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The happy Nada Farmer, a little overworked at present, but loving the challenges and the sunshine, not necessarily in that order.
Keep coming back , page Twenty Two follows......soon .
June 21st is the first day of what ?
Been busy busy busy!
That's why this is 3 months late!
Back a few years ago I had a little Volkswagen project. Megan's 68 Volkswagen was in a small fender bender, which nearly caused it to disintegrate. I guess there was an abundance of rust hiding out in the air channels, and the floor pans and the , well everywhere. SO I have replaced the majority of those parts. But as I was working on it. I fell through a floor at a house fire, and after 5 years I'm still trying to get the City of Akron, through Workers Comp, to own up to the responsibilities they are supposed to accept. Meanwhile, I do little things, one at a time, and take about twenty times longer than reasonable, but, it's getting done. I recently reattached the body to the chassis, (with help of course) now I'm rebuilding the wheels (brakes) one at a time. There are a ton of rubber parts that need attention, and the entire interior to redo, but I've got time, if nothing else. the interior is all overhead work and will be the worst part for me as I can't reach above my head and do anything substantial.
Mugs came home to help, we planned to try to get it finished up in a two week marathon session. Well, I can't do anything but sleep for two weeks straight, and it took about "way too freakin' long". How about, four days to get four bolts in the right places? Then two days to get the pan ready to reattach at the very front, more rust of course, so it took the entire two weeks to to get the body reattached to the chassis. Mugs was incredibly patient, to bide time, while I worked on my 'sailor's vocabulary', she painted parts and redid some of the upholstery. She did as much as I could/would 'let' her do. I usually find it is easier to 'do it', than to 'explain it'. And on a vehicle, what is just a little thing can cause serious and even fatal problems later, we were working on the brakes, as you might recall. And the order in which things get done is often important. I didn't want to do any interior work until all the welding was certainly done, to avoid burning it up and to keep the smell of burning metal away from the new interior, I would be upset if the new seats smelled like a burnt rubber grommet for the next twenty years. Also, there's the little problem with the fact that I moved in the middle of the project, and some parts are missing, the thieves that cleaned out my yard in Akron, as I was moving, stole some of the parts, to get scrap money, probably netted about $1.00 for the parts I've paid $200.00 to replace. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits. To add to the delays, I have been running back and forth to the Lake Street Garage looking for things I forgot I would need, and some things I'm pretty sure I threw away, because I forgot where they went. But I'll get it fixed right yet. Unfortunately I had to move the Bug out to the machine building, with most of it's completed parts stacked inside it because....
The Salt Fork Arts and Crafts Show is the next big issue. I'm supposed to make a few dozen "barn wood frames" for the boss's pictures, and I have to make sure the wood is dry this time, so it won't shrink apart when it "thaws out" like the last few frames I made. "HO HO HO" Merry Christmas, oops your frame is shrinking as we watch.. just part of the "rustic appeal of primitive crafts" This takes the entire garage, well the half of it that isn't "wall to wall" full at the moment, and so the little bug had to go, because I need the room to set up the three table saws and the planer and the staple guns to make the frames.
In the meantime, I moved the little house from down near the old house, up to the new house. Actually across the driveway from it. The story is, it was built as a play house for the kids and eventually became a yard storage shed, after the kids grew up. Well my lovely wife wants to make it a photo blind, getaway, full size doll house, gardening hut, whatever. So I removed it from its moorings and dropped it on a couple "I beams" I made out of the 2X8's Russ got, and dragged it up the hill.
As usual, it wasn't that straight forward, and did go sideways a couple times, and fall off the skids, and nearly tip over, but only once. I tried to use the Bobcat to move it but the tires are so treadless that it was a joke, and the tires on the Ford truck were no use as well, so I had to change the tires and wheels, to the off road tires Russ gave me and it zoomed up the hill, the time it nearly flipped over. So now I have it near where she wants it. At this point we haven't mounted it on a foundation of any type. First because I've been too busy, and second because we haven't come to a consensus of how might be the best way to do it.
The little house from the street. 
Meanwhile, there's the reunion to get ready for, and I am a little concerned about the water issues. So I was getting the Leisure Lodge ready to sell, and... I discovered while cleaning it up, that it has an electrically powered water pump and about a 30 gallon tank. So I created an external water supply system for the toilet tanks in the big house, using the rain barrel Chris bought last year as the input, I used the tank and pump under the house with the battery from the motor home and it worked! I actually got a shower after having three overnight visitors the day before, and 23 people for the Rankin reunion. I'm sure everyone did their best to save water and that was probably the reason we got away without having to reset the water pump. The re-plumbing of the house was all done in blue pipe so the "alternate water system" is easy to identify.
I bought a special crimping tool so I could work on the water pipes with the same system they used to install them. One of the biggest challenges was finding the pipes that were already installed. The entire underside of the house is wrapped in plastic and heavily insulated, so I had to measure around walls and closets and so forth to identify the studs where the pipes might be found. I then cut the plastic, moved the insulation, and checked for the original piping, after identifying where it was going to and from I was able to drill access holes in the floors under the toilet tanks without puncturing the existing piping, or electrical wires or anything else that might be hidden in these spaces. I find a few weird things about this house. I thought a manufactured home would be great because everything is planned and put in place in a factory setting and yet I find plastic pipes that are mounted at angles to the floor joists drilled on top of a joist and then angled away to parts unknown. I wondered when I installed the taller toilets why the supply lines were unable to be extended upwards to meet the higher supply tanks, really just a stretch of two inches, and there wasn't enough extra hose to accommodate the upgrade.
Well after spelunking around under this house, I have a better idea of the areas where cost savings are considered acceptable in the manufactured home. And saving an inch of plastic pipe or a few inches of electrical wire are obviously important in the construction practices they incorporate in their products.
Meanwhile back at the Nada Farm.
I was working on a project for my neighbor, the REAL farmer, and I lost a phase. I know it sounds like carelessness on my part, But it turns out a spring in a circuit breaker broke and the power was really weird. I heard the three phase converter winding down, as the milling machine quit unexpectedly. If it was a full scale quality system installation, there would be circuit drop out relays and all kinds of safe guards, but with my system it's a crash and dash across the impenetrable two bay garage, and throw the Franken Switch, to avert melt down. I am nearly healed from the things I ran into, knocked over, and crashed through. Though I think the blood stains will never come out of the shin areas of my bibs. Anyway, as I finally pulled the switch,
the entire garage went dark. Weird! So I started chasing power with my little yellow electrical meter (VOM). I finally found the problem was in the oldest box in the basement of the little house, oldest breakers, and everything in the house and garage go through it. The garage, "Frankenbuilding" is on a 60 amp breaker, which popped, of course it is a dual breaker, 60 amps per phase, so I can have 220 in the garage. I ran the garage in Akron on a 100 amp breaker, and never had an issue. So I bought a 100 amp replacement, and am currently (pun intended) digging a new ditch for larger wire, Though when I checked, immediately after the breaker incident, the wires weren't even warm!
Anyway, when I left Akron I took the electrical wire that was powering the garage, I un installed the 200 amp breaker box and number 2 triplex from the house through the 3 inch pipes I had installed in the ground running into the basement of the house. There are two pipes, one for communication wires, phone, computer, surveillance cameras. And one for the power lines. So it was easy to pull the wires, well it was possible, actually I needed Russell Muscle to get the job done, mainly due to my lack of any strength above my waist (shoulders shot, back shot , thanks BWC for nothing!) I removed the cable and brought it with me. Now, unfortunately, it is a few feet short, and the price has gone stupid, like most every thing else, it was over $400.00 to get what I needed to run 'new wire' as one piece, and I didn't price the splice option, because, well, I been busy. And I need a tractor. The subject came up that I had a few power issues and the REAL farmer next door said "well check that roll of wire down next to the milk house, and take that if you can use it, I was just going to strip it and sell it for scrap..." Well guess what, I'm digging a trench to upgrade the FrankenBuilding to 200 amps and wire it so it can be powered from the garage by the welder, like Lake Street was. And I'll finally feel comfortable firing up the TIG welder!
But of course it's never that easy. Ryan saw some Hornets entering the back of the little house a couple weeks ago when he visited, they were pretty active.
So when I went in to check the breakers I was not real surprised to hear a constant humming in the area, then I found out where they had been busy. You guessed it, right next to the breaker box. You know the one I had to remove breakers from and replace breakers and run back and forth switching things on and off, while trying to keep up with all the other goings on. Yeah, that's just what happened.
Here, you might notice, they are not staying in the nest but crawling around and in and out of the hundred holes that might lead to even more of them. And in fact, there were hundreds and hundreds of pupae in 4 levels of comb, being well serviced by the hundreds already flying in and out with supplies.
The first thing I had to do was replace the light socket in the room. The original had a pull chain switch which had deteriorated, the actuator arm was some type of cardboard, and it was filled with dead Lady Bugs so it didn't turn on anymore. So I deactivated the breaker and 'changed out' the socket. When I was done I screwed in a light bulb and it worked just fine, unfortunately I hadn't turned the breaker back on yet so that wasn't the right breaker I deactivated, I can tell it will be a while till I have a handle on the electrics in the little house.
Now that I had a light, and a clear path out, I started to reclaim the basement. However, I cheated, and used an entire can of Raid Wasp and Hornet Killer, I saturated the nest and stayed away for about 16 hours, I finally vacuumed the nest up the next day when I could see clearly if my efforts were effective enough to keep me from getting stung again.
I also discovered the basement door was about to fall out of the house, well the door was on only one hinge from the start, the previous owners son had come home after curfew, drunk and decided to sneak in by kicking the door off the hinges. Guess maybe it didn't work all that well, he was caught, and told to repair the damage, two years later dad sold the house... although the door was hanging by the top hinge only, it did close. But the frame was just sitting in a large hole surrounded and supported by old blue jeans and wadded up insulation. So I deck screwed the top of the frame to the sill plate, and sledge hammered the base board out to where it was plumb and cleared out around the rest of the frame.
You might notice a slight 'light leak', possibly indicative of a heat loss probability in the coming heating season. So it becomes a priority as winter approaches, of course having just removed a hornet's nest that existed because of a smaller than a half inch, hole in the sill plate, there might be more pressing reasons to get it sealed a little quicker.
Now just for kicks here is a list of things yet to do this summer/fall: I still have to finish insulating and plating the garage roof. The walls need to be coated with something inside, been using sheets of OSB roofing left over from the garage roof project back in the spring, or was it last fall, yeah last fall. And I have to get actual wiring around the garage walls, inside and out. Need get the turret lathe moved to the back of the garage where it belongs, so I can make the steam engines that are going to pay for all this. The spring house still needs the roof finished and the door hung on hinges, the bug needs finished, the gravely needs the clutches replaced, the second Cub Cadet needs reassembled, the go karts need to be sold, the Leisure Lodge, well I covered that already, and I need to sell the Lake Street Estate, which requires the replacement of the last three windows, with the new vinyl ones I bought 5 years ago, they are sitting in the dining room, the furnace should be replaced , the new one is sitting on the back porch, and the garage should be rewired for the next guy, so he doesn't have to work by extension cords. So that's why I'm removing the smaller cable from the little house's back yard to accomplish that little feat dollar free, the new 60 amp box is sitting on the floor below the spot where it should be on the wall, in the garage. And the Dominion Gas company needs to place their leaking line from the street into the basement. However, in spite of a court ruling making it their responsibility, they are choosing to ignore it until enough people sue them to make them follow the current law, but that's for another page.
Man, are we happy out here!
