May 2015

May 1 friday
April went by in a hurry and I don’t feel like I got a lot done. Ever since we got back from Florida, I’ve been checking out specs for hardware, messing with software install and learning how to git. Next door, I’ve spent more time staring at the problems than solving them. And the LR cabinets are still not done. I suppose I’ll have to think of it as prep work and April was a prep month. So if prep is 90% of the job, then May should be an amazing month for results. Suppose I were to get the beam built and installed. Suppose I were to get c3pr compiling again. And the cabinets installed. And the carburetor working. That would be amazing. Last year, I worked inside thru may or mid-june and still got all kinds of stuff done. If you get started now, you could do a lot.

So today, I did horse chores, and then carefully worked my way through git and tried my first merge.
I shortened the drawer that’s too long and made the mid-span hanger.
I found a long straight downed tree in the woods, trimmed the limbs, and hauled it next door with the tractor. I un-bolted and dropped the basketball hoop and brought it over here. Then I cleaned up the living room next door and Mary made Putanesca.

May 2 sat
Horse chores. first thing. It went well.
I loaded the truck with 1300# of debris and tied the bathtub on top and drove it home.
Picked up Mary and after a discussion about whether to bring a clean shirt, headed to the dump. Mary helped, but maybe a little too much, as she broke out in hives and coughed all the way to lunch. I had a really good pork wrap and she had a lousy chicken sandwich. Both of us got the shits. I tracked down the rototiller and got it started and tilled the garden and put it back in the barn. Then I had my first ginger ale of the season.
I sanded the last drawer and fitted the last support for the shelves.
And then there was another round of horse chores. I walked the dogs this time, and BZ knew it the minute he hopped onto me.
Mary made a bacon quiche and we watched  a Tom Cruise movie.

May 3 sun
I’ve spent a long time struggling with how to go about fixing the green house, and it’s all a little overwhelming. It’s not the big picture that’s messing me up, it’s what to do next. I finally decided I need a beam to hold up the 2nd floor, and it’s got to be 31 feet long. I checked my pile of logs, and none of them are straight enough or long enough for the job.
Which brings me back to that tree that fell in the forest.
After horse chores this morning, I hauled the log up to the GH driveway, stabilized it, rigged up a chalk line and staked a guide for the chain saw. Then I sawed it flat, longwise. My chain saw bogged down, died, and smoked more than once, and the top cover actually melted itself loose, but it did the job. (I felt a little guilty for letting Mary rake rocks and pull weeds the whole time.) We took a creemee break, took showers, and then took a break. 60 minutes, nachos, Madam Secretary.

May 5 tue
It’s cinco de mayo, and I did not cook Mexican.
Yesterday, I turned the log cut-side-down, levelled it up, and tried to slice off another face. It didn’t work, and the chain saw didn’t want to cut. Aside from the fact that I should be using a bigger saw, I decided maybe I need a rip-type sharpening grind and decided to knock off for the day instead of killing myself.  I made an attachment to pull the tip of the blade into the wood without having to torque my whole body.  I dropped off the blades for grinding and located the ideal spots where the posts ought to go. Even I could see that they were awkward, and Mary was clear: she doesn’t like it. She “needs to think about it.” Well she’d better, because we need a solution in about 3 days.
Juliette came back and Mary insisted on doing horse chores one last time. It was a little embarrassing.

May 7 thu
I started off with a ‘./configure sim’, which is different from what I did last time. When I finally got it to run, the make step died quickly, but it died on a merge-related code change, so I felt like I’d passed another milestone. Not a lot of milestones lately, so lets keep the celebration down.
I worked a little on the spiral in cad and then, without even trying out the newly-ground rip-tooth blades, decided I needed to rent a big chain saw for the log. They don’t rent chain saws, though, because people cut themselves and sue. Damn. Since I was in town, I got free tortillas and stuff for enchiladas and then came home and made a batch.  Not my best, but not bad. I tried out a rip blade on the beam next door and it seems to work a lot better. The problem is that the saw dies when it gets hot, and by the time I quit, I couldn’t get it started at all.

May 13 wed
My saw was not worth fixing, so I got a new one and sawed the log into a beam. A good chainsaw with a ripping blade works waaay better than a bad chainsaw with a dull blade.
I still haven’t figured out why the c3pr nml buffer is messed up.
And the carburetor is almost totally reassembled.
The woodpile is moved, and I’ve started to get the stairway into cad.

 

 

 

 

May 17 sun
I moved the log/beam into the green house with the tractor and a dolly and then raised it to the ceiling. Too soon though: I need to take it down and straighten the top before putting it back up. I cleared out all the pegged mortises from the old beams and my elbow is hurting. The floor is a mess again.
The carburetor is completely rebuilt and I’ve examined the bike closely. I’ve got a list of things I need.
I solved the nml problem and then spent 2 days on a make problem, but I nailed it, and it all makes a certain complicated sense.
I installed the cabinet doors and drawers, and they only need minor tweaks.
I got the lawn mower working and tuned up the mowing deck and ran out of grease.

May 20 wed
I took the beam back down and cleaned up the upper face. I cleaned up the walls where the wall plates have to go, and I can’t quite decide how to mount the joists to the walls. Google says it’s OK to use 2×6’s .
I’ve collected everything I (know I) need to put the motorcycle back together, so I got started. I think I overfilled the oil, and didn’t have a socket to fit the spark plugs. I finally got them out, hooked up the compression tester, and got 30-40 psi readings. Waay below the 100 psi minimum. So I’ve either got serious problems and need to check the valves and rings or you can’t get a good reading hand-pumping the kick starter. I’m hoping it’s the latter, so I filled my new battery  with battery acid and hooked up the charger. Funny how my $200 motorcycle suddenly costs so much more.
I tweaked the cabinets and made drawer bottoms. I was too cheap to buy a sheet of 1/4″ plywood and made it out of Celia’s bed platform.
It’s exactly 1 month since I got delivery of the Dell and finally – Finally! – I think I’ve got everything working that I used to have working. It was very painful, and there were some very hard problems, but it’s all good. Nice work.

May 21 thu
Luad died, and Juliet asked me to bury him.
The subject came up last summer when she noticed my backhoe and mentioned that she didn’t expect her oldest horse to survive the winter. She asked if I could dig a big enough hole. “Probably,” I said, “but it would be a stretch.” Well Luad made it through the winter. Luad even made it through the week we took care of him. The spring weather, though, was too nice for him, and they put him down last night. Mary and I checked in this morning, and I came home to eat some breakfast, pick up tools and supplies and put on the backhoe, and then drove it down the road, set myself up, consulted with Juliet, and started digging.
Up to now, the deepest hole I’d ever dug was about 6′ for the NW drainage base, which I recall took me forever. Six feet deep is pretty marginal for a horse, and it’s got to be pretty wide too.  What if I hit rocks? What if something breaks? Was this going to take me 2 days? So I dug for 3 hours, and approached the hole from 3 directions, so all the sides were good and vertical. It turns out that, if you back up close enough to the edge of the hole, you can dig almost 8′ deep, and that’s what I did.  Great soil. No rocks, and stopped just above the water line. Then I jockeyed the horse to the edge of the hole and thought hard about how to make him do a flip on the way down and come to rest on his right side. I’m only getting one shot at this, I knew, so I crossed my fingers, put it in low, and pushed 900# of horse off the edge. It landed almost perfect, and after an adjustment with the chain, he looked almost happy to be dead. I covered it up with hay, filled the hole, and smoothed out the burial mound.
Luad was 37 years old, which is about 100 in people years. Juliet bought him as a 2 year old from the guy living in the green house. Apparently, he was big on bucking, and had been hit by a car once. He’d been ‘retired’ for about 20 years.
If you do the math, Juliet has spent her entire adult life taking care of this horse, so I was trying to do a  good job and make it look dignified. I did a good job.

I came home, freshened up, put the battery in the motorcycle, and checked the compression on each cylinder using the starter motor. The best cylinder was 55 psi, and the minimum is supposed to be 100psi. Really bad. So I wasted no time and removed the valve cover, the cams, the cylinder head, and the cylinder block. All but the cylinder block came apart fine, and eventually, even it came apart. So now I need to come up with a gasket kit and do some cleanup. Maybe even grind some valves. This is the worst-case scenario, and it’s gonna be a mess.
We had leftover mac&cheese and watched Letterman’s last show, which apparently ran long, so the dvr cut out before the last speech.

May 22 fri
I started off with some youTube videos about how to overhaul the valves and pistons. I am in way over my head. I went downstairs and did some cleanup on the suzuki castings and got myself good and greasy. Juliet had brought over some fresh home-made bagels last night, and I made a ham and swiss sandwich with one of them. Really good. I like that lady. Mary and I went downtown to the hardware store and Menard’s, where we bought a bunch of vegetable seedlings. We came home and I geared up for a session at the green house, where I mostly pondered the next move. I worked on shoring up the weak structure of the south wall, hoping to be ready soon for floor joists. I had to jack up the wall a little to get the new pieces in place where they could hold up some weight, but I didn’t have an 11′ post to put atop the hydraulic jack. So I used the tip I’d cut off of the log I’d sawn into the beam. Somehow, it seemed the right thing to do, given the age of the wall I was working on.

May 26 tue
I’ve got my engine parts scraped and cleaned, and I need to get the valves ground. Now I’m no mechanic, but the intake valve was more caked than the exhaust valve. So either exhaust gasses are getting past the intake valve (and probably causing the carburetor to run in reverse for a bit) or the intake valve is getting so hot that it is burning incoming fuel when it bounces off the valve. Either way, the valves need to be reground. So this morning, I took some valves to Stowe Road Auto and asked if they grind valves. Nope. And he says nobody he knows does it because you need some fancy equipment. There’s an outfit in Williston that can do it, but it will cost me a ton of money. So I went about my other errands scheming about how to get it done. Maybe I could mount Dad’s carbide grinder on the lathe, put the valve in a collet and grind it myself? That’s a lot of fucking work, but theoretically, it should work… I decided that that’s crazy, though, and I went to Riverview Garage for a second opinion. The guy looked at the valves, said they needed work but were not beyond repair. He even showed me a tool to make it easy: It works like a cave man starting a fire with a stick. He basically implied that, if I’ve got the thing taken apart and cleaned up, then I should have no problem grinding the valves myself.
I got a bunch of plumbing fittings at Johnson Rental, got the tractor tire fixed, and left the grocery list at home, but got groceries anyway. I sanded the final cabinetry odds and ends and put them in Mary’s car – game over! I pecked away at the green house and we had nachos and NCIS.
I’m a little bothered that I’m making absolutely no time for c3pr. Part of it is the nice weather. Part of it is that I’ve just got too much going on. Part of it is sheer exhaustion from all the effort it took to get charles1 working. In any event, I’m making a mental note of the situation and giving myself a pass for now.
My elbow hurts.

May 27 wed
Mary wants to mow the lawn and yesterday I could not get the lawn mower started. So this morning, I took a look at it. After all, I’m starting to be quite the expert with engines: go-cart, motorcycle … why not look at the lawn mower? So I headed right for the carburetor: I took it apart and got an o-ring lost on the floor. Examined all the linkages and exposed the rocker arm assembly. Only then did I think to check whether it had gas. It was way low and not much was coming out of the fuel filter, but let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it wasn’t just out of gas. I checked the spark – ok – and I checked the compression, which was about 30psi – way low. Hmm. This is the same thing as the motorcycle. Maybe I can give it a valve job and call it practice for the motorcycle? It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what I did. Everything I did to the motorcycle in the last 3 months, I did for the lawnmower today, plus grinding the valves and putting it back together and starting it. It was a little scary holding the pull-rope and pretending it’s the motorcycle. The good news is that it runs really well. Way better than it would have if I’d just added gas and a new spark plug. Very nice job. One lesson here is that I need a roll-around toolbox. Another is that I needn’t be so anal about cleanliness. More than once, I’d wire brush, wd40,wipe, wd4o, carb cleaner, compressed air, and then drop the part on the floor while trying to assemble it. More than once.  And while I really don’t see much difference between the valves before and after grinding, it apparently makes a big difference. I should check the compression tomorrow.

May 30 sat
I finished grinding the valves. In the end, epoxy turned out to be the best way to grasp the valve. My elbow hurts from all the twisting.. I spent a long time going thru the list of camera mfgrs, paring it back to cameras in my range. Very strange that I still have no idea what all these things cost. I’m pretty sure I don’t really need a camera just yet, but it’s good info, and it eases me back into the habit of spending quality time on c3pr.
I hooked up the garden with well water and an empty conduit. I sort of hope it’s the last time I dig a trench that size, because it was a lot of work. If you skip all the planning, I got the whole thing done in 2 days. I pissed myself off when I drilled the 2 1/4″ hole exactly 4″ too low in the side of the house.

All month long
Last summer, I finished the ellipse and I planted bulbs in it. Hundreds of them. Maybe even a thousand. I don’t know what came over me, but I got carried away.
The plan was to draw a picture with flowers and we could watch it bloom from the picture window of the living room. Then I got to thinking: crocuses bloom first. Then daffodils. Then tulips. Then lillies. So why not take advantage of the timing and plant a MOTION picture? A ‘Spring-activated’ time-lapse picture show, if you will. It was hard because there are 3 manholes smack dab in the middle of the ‘canvas’, but here’s what I came up with:
First: A blue-eyed happy face smoking a cigar. They don’t sell flesh-colored crocuses, so I settled for yellow lips, blue-on-white eyes followed by the red glow of the cigar and then a white wisp of smoke.
Second:  A bursting heart made from early, middle, and late tulips.
I should have quit while I was ahead, though, because the tulips’ time-frame overlapped that of the happy face and ruined the whole effect. See for yourself: