Ray McCune's Website

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Fall is here!

Turned into winter as this was all happening!

It's getting chilly enough I wear a long sleeve shirt. And occasionally insulated bibs (if it's below 20 and windy), even a hat at times.

There are few things that make me as crazy as having a fire in a building. After 25 years of trying to keep fires out of buildings, now I have one in my garage! (OK, its in a wood furnace.) And it concerns me. Might be, because the first time I fired it up, the wall caught fire! Actually, it turned out to be burning clothes in the wall, used to pack around the hole in the wall where the chimney connects. Now be honest, you would stuff your old blue jeans around the hot steel chimney pipe, wouldn't you? Particularly if there was a cold wind blowing in, over your wood furnace? Pack them in tight around the pipe and fill the hole in the Celotex and paneling, right , right?

Fortunately, I'm sensitized, somewhat, to the smell of smoke, (not sure how or why) but I smelled an odd flavor in the smoke, and set about finding out why, right away. The smoke was just starting to pour out of the top of the wall, inside the garage, above the flue pipe for the wood burner ! I realized this was no time for finesse, grabbing a hoe that was laying on the floor next to the stove to scrape it out, I immediately started ripping the smoking paneling away from the pipe.

That was when I discovered the jeans and other used clothing stuffed in the wall as a sealer. After I removed the burning clothing, I continued to pull out the smoldering Celotex, that was just starting to produce the black smoke rolling out the bottom of the wall. I was a bit unhappy, at that point, though relieved that the entire place hadn't burned down.

Now while I was preparing this page, I had another little experience with fire in the Garage. I had come in to make a Meatloaf for dinner, but I intended to go back out to the Garage for a while. I also needed to remove the charger from the batteries on the motor home, which for some reason boil dry, but that's another page. Anyway after I had been in the house for an hour or so, there was a knock at the front door. You know how sometimes a knock at the door after dark, is in need of a light being turned on before opening the door, and sometimes not? Well this one had the urgency of an "open the door don't mess around with lights and pleasantries" so as I opened the door I saw two dark figures, breathing hard, and blurting out, "there was a fire in your garage!"

As I ran, yes ran in the dark, down the hill to the garage, my neighbor Brian, the concrete guy, who helped with the floors, told me he saw flames shooting up from the top of the wood burner in the garage. He had been out picking up firewood and as he drove past he saw flames in the window of the garage door and stopped to investigate. Now that's a good neighbor!

I had placed a pile of dripping wet wood on top of the wood burner to dry out, and it sure did! I checked, I could put my hand on the metal top of the heater and hold it there it surely wasn't hot enough to start a fire, really, I know these things! And yet, the pile of fire wood I had put on top to dry out, had caught fire. I had intentionally placed a piece of the steel siding behind the furnace, for heat reflection, and was wondering if I should put a piece above it as well? Obviously that question is answered! The entire corner is going to be steel covered. Just in case I get stupid again. Chris has a much different story of this little ooppsie so I'll let her make up her version and get it on here soon.

This year as it gets

Here's where the story takes a turn, I have been using an Apple computer to create and maintain this site since its inception. I have been happy with my little G5 Dual, and had no intention of upgrading or changing anything, it just works great, then as I turned it on to make this page it just quit.. not shut down, just blinked off . And refused to do anything but a quick blink when I attempted to restart it. I reverted to my Sony Vaio PC to check the web to find out what the issue might be, it seemed most likely a power supply failure or......a coolant leak. Yes this machine was one of them with the liquid coolant system due to the heat generated by the Motorola chips running at 2.5 Gigahertz. As I found more and more reports of system leak failures and months of waiting for repairs and no admission by Apple it was a design flaw, I figured I was "right and royally screwed". I had asked the salesman when buying the $3000.00 machine why I should purchase the Apple Care for another 500.00 dollars and did he doubt the quality of the machine that much maybe I should buy something else... he said no I could trust that Apple had built a quality machine, and I should get the same trouble free service I had gotten from the dozens of computers I had purchased over the years before. I figure I have spent over $20000.00 on computers alone, not including the thousands I have spent on software, or printers or internet access, etc. So I have some experience.

Now my experience with Apple has been pretty good to date, I did have a little issue last year about some monitor problems which we thought should have been covered by Apple Care, but it turns out they were a year out of the warranty somehow, so I had to go to COMP USA and turn in my monitor, for a new one, and swap Chris for hers (which had two dead pixels driving her crazy when she tried to retouch them out of photos each and every time she took a picture). So it worked out that the COMP USA was a good replacement plan, no problems at all.

I have an iBook that needed a battery replaced and that was remarkable, the replacement came the next day, with a return box and I have never had anything work so smoothly, until now.

OK, HOLD ON TIGHT, HERE IT COMES!

APPLE GAVE ME A NEW COMPUTER! That's right folks, a brand new, in the box, complete with the latest operating system upgrade, new freaking computer! It's a MAc Pro, it's faster, (2.66 mHz versus the G5's 2.5 mHz) bigger hard drive, (250 Gigabyte versus the G5's 160 GB) and has four processors instead of two, has the same amount of memory I had expanded mine to (1 gig), has more ports, faster interfaces, a better system for adding more drives, a second door, and bay, for another optical drive, a dual layer burner, and they moved all my programs and files, shifted over my extra drive, gave me back the extra ram I bought , and the airport card, (because none of them would work in this unit) added a new airport card, and the old keyboard and mouse and all the cables and the disks that came with it, and books. And I gave them the old box to ship the dead one back to California. I didn't want to upgrade the operating system since the programs I regularly use, won't work under the new system. So they installed the system I had on mine.

Now this wasn't without a small cost to me, I had to buy a power supply for my monitor, it had been driven by the computer before, and the new ones don't do that. So I had to purchase a $110.00 power cube. But that's it, and with all the stuff they gave me back, I can hopefully recover the cost by selling the things I can't use, on Ebay.

(Even better, I discovered the airport card and memory worked in Chris's machine, so now she has a wireless connection to the rest of the machines and I doubled the memory in her G4 Dual Mirrored Door model, which is like I did something good for a change!)

I have to say, this is how a business should operate, if you want to see a satisfied customer, this is what one looks like. This is happy me!

Chris pestered me for almost 20 years to leave the PC world and go Mac with her, I bought her Macs and found she was happy with them, they just work. Whenever I pressed her about not being interested in how they worked, she'd just smile and be happy they did what she wanted. I learned about DMA's and IRQ's and installing upgrades and over clocking and peripherals, and that has been handy for helping others, but with the Apples, they just work.

So when I got hurt in 2003 and forced into retirement in 2004. I went out and bought an Apple, the top of the line, best ever, G5 and the software I needed to make movies. I shot the videos, and had struggled with my Sony Vaio (with Adobe Premier) to make a DVD, for weeks, and still couldn't get what I wanted. I went home, hooked up the Apple, and had the finished DVD that evening, in less than three hours! And this evening when I got home, I had the new Apple right back in the desk where it belonged and running, in a half hour. On line, providing the Airport signal for the laptops, internet sharing, (through the Sony Vaio I have to use to hook up through People PC, as the name states, only works on a PC). Everything important working in a half hour!

So, I simply suggest, spend the extra dollars, and get an Apple. They aren't perfect, and there are quite a few things they won't do, that an internet savvy person can do on a PC, with free internet downloads. But if you want to email, make videos, or music, or web sites, or draw pictures, or make photo albums, or anything else legal, and you just want it to work, quickly and easily, and based on the kind of support I got. Buy an Apple!

Now back to the Farm.

The Garage is coming along, the insulation is going to be a challenge, I can't work overhead, neck and shoulders aren't functional in that area anymore, but as the Lawyer says, "they will find a doctor that says you should be playing for the NFL" because it suits their purpose.

Fortunately Russ came down and put the insulation up for me, we had enough to do about 3/4 of the ceiling, I am happy to wait for the rest, as it was done with cast offs from jobs he has worked. Again, the operational word here being free! In fact the crisscross is from a bundle of wire that was rusting away in the open side of the garage structure. I puzzled over the purpose of that bundle of wire for about 7 months, then I went to the Dover Steam Show, I was looking for a favorite cousin and when I found him he was running a steam powered haybaler, and he was threading two of these long wires through a wood board that was a separator between the bales. About a month later I mowed into the bundle, I had moved them outside to finish rusting away, and I realized what they were, actual baling wire. I have been accused of "bubble gum and bailing wire engineering" for decades and this was the first bailing wire I ever saw in it's unused form, actual strait untwisted (except for the ends) bailing wire, so I had to think of a use for it.

So Russ used it for this happy little pattern.

I had put up one strip of paper backed insulation that was so old the staples just ripped through it as I was putting it up. I ended up using Duct tape as a band across it to hold it where I stapled it, of course Duct tape, bailing wire, bubble gum, it fits huh? It worked, but it was a real pain, and not very durable, just a temporary attempt.

I intend to finish the ceiling with some thing eventually, I'm actually covering the area over the Wood Burner with small pieces of the steel siding that are dented bent or just too small to be useful on the outsides of the buildings, Why steel above and next to the wood burner? Did you read the top of this page? Yes I could do it again, I know that, but, it does refect the heat around a little bit as well.

 

I also covered the overhead garage door, at least the bottom panels which were rotting out, with steel. They are insulated with the Tuff-R, which shows as the silver from the inside. I had been concerned this would make the door too heavy, but it didn't change the weight of the door much. The rotting panels I cut out were loaded with absorbed moisture and had swollen and become pretty heavy, so the door seems lighter and works well. And it is now insulated, which will become more important as the snow hits, and I try to heat the garage more often.

 

I am getting the outside wrapped in steel, albeit slowly. I have used the steel I removed from the inside wall, of what was the open side of the garage, and by cutting it, and using the cut pieces around the windows, I have been able to stretch it around the outside and the back of the structure. I only have a small area to complete above the door, which you can see here has the original barn siding then a layer of Tuff-R then the steel on top of it. I added a rear door, that I built out of a couple pieces of the old plywood we removed from the roof in the summer, it was rotted around the edges but good in the center so I cut away the rot and filled the interior with the scraps of the Tuff-R from the siding job. I also used an old wolmanized 2x6 for the edges so the door is about 2 1/2 inches thick, insulated, and I intend to cover the outside with the scraps of steel left over from the siding.

When I get the last area of the garage finally enclosed, I am hopeful it will discourage the little birds from nesting inside it this year. But I have to finish it when the current resident is outside, there is still one bird, who's nest I can't find, flying in and out of this last hole.

Due to heating the little house to protect the things in it from freezing, I realized the back door area was basically insulated by a piece of 5/8" wood, which had been previously covered with Insulbrick, (like a roll roofing, brick patterned, tar paper). Most of which had dried up cracked and was peeling off. As I am harboring a sizable pile of metal sheeting I decided to save some money on heating and hopefully foil some wasps this coming spring. They really like to live in this wall, and provided one of the two stings I had last season. So I tacked up some Tuff-R, for at least a little insulation, and covered it with the metal sheeting. I think it looks pretty good, better than the hanging Insulbrick did anyway.

So now the entire structure is wrapped in metal of one form or another, with the exception of the blue wood siding of the front entryway. I'll be getting to that this summer when I get that area of the roof sealed up a little better.

Another little project, is that I would like to move the chicken coop,

as this showsit isn't in good condition.

I also think it is in a terrible place, too close to both the other buildings, the garage and the machine shed. It is another pole building, unfortunately they don't lend themselves to just grabbing them and dragging them where they are needed. So I may have to reengineer the floor, so the building can be skid mounted. As it is currently sitting on a house jack, due to the recently broken floor joist which loosened these sheets of OSB it's covered with. I'm going to have to get under it anyway, so I'll determine the likely hood of it surviving such a maneuver.

And during her Christmas break Mugsy helped me reinstall the rollers on the barn door. They had ripped out during a wind storm at the beginning of last summer, mostly due to the rot that infects everything constructed of wood here. It seems to be mainly a lack of skirting, or design for water shedding that causes most of these issues, and I'm going to have to do some redesign later, when it isn't all catchup work. But the job went pretty well once we found some solid wood to attach to. Which is the reason the right roller is set so close to the center of the door, it may have to be removed and the top replaced next summer but I needed to get something I could close for the winter, as the BOBCAT lives in that building for now.

right roller

roller overview

left roller

front of the barn.

So I hope you had a good Christmas season, I'll keep working as the weather gets colder, spending more time doing computer things, music and photo projects are on the list.

 

 

Man, are we happy out here!

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