Compressed air proved less than acceptable for a couple reasons: 1) Though the plastic is thick, the ends of the drum did major bulge with less than 10 psi. 2) Major bulge made pumping to the bottom not so possible. About two gallons of liquid remained and it’s no fun emptying herbicide mixture into smaller containers for later use. Better plan: a 12V on-demand diaphragm pump.

One small problem: cost vs. available funds. Ebay to the rescue, kinda. My winning bid on an older Shurflo pump was $26.01. It pumped water, pressure switch worked, yep, happy camper time. So I left good feedback and proceeded to fabricate an acceptable mount. For the sake of verifying all worked as desired the drum was filled with water and sprayed all over the yard. Let’s just say it was a good experience. For the money spent, getting through this season would be fine with me.

Then Friday a 3 X 15 foot mower blade eating high spot at the back of our yard got knocked down to size. Of course that left a lot of dirt to be soaked down before spreading grass seed. Problem – pump motor kept going into thermal shutdown mode. Dang!

What’s a poor white boy to do? At this point there was nothing to lose. Time to remove the pump, open up the motor and maybe fix it. If you get lost in the following please forgive. Explaining the structure and workings of a permanent magnet DC motor isn’t something I’m good at. Taking it apart, observing the problem(s) and attempting corrections I can sort of explain.

When the motor end caps were removed it was obvious there was no problem with the carbon brushes. While pulling the armature out one of the permanent magnets came along and that’s not right. The magnets are approximate half circles bonded to the outer shell halves of the motor. What happened was the bonding agent (glue in other words) failed and the magnet pulled to the armature. Whenever electricity was applied there were “parts smashing into parts”. Lamination after lamination got pushed out of alignment. Instead of even lamination rows there were jagged rows with parts from one row pushed into its neighboring row. Talk about magnetic anarchy.

Moving each lamination back into its own row isn’t difficult but getting each row centered and even may be more than I’m ready for. The challenges are to get all into their separate rows, bond the magnets in correct positions in the motor housing halves (hoping J-B WELD will work) and hope the effort lets the motor run for the rest of our lawn care season.

Meanwhile the lyrics of a SuperTramp tune keep repeating in the head: “Dreamer, silly little dreamer…”

Update in a couple days.

Edit for added comments:

OK, it didn’t take a couple days though it probably should have. J-B WELD seems to have worked as intended. Yeah I jumped the gun on the cure time but I added heat to shorten cure. Everything was reassembled, fastened in place and connected and pumped very nicely. Sweet success and a learning experience besides. How long will it work? Well, that’s the $64 question.

Last fall it was a simple plan: find a snow blade for our Craftsman lawn tractor and make it a dedicated snow plowing and landscaping machine. Our Craftsman was built by Murray and Craigslist yielded a newer Murray snow blade that needed a few parts fabricated to fit our Craftsman/Murray tractor. It worked well. Second half of the plan was to find a lawn tractor to dedicate for mowing etc.

Craigslist is a peculiar creature. No suitable tractor showed up all winter. OK, no huge surprise – winter lawn mowing hasn’t caught on here yet. But at first hints of greening grass I expected droves of people selling old lawn tractors.

Silly me! The grass was a week or more past due when I pulled the snow blade and mounted the mower deck. Two mowings later Craigslist finally came through. I swear Murphy must have been running interference. Remember Murphy? He has a law. Another Murray lawn tractor a few years newer and after minimal haggling (I hate haggling) $150 changed hands and tractor came home with us. Mower blades got replaced, carburetor rebuild kit installed and deck height adjusted. Yep, good to go.

In spring when grass starts greening dandelions and weeds take residence too. Last spring 150+ feet of hose was strung out and attached to a one quart spray bottle made just for weed killing. Refilling that quart bottle with concentrate was a pain in the, well y’know. Except for expense, a pull behind lawn sprayer sounded good so I decided to build my own on the cheap. Janice suggested I shoot video and put it on YouTube. Talk about slowing the progress of a project. Shoot video, learn how to make the editing software do what you have in mind, edit video, organize video clips, add titles, record audio to replace untold minutes of wind noise and collate all that into a single video presentation. Now there’s a learning curve for ya.

Around 15 minutes of video was edited down to less than 3 minutes total. That includes intro title, outro title, untold trims and added audio tracks. Not to mention the times it was thrown in the trash and started over. There were a few (quite a few) of those.

A few days back the video was finally uploaded and launched on YouTube:

True confessions time folks: After the initial spray test using only water it became a meteorologist vs our lawn thing. Eventually a window of opportunity opened and the weed killing carnage began. Of course after spraying we got rain overnight casting doubt on the effort. The next day by mid to late afternoon those pesky dandelions were looking like unhappy campers. It don’t get much better does it?

Thanks to Murphy (he’s the most likely suspect to blame) a major portion of one afternoon needs to be devoted to getting the snow blade back onto the Craftsman. Arghhhh!

Poking around forums and DIY sites dedicated to solar energy brought me to conclude supplemental solar heat has low construction costs and a break even point little as one or two heating seasons. So take advantage of sunny days and give the furnace (and our budget) a break. That’s what I call the greatest immediate benefit. If all winter the furnace gets a couple afternoons off every week that’s money not needed to feed and maintain it.

Our family room addition is hard to heat ‘cuz the main heat duct is distant enough to limit how much gets to the room. It’s a perfect candidate for sunny day supplemental heat. So our first solar heat collector has an intended victim.

One of the easiest and least expensive DIY heat panels to build (called a screen collector panel) is one of the most efficient. QCAD and I have spent lots of quality time together. OK, QCAD may disagree. What we designed is a hybrid version. Twelve 80MM-12V computer case fans will draw cool room air into the panel bottom and circulate it up through the collector finally pushing heated air from the top into the room. A normally open disc snap switch will turn the fans on when air temperature at the panel top is high enough and off when temp drops enough. A solar electric charged battery bank will power the 12V fans. Good plan, huh?

This is an experimental collector designed with easily removed glazing for internal alterations. Each of the dozen fans will be individually switched on or off. It will be possible to go from a snap switch that closes at 40° C to a 45°C one. Of course that assumes computer fans will work. We will see. The plan is to fine tune the first so collector two and beyond evolve, go together faster, cost less and outperform the first. I’ll buy that.

Lumber cut, fitted, squared, glued and screwed together. To verify acceptable fit the 4 X 8 ft sheet of foil faced insulation got slid in place. A couple days ago Janice came to the shed. Her expression conveyed the exclamation she verbalized: wow, I didn’t know it would be that big! Seems she imagined it about the size of a 50 watt solar electric panel. Now she’s referring to it as the monstrosity in the back. Hope that sentiment is good.

The bad news, cost of materials and quantity of work remaining means we’ll get little from it this spring. The good news, fabrication is happening.

Cool! Actually I’m thinking hot on sunny days all fall, winter and spring!

It was only a 14′ aluminum fishing boat with a 15hp outboard and a trailer that looked as though it had about 50 coats of paint, all of them peeling from age, but it was mine. Granted it saw little use last summer ‘cuz it was our first summer in this place and there was plenty to do. Still, I really didn’t want to sell it but someone made an offer and the truck was in need of ball joints so I bid the boat farewell. An old saying goes “the two happiest days of boat ownership is the day you buy it and the day you sell it” but that ain’t necessarily true.

Colder times when local bodies of water usually aren’t good for boating (that ice thing) also means time inside while thoughts wander. My thoughts wandered to when a hard drive met its great reward and among other lost data was plans to build a hydrofoil boat. I think the technical term is “crashed” not “met its great reward”. Of course everyone knows to backup that kinda stuff on a thumb drive and/or CD/DVD or one of the online backup services. Did I? Nope!

After all isn’t it common knowledge once it’s on the “net” whatever “it” is remains online forever? So if I found it online before it’s still available. Right? In this instance that was accurate. The big “G” search engine, the one with the new ‘you got no privacy’ policy found the PDF file in about a nanosecond. Yeah, you guessed it I have the file in half dozen places besides the hard drive.

We aren’t talking a fancy vessel but the hull went beyond curvature of the bow to a gracefully curved topside. The claim is the plywood is stressed in a manner that creates a light and sturdy “monocoque” (sounds naughty doesn’t it?) structure. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of curves since I developed facial hair, if you know what I mean. But when it comes to a box to fasten an outboard motor and experimental hydrofoil wing configurations to, fewer curves is OK by me.

To the drawing board, actually CAD program to tailor the original design (from somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 years past) to my liking. At this point enough foil configurations have been drawn to lend new meaning to the “life is short” saying ‘cuz there ain’t enough life left for me to build and take all of them for test flights.

When all is said and done, and the little 9.9hp outboard in the front shed (for now) raises the hull so the foils fly through the water I fear it won’t be enough oomph for the adrenalin rush desired. The quest for a more powerful outboard and the means of paying for it will begin.

Never mind the “honey do” list that grows ever longer and more urgent now that consistently above freezing temperatures have arrived. I wanna build a boat. “She who must be obeyed” will understand. Well she will right after the greenhouse is assembled and expanded veggie garden landscaping is done and family room roof is re-covered.

OK, there are a few teeny weenie things to deal with before boat construction begins. Stay tuned.

This is great, check it all out! 

E-Mail Tracker Programs — very interesting and a must read!

The man that sent this information is a computer tech.  He spends a lot of time clearing the junk off computers for people and listens to complaints about speed.  All forwards are not bad, just some.  Be sure you read the very last paragraph.

He wrote:

By now, I suspect everyone is familiar with snopes.Com  and/or truthorfiction.Com for determining whether information received via email is just that:  true/false or fact/fiction.  Both are excellent sites.

Advice from snopes.Com   VERY IMPORTANT!!

1) Any time you see an email that says “forward this on to ’10′ (or however many) of your friends”, “sign this petition”, or “you’ll get bad luck” or “you’ll get good luck” or “you’ll see something funny on your screen after you send it” or whatever — it almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward to.  The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other Spammers.  Even when you get emails that demand you send the email on if you’re not ashamed of God/Jesus — that is email tracking, and they are playing on our conscience.  These people don’t care how they get your email addresses – just as long as they get them.  Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease “how would you feel if that was your child” — email tracking.  Ignore them and don’t participate!

2) Almost all emails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards.  All it was, and all any of this type of email is, is a way to get names and ‘cookie’ tracking information for telemarketers and Spammers — to validate active email accounts for their own profitablepurposes.

You can do your Friends and Family members a GREAT favor by sending this information to them.  You will be providing a service to your friends.  And you will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in the future!

Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(s) to those types of listing regardless how inviting they might sound! Or make you feel guilty if you don’t! It’s all about getting email addresses and nothing more.

You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT!

Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached!  Plus, we are helping the Spammers get rich!  Let’s not make it easy for them!

ALSO:  Email petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other organization – I.e. Social security, etc.  To be acceptable, petitions must have a “signed signature”and full address of the person signing the petition, so this is a waste of time and you are just helping the email trackers.

and   EMAIL ETIQUETTE:
Please delete details of all previous senders before forwarding/sending.

No one wants their email address circulated in forwards !

Tips for Handling Telemarketers
Three Little Words That Work!!
(1)The three little words are: ‘Hold On, Please…’ 

Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt.

This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a ‘real’ sales person to call back and get someone at home.

What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call, and it kicks your number out of their system.. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer!!!

(3) Junk Mail Help: 

When you get ‘ads’ enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these ‘ads’ with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away.

When you get those ‘pre-approved’ letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. 

Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 44 cents postage, ‘IF’ and when they receive them back.

It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes.

One of Andy Rooney ‘s (60 minutes) ideas.

Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn’t get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back!

If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn’t on anything you send them.

You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 44 cents.

The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let’s let them know what it’s like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they’re paying for it…Twice!

Let’s help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that’s why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea!

If enough people follow these tips, it will work I have been doing this for years, and I get very little junk mail anymore.

THIS JUST MIGHT BE ONE E-MAIL THAT YOU WILL WANT TO FORWARD TO YOUR FRIENDS

There’s something to be said for ruminating over this kind of thing. It let me figure out that if there was dripping water when either hot or cold faucet was open the most likely culprit was the old faucets. Sunday afternoon found us in Lowe’s deciding on faucets. One might think this would a straight forward pull the old, put in the new and all is good to go. Enter Murphy.

Guess I shoulda known. Removing the old faucets went well until time to unscrew those big plastic holding nuts. Does stuff you work on sometimes talk to you? After an hour or so trying to loosen those big nuts the sink finally said “hey you, Mr. obviously not a rocket scientist, your option is to pull me out and bust these plastic nuts off so get with the program”. No problem. Well maybe small problem because the sink was held with the normal hold down things (whatever they are called) and caulked from the under side with tenacious white stuff that’s really hard to cut through. A cartoon bubble of the crazy Irishman aka Murphy sipping (more likely guzzling) Irish Whiskey and roaring with laughter floated overhead. What ever I did to deserve him is a mystery.

Oh, did I mention if there had been plastic plumbing in the Roman Empire the supply lines from shutoff valves to faucet inlets could have come from that era? Aside from mangled tubing ends (looked as though the tubing ends were gnawed rather than cut) the plastic fittings ceased to be industry acceptable long before this mobile home was manufactured. Suffice it to say my discomfort level with outdated fittings and mangled tubing was huge. But it’s fixed, no leaks, no drips, no errors and nice new faucets. Only three runs for parts and information but it’s a done deal. Now all that remains is to return extra parts.

Talk about an eye opener, spend Sunday and most of Monday with no running water to the kitchen. Hearing the dishwasher run Tuesday evening – priceless. There’s a sense of accomplishment with any project.

Anyone want to hear about my aches and pains from down, standing back up, back down (about 47, 392 times), lying under the sink with cabinet ledge digging at my back and because it’s not daily routine the belief enough ibuprofen doesn’t exist? Yep, that’s what I thought! Oh the burdens of being a DIYer!

Living with and observing M has led to some conclusions about cats as house pets. Like I said, M is dumb, really dumb. Short of hundreds of dollars for pain inflicting shock mats to cover all kitchen counter space, claw removal surgery to save furniture and carpets not already destroyed, eviction or moving target practice would be the best options ‘cuz she’s clearly too stupid to be taught anything.

Yep, I’m sounding like an outright cat hater and that’s not true. But when excess efforts and expenses have been used to teach a critter where it should not go (kitchen counters, table and such) and what it shouldn’t use for clawing to no avail Curmudgeon cops an attitude.

So what’s my thing about a cat jumping onto kitchen counters? M uses one of the litter boxes, kicks litter over her deposit with her paws (front, rear or both), wanders into the kitchen and navigates every above the floor kitchen space including the table and range top. Then I decide to make a sandwich. First, what to do? Scrub down and disinfect every food preparation surface every time before making food? If not you might as well just go to the litter box and scoop out what the cat deposits there and chow down!

Yum!

Kitty cookies anyone?

Exactly when this was originally published or where “realityzone” copied it from I do not know but obviously it wasn’t long after Hurricane Katrina. The major change since then is how much government wastefulness has escalated.

$1,000,000,000
The next time you hear a politician use the word ‘billion’ in a casual manner, think of this: A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, But one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into perspective in one of it’s releases:

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
A billion hours ago our ancestors were in the Stone Age.
A billion days ago nothing walked on the Earth on two feet.
A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate the U.S. government Is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans. Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is asking Congress for 250 BILLION DOLLARS to rebuild New Orleans. What does it mean?

Well…If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman and child), You each get $516,528. Or…If you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1,329,787. Or… If you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012. Washington, D.C., HELLO! Are all your calculators broken??

Building Permit Tax, CDL License Tax, Cigarette Tax, Corporate Income Tax, Dog License Tax, Federal Income Tax, Federal Unemployment Tax (FU TA), Fishing License Tax, Food License Tax, Fuel Permit Tax, Gasoline Tax, Hunting License Tax, Inheritance Tax, Inventory Tax, IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax), IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax), Liquor Tax, Luxury Tax, Marriage License Tax, Medicare Tax, Property Tax, Real Estate Tax, Service charge Tax, Social Security Tax, Road Usage Tax (Truckers), Sales Tax, Recreational Vehicle Tax, School Tax, State Income Tax, State Unemployment Tax (SUTA), Telephone Federal Excise Tax, Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax, Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax, Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax, Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax, Telephone State and Local Tax, Telephone Usage Charge Tax, Utility Tax, Vehicle License Registration Tax, Vehicle Sales Tax, Watercraft Registration Tax, Well Permit Tax, Workers Compensation Tax. (And to think, Americans left British Rule to avoid so many taxes)

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago…And our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt. We had the largest middle class in the world. And Mom stayed home to raise the kids.
What happened? Can you spell: ‘POLITICIANS’ ?

It was a long time ago (that should be obvious to the most casual observer) and the Maya had grown to a sprawling empire heavily engaged in commerce and trying very hard to feed their masses. When you are part of a society in decline and it’s getting harder to get an omelet at the local hole in the wall diner does it matter to you if the calendar only goes several thousand years into the future? Just a wild guess here folks but I’m thinking probably not. Can you imagine a lot of Maya thinking “OK all you government politicians, let’s shut down a bunch of less needed bureaucracies”? And the politicians saying “name one”. Response, “how about the bureau of calendar development ‘cuz they’ve got it worked out a long time into the future and if we disappear as a culture it’ll all be rhetorical anyway”.

If back then you were a member of the “bureau of calendar development” and your team got so far as 2012, you would have reason to be really proud. But when the department gets shut down because of budget cuts, well guess what – that’s when the calendar stops.

Bet they didn’t have unemployment back then and I suspect none of the “bureau of calendar development” guys were willing to continue adding to the calendar for the sheer pleasure of it. And in spite of whatever efforts Mayan society as a whole made, it’s obvious they didn’t quite succeed.

So that’s my take. The calendar stops during 2012 because that’s as far as they got before Mayan civilization as they came to recognize it ceased.

But I gotta wonder if someone provided the Maya with a calendar that told when their empire would cease? Possibly people from the sky?

ET phone home!

Here we are at day three working on four of the new year and the biggest event of the year thus far was the “no pain migraine” I experienced early this afternoon. Yeah I know it sounds contradictory but they exist. I’m not the person to explain them but any search engine will provide plenty of stuff to explore and learn from.

My particular type is entirely visual and usually starts in my peripheral field of vision. Imagine looking down into the snake pit in whichever Indiana Jones movie it was and all the writhing snakes are at the edges of your field of vision. Yes, it is kinda weird but I’ve experienced them long as I remember and learned what they are only a few years back. Depending on severity they can close in on the field of vision and sometimes even produce colors. When at that level they can be quite distracting, in other words driving and the like may not be advisable.

Today was nothing close to that. It was about 15 minutes in duration, entirely in the right eye and went almost unnoticed. I was sitting at the computer playing a game of 500 Rummy and mistook a Jack for a Queen when I realized it was happening. I sat back with eyes closed for a few minutes and let the mind wander. That did it. The rest of the Rummy game was played with a vengeance and Bilbo (the computer opponent) was once again humiliated.

Then there was the rest of the afternoon excitement. New Years Day we wandered into the local Harbor Freight store with 25% off coupon in hand and Janice latched onto an amazing buy on a 6X8 foot greenhouse. Since it ain’t getting assembled until sometime in March it made sense to open the box and inventory everything against the parts list. Just in case. No missing pieces.

Y’know – sometimes a “no pain migraine” doesn’t seem all that bad.