Ladders are scary.

For some reason climbing around in the tops of giant trees feels much
safer than a wobbly ladder.

But ya gotta get it done.

First new window

...is ready with moldings attached. Cross your fingers for me that
this works.

New windows go here.

Da Christmas Ham

A lot of pig for what was only going to be the five of us. Suckered a
couple friends into helping, but will still be a bit more than we
need...

The new way to peel shrimp...

Army of Gingerbread Girls

Dave has been very busy.

Emma's baby

Emma carries Tug around like a baby--he seems to love the attention!

Village

To be decorated at our girl scout meeting tomorrow night.

Our little Eskimo

Looks like crate training won't be too hard.

Tug apparently is quite at home in the crate.

It is rough I tell ya....

Meet Tug

Mommy Caved.

Someone wants to be an engineer...

2nd coat is done...

Might not even need a third coat after all. Here's hoping...

Oh, and Erin's a little worn out!

Finally

Erin's getting her bedroom done. The start of three coats.

The kiddies

Yup, we have 7 kids in our house right now. Total of 13 people until after Thanksgiving. Nothing but good times. More to follow....

Gotta love the tie-dye

And the candid shots!

It's all good in this house...

New heating lines

I think I must have this all wrong. When the wife says she wants to
rearrange the heaters so that the furniture fits better, would the
average person just blindly say, "OK"?

I will say that oxygen barrier PEX (the red line) is da bomb. The only
other alternative I know of is lots of little pieces of pipe or tube
hooked together between joist cavities.

We treat our animals well

This includes hand feeding in between beatings and solitary
confinement....

Mini Watermelons

A Pumpkin Divided

But we ended on a good note.

We had varied emotions during our first game.

Cailin was playing with my phone

And I just found it filled up with random pictures.

"Huh?"

First day of school

Yep, it's a bit late, but this was the picture from Tuesday morning. (Erin said I had to get something up to push the foot pic down.) So, Emma is starting KG, Cailin is in 5th (on patrol, that's the reflective sash), and Marlee is going into 3rd.

What not to do....

Picture is about 42 hours after impact.

-Dave

It is rough when the dog food spills and you have to clean it up.

Someone needs to learn to cut bread vertically...

Emma and mac & cheese

Emma made Spongebob M&C tonight. She ate almost the whole batch single-
handedly. And some popcorn chicken. And some bread. And some fruit
salad. What happens when she turns 6?

Tae Kwon DoDo

So imagine Hurricane Emma the blackbelt at age 8. The "Yes Sir!" and
"Yes Maam!" really makes me smile.

I only need a few feet...

But it seems the smallest piece of 3/4" oxygen barrier PEX I could buy
was 300'. If anyone else needs a small piece, just let me know.

The garden grows

Albeit slowly. We've had an unusually cool spring and early summer.

Shower Drain

The new shower drain was installed tonight. Baby steps...

I finally won something!

Ok, I have bad luck with contests. One of the reasons I don't play the lottery (the other reason being the odds make it a tax on the gullible....) I go to office parties, and they give out tons of door prizes and I don't win any. Ever. I enter contests and rarely win if it's a simple drawing (I did win a dessert contest, but my entry was pretty darned competitive....) The only contest I can remember winning of any significance that was purely luck was a romantic get away for two to the Oregon coast. Problem was I was 17, and you had to be 18 to be elligible for the grand prize. I would have been elligible for one of the other prizes though :(

But tonight that all changes. That's right, I won a $100 gift certificate for my entry in the helmet sticker contest.... That's right folks. Of course, it turns out that there appears to be only five entries. But given my luck, I figured that was pretty much a no-win situation. Especially given that earlier this evening I figured out I had installed the piston rotated with the wrong side to the flywheel. That's a 50/50 chance, right? So at 1 in 5 odds who'd have guessed.

Anyhow, time to go to bed and dream about what I'm gonna spend my winnings on! (It's an arborist company, so we're talking tree climbing equipment for those not familiar with Wesspur.)

Catching Up

Well, it's been awhile now and that stinking crankshaft post is still at the top of the blog. I really need to put some kid pics up or something, but....we'll just have to catch up on my narcissistic endeavors for a bit instead.

First, for those fans of the firetruck, it's finally moved on. Andrew sold it on Ebay for a small profit to a broker in Tennessee who has a buyer lined up for it at a huge profit. I don't think that Andrew was excited about this, but his marriage depended on it. However, the broker didn't want to pay for the nice diesel Onan generator on top of it. The tractor wouldn't reach that high, so we had to rig out of a tree and use the pickup to hoist it free of the fire engine. This was late Thursday night in the dark (but of course :)) Gotta love being a wanna-be redneck.


When I got into my truck to hoist that thing, I noticed a spiderweb looking windshield. Dang it all. Looks like an old, rotten section of branch fell out of the oak trees above my truck and hit right at the top edge. That was it. Same thing happened to the horse lady's car last year. Both times you couldn't find the offending projectile, just rotten shrapnel.

Since I can't think of a better place to park, it was time to take revenge in the trees. Saturday Jason and I each went up a tree and started deadwooding them. Actually a great climb while Erin and Katy went to the Rascal Flatts concert. Both Jason and I get more comfortable each time. I don't think he's ever gone quite as high as this time, and I have never been at the extreme tips of the canopy before where the branches are 3 inches or less that I'm tied to. Things move a lot at that point. He came down first since his tree had less to cut out and grabbed the camera. Here I am almost to the top.


I also cut a couple lower live branches off to neaten things up a bit. Well that and inflict a little payback on the tree... A jump cut is where you get the branch to 'jump' off the tree, avoiding the hinge effect and letting it fall horizontal to the ground. Never tried it without a chainsaw before this effort.

We climbed a little more for fun, trying out some new techniques. When I came back in, the girls had made themselves dinner and some substantial desserts:

Finally, I have to mention that the wiring is roughed in and the ceiling drywalled in the bathroom. Check out my crew....

The Crankshaft Is OK!!!

I know you have all been concerned since my last post, so I'd thought I race up to the house and post the results of the crankshaft operation.....

First I had to get it out of the lawn mower. The poor patient looks a little worse for wear now:



Then very carefully with a file and many grits of wet-dry sandpaper I was able to remove the friction-welded aluminum from the journal surface and smooth the grooving a bit.

It's within spec, with minimum measurements at about 1.6134" and max measurements of 1.6141". That actually happens to be the min/max spec values exactly, and falls within the 0.001" out of round tolerance. We also meet the 0.0005" taper tolerance. It's nice that Kohler publishes these values in the service manual which is free to download. So the only question is surface finish, for which I can't find a spec. But I think I got it pretty good.


Now that I know you can all sleep better tonight, I will be able to sleep myself.

Lawnmower Problems

So, Erin was mowing and I was weedeating yesterday. There's an embankment along the side of the road that needed weedeating, but I wanted to mow as much as possible first. So after Erin finished, I took the mower back out. Sitting on the left fender I was able to mow at about 40 degrees maybe along the side of the hill. Then the oil light flashed on and the engine started to die. Dang. Killed the engine and towed it back to the shop with the big tractor, kicking myself the whole time. I knew I was getting close to an oil change, and hadn't checked the level for awhile.

When I got into the shop, I checked the level and it was low, but still in range. Huh? So how bad could the damage be? I started pulling apart the Kohler 20hp single piston engine to find out. Not how I imagined Father's Day, but....

So the pickup for the oil pump is on the left side. I had all the oil tipped to the right side. Plus I just read that the engine is only designed for operation up to 25 degrees.


Well, here is the damage.


The crank has some aluminum from the connecting rod friction welded to it. Not sure if it can be cleaned up or if I need a new one. I'll find out tonight when I pull the crank. I'm hoping I can skip the $200 crank and just get by with the $90 for a new rod and gaskets. Time will tell. At least the oil is being changed at the same time, right?

Chainsaw GTG

I've become addicted to this website, arboristsite.com. I found it when I was trying to find some info on how to splice a certain kind of climbing rope, and became hooked. I'm not the only one. They have about 38,000 members, although the regulars are a smaller crowd. Anyhow, the chainsaw guys had a Get-To-Gether in West Virginia on Saturday that I went to. Yeah, buddy....


Lots and lots of sawdust flying. Lots of noise. Lots of fun. And no, I don't expect many of you to understand....

Erin was out of town....

Erin was out of town for a few days last week, so I stayed up late working on Dav Projects. First up was splicing some prussik cord for climbing. Believe it or not, this little cord is rated for about 8000 lbs! And is heat resistant. Only the core fibers carry the load, so the outer braid is just whipped and stitched at the base of the eye. Two eyes make a prussik.



Here is the almost finished product. The core fibers are so fine and tend to snag that I whipped them so they would go on and off the caribiner easier. Below is the final setup, including a hitchclimber pulley.


Then the next night I decided to muffler mod my MS260 chainsaw for more power. See the bolt holes in the edges for attaching? That's about the size of the exhaust hole in the center before I started. Opening it ups helps a lot. Including swapping carbs for one with an adjustable H jet, it took about 2 hours. At the GTG on Saturday this thing ripped, people couldn't believe it was out-cutting bigger saws.

Erin's home now to save me from myself and make sure I go to bed at reasonable hours.....

Last Day Of School.

Alrighty then...today is the last day of school for Cailin and Marlee. But they keep correcting me -- it's not the last day, it's apparently the last 2-1/2 hours. And that's not a day. I guess this is one of the tough parts of educating your kids, they get smarter.

Dav

Not sure who he is calling, but I guess the helmet must be a safety
precaution.