Saturday, April 24, 2021

The day in pictures

 

Millie, left side, foreground, seems to be responding to the medication.

Here she is next to her bosom buddy Lucy.

She appears to be eating more, much more. In fact, she turned into an eating-machine and she lost that hunched-up look.

We will wash the poop-ring off her tail after she is moved to a paddock closer to the house.

Roofers

The roofers showed up today.

It started to rain at 12:30 and they bagged it for the day. The steel roofing is very slippery when wet.

They dropped off an enormous dumpster for the roof tear-off. Half the roof filled less than a sixth of the dumpster. The crew chief said I could not throw tires in there but he would look the other way for nearly everything else.

The roof tear-off was loud inside the house. It didn't bother me because I have lots of practice ignoring loud music, loud kids, loud TVs, loud bangs and the like. It drove Kubota nuts. Karma?

Side project


I fiddled with the old Coleman Dual-fuel 533 camp-stove I have.

My first go-around had several leaks. I looked at the cost of a new one ($100) and decided it would be worth my time to try to fix it.

I bought an set of Viton O-rings because...well, because it is always the O-rings.

It wasn't the O-rings. Somehow it had gotten tossed around and the compression fittings were loose. Fixing it involved lightly greasing the O-rings with Rotella red-grease, reassembling and tightening the nuts for the compression fittings.

It ran like crap until the air and stale gas had worked its way through the system.


 

Once it burned off whatever was clogging up the air-ports (spider webs?) it ran like a top.

What a great piece of technology and not a single wire or chip in it. 

Goslings

No pictures but at least one set of geese at the local pond have newly hatched goslings in tow.

Shopping trip

Again, no pictures. I made a trip to Charlotte (pop about 8k) to shop at the local sporting goods store.

The Dunham's Sports in Lansing had New Balance running shoes that my feet like. I assumed the store in Charlotte would also have them.

Wrong.

On the positive side, they have Ruger American Ranch rifles in .350 Legend with decent Vortex glass on them for about $600. Tempting.

7 comments:

  1. I can recommend OLDCOLEMAN.COM for parts. Especially for the really old stuff. Another really fun site is https://terry-marsh.com to identify all things old and Coleman.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks.

      I "get" that propane and butane stoves have fewer moving parts and are cheaper to manufacture and sell.

      But it is immensely comforting to have a piece of equipment that you can run on paint thinner or gas salvaged from a junk car with an ice-pick to the bottom of the gas tank.

      We are defined more by how we function when everything is in the ditch than by how we function when everything is nominal.

      Delete
    2. Propane and Butane are less energy "dense". They will heat stuff up but liquid fuel turns things orange.

      Delete
  2. I have one of those old colemans. Runs great on 89 octane unleaded.

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  3. I pulled the old Coleman two burner stove off the shelf and tried it out last year.
    New fuel and oiling the pump washer was all it took to put it back into service.

    Much the same for the single mantle and double mantle lanterns.

    I got Crown White Gas Camp Fuel from a place that whose name rhymes with Ball Tart. It was much cheaper than Coleman fuel and works fine.

    The double mantle lantern is dual fuel, but I've never gotten around to trying it on gasoline.

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  4. Will it run on alcohol or good moonshine?

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  5. They run fine on unleaded, however the generator will crud up after a couple gallons. The price of a generator $8, unleaded @ $3 and campfuel @ $14. Generators are cheaper than campfuel. Probably would run on alcohol, just stand back while you try it.

    ReplyDelete

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