farm Show in Harrisburg. This was a huge event. I saw more people in that building that afternoon than I had seen in all of New Hampshire over the past year. The vendors didn't disappoint, and we left with lots of good food. I have a nice hand-made birch mixing spoon for the bus, now, too.

In Virginia I went to Williamsburg, which allowed me to escape the suburban sprawl of Hampton Roads, and walk around a nice New England-esque town and smell the sweet smell of woodsmoke. I paid attention to how the buildings were constructed... how the timbers were set, how the trim was laid, and where the chimney was (keeping in mind that English style woodstoves are usually very inefficient.)

The day before I got home, Roy Orbison the rooster was mauled to death by my cute, cuddly, and otherwise harmless Springer Spaniel. My domestic untrained bird dog really likes killing my domestic birds... Roy died protecting his flock. Luke at work had asked if I wanted one of his roosters several weeks prior; I texted him back to find out he had lost most of his flock to a wild critter.

If any aspiring chicken farmers have recently lost a chicken to a predator, and are wondering when the pain and sorrow will end, I can tell you that after losing your seventh chicken the reaction is about 1% of the emotion invested into the first one. I liked Roy the rooster... but I'm also getting used to chickens dying very easily. Did I mention none of the new hens have names? Much easier this way. Working with Zeke to increase discipline around the chickens.

I went to craigslist and found a free bantam rooster in need of a home, after it's hens had been taken out by a possum. Apparently possums, known for playing dead, also kill chickens. The family I got him from had small kids who named the rooster, appropriately, Woof.

Woof, being a cool customer, and possibly the friendliest chicken I have met, got a ride home in the front seat of the truck, in a cardboard box. I introduced him to the hens thinking they would love a new friend, and was quickly appalled at the law of the jungle in an 8x8' wire enclosure. The hens had poor friendly Woof bleeding and hiding in no time.

I separated them, and with the help of Mom, built another coop enclosure off the back of the run, where Elvis "Woof" Presley could heal up and not be hen-pecked to death. We used a tarp, a pallet, dog food dishes, and a particle-board cabinet turned on it's side. He got his very own roosting stump and branch.

In the barn, I'm working on cleaning up and inspecting the solar panels. Much more to follow on that in another entry.

Zeke and I took a much needed trip up to the land on a warm afternoon. There was still a foot of snow on the ground, and it was about 50'F and sunny in the way that a plaid shirt is the only extra layer needed. Both the bus and the backhoe started right up after sitting for more than two months. I'm equally impressed that the ancient diesel in the backhoe with no glowplugs, and the modern Powerstroke diesel in the bus with all the computers, both started!

In town, my grandfather showed me around Dave's sugar house, which he had helped build. He explained to me how the foundation was poured, how the walls were built, and how I could do something similar. The design is coming together.

Zeke and I went for a walk, then lounged out on the futon for about an hour. I forgot the mousetraps. 

Day 10541

A warm December day was capitalized on. I'm beat.

I got in touch with someone on craigslist selling some chickens, to give my sole survivor of the Iain & Darcy flock some company for the winter. The small flock for sale included three Rhode Island Reds, a black Australorp, a Barnvelder, a white Ameraucana, and a cool technicolor rooster, who were all hatched in the Spring. We captured the hens pretty quickly, but the rooster was a bit leery of the three humans with a rake and a box. He was ultimately captured by cornering him in the horse stalls, and being body slammed into the wall as he tried to fly away. Once he was held in my arms, he stopped resisting immediately. "Okay humans, you got me." They enjoyed a ride up I93 in a cardboard box and plastic bin.

The seven new chickens were thirsty after their trip. Sophia, the Veteran of multiple dog attacks, is the gray/brown Ameraucana in the lower left.  The rooster is on the top left; he has a bunch of odd colored feathers in his tail. With luck, the rooster will rough up my family's dogs if they get too close to the hens.

I'm hesitant to name them, because they seem to die easily, but I'm thinking the rooster will be named U-P-G-R-A-Y-E-D-D.

So Sophia has coop companions, and my egg-makers won't freeze to death. I wanted them to free range, but the domesticated bird-dogs have proven to be skilled domesticated chicken hunters. The run is a little small for a flock of eight to live in continuously, so I decided to expand it.

I sacrificed money for time, and bought a 100' spool of wire fence. I kicked myself for not bringing one of the spools down from the land! I also picked up a quarter mile of galvanized electric fence wire, ten T-posts, and a new door latch.

I laid out the T-posts in a 30' x 14' box, which would give me some leeway if this takes more material than I thought. I drove the posts into the ground, which wasn't quite frozen yet, using a big scrap piece of steel pipe I had lying around. I spent a few hours unspooling the wire fence, and tying it to T-posts using chunks of twisted wire. I bowed the bottom of the wire fence out, so it would be harder for a wild critter, or my dog, to get in and eat chickens. With the fence all wired in, I snipped a small door in their old run.

Sophia and the rooster were the bold birds who tried out the new run, while the other hens roosted in the early evening. They now have their enclosed coop, a nice roofed three season room, and an open-air run. We will see how easily they can scale the 5' fence (I'm envisioning eight chickens eating all the bugs outside of the wire, 10am, tomorrow) and how exposed they are to air attack from hawks. I have seen a few clever ideas to deter hawks; one was creating a mess of strings above an open air run. Another was making a teepee of thin branches. 

Last weekend, Travis and Gavin came over to keep working on Gavin's Massey Ferguson. When we left off last time, we got it running with a new carburetor, but noticed that the starter wasn't dropping out when the key came back to RUN... so Gavin and I didn't get the right wires on the right terminals when we installed the starter this summer. Travis pulled the carburetor off, we guessed at the 40 year old wires, and got it running properly. We tuned the carburetor by ear, filled the gas tank, and commenced learning what unlabeled lever does what in the cockpit.

With it running reliably, we started in on learning the hydraulic controls. The 3-point hitch arms have a cool float function, but they are slow on the response. Probably because the hydraulic fluid is low; the loader shuddered as we raised it, but everything functioned fine. With the bucket up, we could start driver's training.

We found that the transmission has three gears, high and low range, and a column mounted reverser. With a sharpie, we drew the shift patterns on the dash. Having some familiarity with the 580CK and the 1700's manual transmissions, I stood on the step and gave Gavin driving instructions as we lurched up and down the driveway. Did I mention the power steering lines are blown out? That made things a little more challenging.

On the last remains of our energy, we got the MF20 on the trailer, and brought it up to Gavin's house. We still have a lot of work to do, but the machine is borderline operational.

Next task was "fixing" rust holes on the F150 for inspection. I ground down the rust to bare metal and applied foil tape...

Primed it under a heat lamp...

Another few coats of Krylon white...

And then I found a mostly-empty can of the "Oxford white" for the last coat. Isn't that fender beautiful? I shoved some WaterWeld epoxy into the separating sheetmetal patch I made on the driver's cab corner, too. 

I took it in for inspection this week, and learned that I have a rust hole in my eleven year old's truck frame. It can be fixed, the shop said. 

Designed obsolescence. I read somewhere that cars are only built to last 11 years... and my frame is rotting away at 11 years. I just rolled over 166,000 miles, so the truck has driven, on average, 15,000 miles per year. Which is just above the average of 13,476 miles for an American driver. I would like for the truck to survive above 200,000 miles, but we'll see if the rust returns it to the Earth before it gets there.

Day 10502

Like the 18th century colonials before us, I am typing this blog post using wifi from my cell phone's hotspot, and light from a candle to see the keyboard, as the power is out down here in the City. A warm, windy front is moving through, bringing some needed rain. It also brought down a power line.

I was in the midst of cooking dinner when the lights flicked off, so I was a little annoyed (crunchy rice soup, anyone?) but I improvised, adapted, and overcame, and cooked most of my food on the grill outside with the waning twilight. Holding the flashlight to see if my Vermont-raised hipster chicken cooked through, I was wishing I had the bus and all of it's amenities. I could have cooked my rice and potatoes over the woodstove. I would have had bright lights for days, even with cloud cover, running off the batteries. Cell phones and computers could be charged with converted or inverted DC power. My resilient mobile homestead is designed to operate on it's own, and this is the first outage where I haven't had the ability to use it.

Not having the bus has really made me think about how dependent we all are on "the grid." One tree goes down across an open, exposed power line in a wind storm, and at least dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of people are without light, and unable to cook their dinner. So the lights are out; now what? Many went into town for food. Some cranked over a loud, gas-powered generator to get their house running again (or not, because it has a dead battery and watery gasoline.) Some settle in and spend time with their family, eating cold leftovers, rooms illuminated with candles, the one flashlight that wasn't dead, and iPad screens. My family went with the latter.

A friend of mine in school grew up in an off-grid house. When the power went out in her town, she had no idea! She'd come into school the next day wondering why everyone was complaining about not having a hot shower, or not having internet to finish their homework. At her house, there was no change! They weathered the power outage just fine, because they weren't connected to it. They weren't reliant on that power coming in off the pole. I didn't realize that an off-grid house wouldn't lose power in a storm until an embarrassingly late age.

How much of what we pay in our electric bill goes to supporting the infrastructure? How resilient is our community, how vulnerable are we, when a single tree can disrupt the evenings of hundreds of people? Now imagine with me, that instead of our grid tied system, with thousands of power poles and thousands of miles of electrical wire, "gracefully" connecting all of our homes to a series of single-point failures... we have a community of off-grid homes. For electricity, these homes have solar panels up on the roof, a battery bank in the garage. A wood stove may provide the heat for the home, or maybe a geothermal system. Let's go the extra mile and assume they have a small garden, and a few weeks of food stored... is there anything that this house, and that family, can't endure from Mother Nature's wrath in New England? How much stronger is the community, when a tree going down across the road doesn't take out power to hundreds of homes? How much stronger would our nation be if more people lived like this?

Imagine all the people, living with no electric bill... and no power outages.

Meanwhile, back in cold, harsh, oil-burning reality, I'm continuing work on tractors. I went up North on Day 10502 to finish "winterizing" the bus. I closed up all the windows, which had been letting it breath in the heat, and laid down some fresh sand in between the bricks under the woodstove.

I cranked up the woodstove for some heat. When I got up North it was early, and still in the 40's. The bus warms up quick once the fire is going; it also cools down quick once it goes out! I have firebrick added to my to-do list; I'd like to put a layer in the firebox to take some of the heat, and dissipate it gradually. Otherwise, this thin sheetmetal stove takes all the heat it makes in the burn and radiates out from the hot steel, or sends the hot exhaust smoke up the chimney. I can slow down the burn with the damper and the air inlet... but the restricted airflow just makes for a dirty burn, which could load my chimney with creosote if I don't burn good dry wood. Can you tell I'm in the middle of a book about masonry woodstoves? Learning is happening.

I wanted to fix the cracked driveline on the 444 tractor, so I needed to lift it up to get under it. I also realized the front tires were flat. My dad had borrowed my farm-jack... what to do?

A solution presents itself. With the tractor elevated, and the front axle properly shored with firewood (what can't be done with a backhoe, a chain, and firewood?) I began disconnecting the hydraulic lines. My intent was to replace the 444's forward and reverse hydraulic lines, from the control valve to the drive motor, with the lines and reducer from the 442 I parted out. The reducer on this machine ought to keep it from "running away" when it's in gear going down a hill, which is a "nice feature."

One of the B-nuts was rusted tight, and the crack opened up and severed the line as I tried to loosen it.

With the line removed, I needed to pull the two 90 degree fittings off the start motor so that I could install the reducer. I found that I couldn't remove the upper 90 degree fitting, because it wouldn't clear the tractor's frame. Hmmm... I don't think I'll be doing much more on this machine today. I'll have to take the axle off, which requires major disassembly off the whole backside of the tractor, in order to do what I wanted. I elected to do a quick fix, and get a braided hydraulic line made up. This way I can use the machine until I have some time to do the major surgery, though it isn't as resilient (or as expensive and hard to find!) as a new steel line.

So the tractor will remain on firewood jackstands until I can get back up with a new line. Good thing the neighbors can't see... how embarassing.

Back down in the city, Gavin and Mark came over to try to start Gavin's Massey Ferguson. We had replaced the battery, spark plugs, spark plug leads, checked the distributor, cleaned the carburetor, then drained the tank and put in a few cups of fresh gasoline. Online we found the cylinder firing order of the 2.5L Perkins motor (1-2-3) and we looked at the rotation of the distributor to see which order the plugs fired in. We didn't know one thing; where the cylinders were in the motor, and which spark plug lead should go where. But hey, we knew there was only three possible combinations, and it wouldn't run on two of them, so we labeled the plugs A, B and C, and started cranking. The carburetor was dripping gasoline from a stuck float and needle valve; I'll have to pull that back off and tweak it. Jokingly, we set a fire extinguisher out on the floor next to us, and made a plan for who would fight the fire, who would jump in the truck, and who would connect the chain to pull the thing out and let it burn in the yard, if it came to that.

Spraying ether into the open port of the carburetor, we got it going on 1-2-3/B-A-C, but it wouldn't stay running. We tried the other combinations. On C-B-A, we got a big coughing backfire out of the carburetor, which ignited the fuel vapors from the leak. The tractor now had a small fire burning around the dripping carburetor. Gavin stopped cranking.

"It'll go out" said Mark.

A few seconds go by.

"It's not going out" said Mark.

I pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher, and hit the base with a two-second burst of powder.

Hero of the day; ABC fire extinguisher.

Coughing through a cloud of monoammonium phosphate, we went outside and decided to call it a night. We elected to get the carburetor fixed, and go back to the B-A-C firing order.

Day 10454

Labor day weekend revolved around tractors.

I'm imaging that this winter I will be harvesting a few trees, but with the One Ton still "under construction," and no suitable trailer, I can't transport the big Case 580 without calling someone for help. The 580 also doesn't start without the block heater when it's below 50 degrees. And it's two wheel drive.

Clearly, I need another tractor. Something in the compact range that I can transport with my half ton truck, that will start in the winter, and has four wheel drive, a loader, and a 3-point hitch.

After doing some research online I decided on the Shibaura-made Ford tractors. The Massey Ferguson and Yanmar machines were also in the running. There were half a dozen suitable machines in the area, which I compared by hours, price, distance, physical appearance (is it rusty and scraped up?) and included attachments. I was sold on a machine on Massachusetts' north shore which had meticulous oil changes, and was used for moving snow in a guy's driveway (... so it starts in the winter!)

The morning of day 10450 I drove down and bought the machine. It's a two cylinder diesel, with a 4x4 manual transmission (12 speeds forward, 4 reverse.) Hydrostatic transmissions are easy, but this is just fun to drive! Power steering would have been a nice addition, though; steering is a bit of a challenge. The steering wheel should have no problem breaking the wrist of an operator not paying attention to the terrain they are crossing.

A few lights don't work, there's some crappy hardware holding the front support tube on, and the front tires are weather-checked and leaking on one side, and slick on the other. Otherwise, it sounds great, the gauges work, it makes good pressure, and starts right up.

Day 10451 I continued working on the welder; installing a new battery and the fuel tank, which I pulled from the Case 446 tractor.

I needed a few feet of fresh fuel line for this project, and was distraught when I went to an auto parts store and they had 1/4" fuel line... in 1' lengths for $6.00. I went online and ordered three different size 25' spools of US made fuel line for $20/each, instead. Now I have years of fuel line. What kind of auto parts store doesn't give you the option of buying fuel line by the foot? I'm becoming more and more distanced from box stores. What I really want is a bulk raw materials store; somewhere that you could walk in and get 100 bolts, a metal gas can, a canvas tarp, fuel line and battery cable. A Chutters candy counter of tools, parts and consumables. Is this too much to ask? The internet certainly makes this easier, and the time and money spent on shipping is an easier pill to swallow than the futile, gasoline-burning and time-wasting search of box stores for the odds and ends needed to get a project done.

I crafted a mounting bracket out of scrap steel shelf L-brackets, using an angle grinder and a vise, to line up with the two holes that secure the battery compartment to the welder body. The fuel tank is secured with two metal straps, which go around the black tabs on the top of the bracket. I painted the battery compartment and the bracket in primer. The Miller blue, primer green, Kohler black and Case orange look nice together, I think!

With the welder operational again, I pulled my new tractor and my dad's tractor over to get some new hooks welded onto buckets. I had sheared one of my dad's bucket hooks off by accident last year, so that needed repair. He also wanted a hook on his backhoe bucket for lifting things. I wanted three hooks across the top of my bucket for lifting rocks and logs, as well.

I haven't welded in a while, it took a few passes to get back into the groove. I prepped the areas to be welded with angle grinder and wire wheel, and used #7018 rod (the good stuff!) to put the hooks on. I didn't have to resort to #6011 (the "Farmer's rod" that will create an ugly weld on anything, rust included) at any point so I feel like I am still a seasoned amateur welder.

Day 10452 was largely spent dissembling the Case 446 for parts. I've already taken the headlights, seat and mower deck for the 444 up North. With the recently cracked hydraulic driveline on the 444, I have taken that from the 446, as well. I parted out the machine, and will be posting an ad up on craigslist for the remnants shortly. This machine owes me nothing; I have definitely gotten what I paid for from it.

And on day 10453 I helped my buddy Gavin recover his new/old Massey Ferguson MF20, handed down to him by his grandfather. Talking to my grandfather, and looking at the old layer of forest green paint, this machine was probably owned by the state for mowing the highways. It is not currently running (I don't think the fuel/air mix is getting to the cylinders,) and needs some parts.

We lifted the bucket with a farm jack. Not having a good place to strap the loader arms up, we used another great multi-tool; firewood. With out hardwood bucket stops installed, we slowly winched the tractor onto the trailer by hand.

Along the way we killed several wasps nests that had been built in the cab. We used a combination of ratchet straps and the farm jack to bring the tractor up the trailer 3-4 feet at a time. The straps made it easy to adjust between iterations.

Back at the barn, we hooked up the pressure washer and went to town, blasting off 40 years of grime. The Massey will live in the barn until it's running reliably, at which point we will move it again over to Gavin's house.

I haven't been up North since the eclipse, which is bothering me. I'd like to run all the equipment, and adjust the solar panels for the fall. Necessary projects down south have taken up much of my time.