Author: Admin

Things are growing….

And not just my beltline. 😉

It doesnt seem like its been a month since my last post, but the date in the header doesnt lie. The medlar tree has flowered. They are good size blooms, around an inch across. Since I put this tree in the ground in Feb it has taken to the spot and out performed all expectations. Here is what the flowers look like…..

Neat flowers and they were at the end of every branch.

I couldnt sense any fragrance or smell from them, nothing at all. I was sad when they started to wither after barely a week, but then I noticed that they didnt go completely away….

All of them shed their petals and pulled back to this. Some were more closed then others and as the week passed they all closed up tight. This week I netted the tree and noticed that it was getting bigger…

Im now fairly sure that this tree is setting fruit. The pic was taken today, the day this is posted.

Speaking of netting trees, my trees are starting to all look like ghosts for Halloween…

I noticed a few full grown crickets around and want to make sure my trees have a fighting chance this year. The grasshoppers/crickets/locust killed about half of my trees and all but one blueberry last year. I also made screens for the greenhouse so its enclosed but can still circulate plenty of air…..

There is a mix of solar shade screen and plain bug netting screen. Im trying the sun screen to see if I can mitigate some of the direct summer sun here in the central valley. As far as the plants are concerned, they seem to be loving the greenhouse….

Those are all the same plants seen in the previous post. All of them have grown a bit and look healthy. I even found some blueberries on one of the bushes that are starting…..

Since the greenhouse is doing well I am going to give a try with a raised bed idea I have. I found a good location for a test bed and asked dad to bring in the tractor to scrape away the tall grass. Here is the spot…..

And here is what it looked like after Dad brought the tractor in…

I got the first row of blocks done and need to bring more up. Im going to use the blocks for the raised bed portion to see if I can keep the wild pigs from destroying it…..

When I go up next weekend with more supplies I will adust and level the base layer a bit more, I ran out of time on this trip.

Spring is starting 2…..

After years of trying various lighting and humidity profiles to grow my coffee plants, I think I may have got close to the right conditions. I know this because not only are they growing well, but they have flowers..

They seem to be happy, and they are pretty little flowers…

I spent last Saturday moving the greenhouse from my backyard up to the property on the hill by the shed (due to the asshole behind me planting a bunch of trees to block my sun for growing things) . The greenhouse was in shade almost all day long and was useless where it was, so best to put it somewhere it can be useful.

I put it in the middle of all that tall grass, the thought being that there must be plenty of light to grow things there. 😉

I’ve already put my Tayberries in there. Herd to believe these were just bare sticks from Trees of Antiquity just a month or so ago. They love the light and already have buds for flowers…

I put my blueberry plants on the other side of the greenhouse, they have a ton of flowers on them and I’m hoping I will get to enjoy the berries this year instead of feeding the grasshoppers like last year.

Speaking of things that are budding and flowering, the Medlar tree has more buds on it and they are getting closer to flowering. Last week they were closed tight at the top, this week they are larger and just starting to unfurl the outer leaves/petals.

Last but not least, this Saturday I made a stand for the new oven. It was WAY too tall sitting on the table I made. I couldn’t get my coffee maker on the top and there is no way I’m going to put up with that. I wanted the top down low enough that I could use a pan on it comfortably like I would at my regular cook top. This is what I came up with.

Much more usable now. I just need to run it a few more times to double check the heat levels on the things around it. Every weekend I’m up there things get a little more refined for ease of use, and every weekend I’m up there it gets harder to come back to town.

Spring is starting…

Just a quick post. I planted this years batch of trees in the ground, and blueberries/tayberries in pots the second weekend in Feburary. We have had more rain this year than usual and the springs are running still at the end of March. The first tree to wake up was a Medlar from Trees of Antiquity. It was a stick when we put dirt around it and now a few weeks later its leafed.In fact, I think it already has flower buds on it….I haven’t grown one of these trees before, so I am surprised a bit by how vigorous it is. The peaches, apricots, plums, and cherries are just showing signs of leaves. The apples are just now getting fuzzy tips.More posts and pictures coming after this weekend.

New oven for the property

Its been a while since I posted any updates on the property/shed. Actually, there wont be much about either one of those in this post, but it kinda ties in since the oven is in the shed….

Yeah, its a stretch but it will have to do.

So I’ve been enjoying the shed almost every weekend this winter since I have a 2 burner coleman stove and a teeny tiny wood stove. The coleman is great to make my coffee with, and the stove always has a pot of water warming on top for tea or cocoa. Oh, and I can’t forget the occasional can of soup or Chef Boyardee. I have a coleman fold up oven, one of these..

Its a great little oven, but it is little. Biggest pan you can get in there is a 9×9. That means you can bake about half a roll of Pilsbury cinnomon rolls at a time. My other issue is that I can make coffee and some rolls, but that takes up both burners, so no bacon.

Yup, i said it….. no bacon. Suckville.

That leads me to last weekend when I was in my local sportsmans place. I saw an oven that was big enough to use a full 9×13 baking pan…. actually it will hold 2 full sized pans and has 2 burners on top.

This little beauty runs on the same small bottle that my coleman 2 burner runs on and has the option to use a conversion hose for 5lb and up bottles!

So, you ask, how well does it work? First try with the oven today was a success. Warmed the oven up and it held a steady heat on the built thermometer and another I hung on the rack inside. My mom wanted to see how it would do and made a test batch of blueberry scones.

All you get is a picture of the left overs. I was too busy stuffing my face to take pictures…..

;)-

Adding another machine to the shop…..

I do a lot of work on antiques and custom projects, so a lot of times I need to either produce or reproduce parts made of plastic. My go to technique has always been casting resins, but many times they don’t have the ‘feel’ of plastic parts even if they look the part. Sometimes there just is nothing like an injected plastic part.

I started work on a David Gingery style home made plastic injector a couple years ago, but I was never happy with the way the ram was designed. I purchased a nice electronic PID temp controller for the project, and temp control was never an issue, but there were enough other issues with it that I never put it into use.

Last week I saw this pop up on ebay…..

Hmmmm, a $2500-3000 injection unit that had been torn open and no one knew if it was working. The seller was asking a price that would put it on my doorstep for around $200. After looking at the pics, I figured that the ram and chamber were were professional made, the lever linkages would have proper geometry, there was a neat little filler for the plastic feed, and as a bonus there was a mold hold down clamp. Those were all things missing in my home made unit.  If the only thing wrong with it is the temp control, then this would be a good purchase so I bought it.

It showed up on my doorstep a couple days ago and I didn’t waste any time tearing it down to see what I had received for my money.

I stripped the heat guards off of it to see what was left under the covers. Turns out that nothing in the heater and injection parts had been touched, things are looking positive!

Here is all the temp wiring as I received it. Everything looks good, I couldn’t see anything obvious wrong with it. I did notice that it is an older type mechanical temp control which are prone to temperature fluctuations, I decided to replace it with my digital PID controller. The data plate on the back said it’s a 220V unit, I will rebuild it as 110v since I will be rewiring everything anyway.

During the tear down to get to the heating cartridges I noticed a few things that the professional unit had that the home brew didn’t, like this  bevel on the ram to make feeding pellets easier.

Another lucky bit were the heating cartridges used in the machine. They wired two 110v heaters in series to make a 220v unit. I could just rewire them parallel to make the 110v unit if they were still working. I decided to test them since I had them out of the machine. I put them on a large steel plate as a heat sink, wired them to my digital controller, and tested the system I wanted to install on the bench.

Everything worked. The heaters got hot, and the controller turned them on and off. The next thing to do was modify the heating chamber to install the temp sensor that feed information back to the temp controller.

In the upper center of the picture is the heating chamber and heat cartridges, in the middle is the temp sensor I need to install. I chose to drill out and tap the small hole towards the bottom of the heating chamber where the original heat probe was located.

Hole drilled and tapped. Temp sensor installed. Time to reassemble.

Reassembled with the new parts in it. I hadn’t put the heat shroud back on yet since I wanted to do a test of everything. The test went well, I brought it up to 131’C which is a good temp to begin melting polypropylene plastic for injection.

Since the digital sensor will let me regulate all the way down to room temperature I can melt several different materials for injection molding, so another use for this machine will be injection of casting wax into molds. This will let me make precise investment molds for metal casting.

As if I didn’t have enough projects…..

Actually, can you ever have enough projects? I’m leaning toward ‘no’. If there was a smiley emoticon in this editor I would put one here..   😉

Soooo, yeah… I’m working on a Pietenpol Air Camper. A simple, open cockpit, 2 seat, Model A Powered, airplane. Did I mention the original Piet is dated 1929? There’s a thing for 1929 in my life for some reason. Both my Dodge and my Ford are ’29’s, and my plane was designed in that year. Kinda cool. Here’s the general layout for the Pietenpol Air Camper….

I’m starting with the tail since it is kinda straight forward to build and is one of the cheapest parts to build. Therefore, if I’m incapable of this simple bit of woodwork then I don’t need to invest in the rest of the plane. I’m smart that way……

I started out with laying out the vertical fin in full size on a piece of board and then putting in blocks to hold the structure as I build…

I even used a square to be sure I have something close to a 90 degree angle. Next was to profile several of the wood pieces using a router table. I worked for a short time doing pre-builds for a staircase company, so I’m not a complete stranger to woodwork. I had never used a router table before, just a regular plunge router. I’m finding out that I am not a fan of the router table. Something about the 10,000+ RPM blades of death looking at me while whirling at break neck speed is disconcerting. Never the less, I routed the pieces and put them in the jig to see what I had…..

Looks like it will work. I made a couple cuts, did a little sanding, and this evening epoxied the first few joints on the vertical. I’m not totally proud of the joints, but they will work since there is plenty of gusseting around the structure before it is done….

I will also make a test piece for every batch of epoxy. This will be a destructive test piece to make sure that the epoxy mixed properly and cured successfully. This is test piece number one (TP1). If the wood fails and the glue joint stays intact then it will be a good part. If the glue gives way on the test part instead of the wood, then I will need to reassess things.

I’ll update after the epoxy has had full cure time.

How did it ever run?….

Time for an update on the Model A project. I drove it around for a bit, now it’s time to start getting the body squared away. I started by moving the cowl back and lowering the steering column to fit. All of this is mock up and may change as I see fit, but for now this is pretty much where I want the pieces.

This is what it look like with the cowl and steering in the stock position….

The seat is in the same place, only the cowl and steering column have changed. Moving the cowl back will give me a longer hood look that I am fond of. After playing with the location and look of things I thought I would remove the ignition switch and overhaul it since it doesn’t turn the car off when in the off position. The ignition switch connects into the side of the distributor on the engine by way of an armored cable. You can see it in the following picture..

The rusty cable looking thing on the lower right is the ignition switch cable. I wasn’t quite sure how it connects into the distributor, so I figured I would take the top off and see what I could see. There were two things that surprised me. First one was the distributor rotor…

The metal tab on the right is supposed to be bonded to the the other metal piece on top. This is what carries the ‘spark’ from the coil to the spark plugs. The whole thing rotates to make everything happen, and how it worked the whole time I was driving it is beyond me. Between the carb float that never floated and now this, how did it ever run the first time we started it?

The second surprise was what I found under the rotor..

Yeah….. What the heck… Why not a few wasps and a nest. Thank goodness they were all dead.

Oh, and I still haven’t removed the ignition switch.

Went for a short drive on the property….

I wasn’t supposed to receive the parts for the carburetor until after the weekend, so I hadn’t planned on working on the Model A until next week. Since I had a weekend ‘off’ I took my Mom and Grandma over to the coast on Saturday. When I got home I found my carb parts in the mail, and being me, I couldn’t just let them sit there. I was up rebuilding and double checking that carb until 1am, on top of about 6 hours driving earlier in the day.

Sunday morning I was a little slow in getting up, but a few cups of coffee helps with that. I grabbed the carb, starter, a few other small parts, and headed up to the property. The overhauled starter and switch worked good. The carb didn’t leak when fed some gas, so I set the timing and throttle on the steering wheel and it fired up nicely. Now, I just needed to put the seat on it. A piece of plywood left over from the shed flooring worked to mount the seat to the frame and I had a very ugly, but sturdy, place to sit.

Remember… this is just temporary until I work out all the drivetrain…

Yeah, some eye bleach is needed to get that vision out of your head. I’m going to have to post some renderings from my cad drawings of what it might look like some day so no one thinks I’m going to keep it like that.

If anyone wants to go along on it’s first two drives, here’s links to the videos…. Turn down your volume though, when reviewing the footage to post it I found the fuel cap rattling in front of the camera is about all you can hear. I’ll leave the cap off on future test drives since I’m not using the fuel tank to hold gas. Gas is in that bottle you will see hanging from the radiator in the videos.

 

The second video is a drive down the driveway at the property from Dad’s shop, out the second gate, turn around, and back to Dad’s shop. Not once do I leave the property.

On the bright side, no oil or water leaks so far.

 

Maybe that ‘leakless’ seal will actually work.

 

 

 

Inspecting the starter….

After seeing that the starter decided to no longer work on Saturday I removed it, the carburetor, and the battery. I brought all three home since the starter and carb need some love, and the battery could use a charge. I decided to check the starter first because I could have a perfect carb and full battery but neither would do me any good if I can’t turn the engine over. First order of business is to take the bendix off of the starter. The bendix is what engages the engine to make it turn with the starter motor and then release the starter from the motor once the engine is running.

In the pic above the motor is the big thing toward the bottom, the bendix is upper left, and the starter switch is upper right. With the bendix off I turned the motor shaft by hand to see if there was any binding. The motor has a little bit of drag to it, but it wasn’t sticking at any position in the rotation. Looking in the cut outs on the right side of the motor  I could see the brushes and commutator were packed full of carbon. That needs to get cleaned up since it gums up the motor and can cause a loss of power as electricity can jump to areas it shouldn’t be. Time to take the motor apart.

I was kinda surprised that the long screws that hold the whole thing together weren’t frozen in place. The would be the two screws center top in the pic. The end plates are upper left, armature lower left. If you click on the picture to make it larger you can see the end plate with the brush holder is caked in carbon, and a trail of carbon chunks leading from the motor housing up to where I set the brush holder down. What a mess, carbon sticks to everything and you can’t just wipe it off. If you try then you just smear it all over whatever your trying to clean up with.

A closer look at the commutator end. All that black carbon in between the commutator segments can cause your motor to run weaker. It can allow some of the energy that should go to the winding you are trying to energize to go to other windings. This means the winding you want to energize isn’t as strong and other windings can energize weakly, but enough to further impede your starter. All of that needs a good cleaning and a piece of pegwood to dig the carbon out between the segments.

Mmmm. More carbon dust. The field coils look good though. A quick check with a meter shows that they don’t have any breaks in the wire and aren’t shorted to the case. I don’t like to remove field coils that have been in place for a long time.  I’ve found that the insulation can become brittle over the years and sometimes it creates problems that would never have happened if they were just left alone. Now to the brushes.

Well that’s ugly. Every one of them is worn at an angle. Someone didn’t take the time to make sure the springs that hold them in place and press them against the commutator were centered. The concern here is that the brushes won’t be sitting straight in the holder that they are supposed to slide in. By sitting at an angle they can bind in the holder and stop making contact, and then the starter won’t turn. To make sure they didn’t bind I cleaned up the brush holder plate and then tested the brush holders themselves for shorts to ground. The ‘hot’ brush insulators are still good and the ‘ground’ brush holders weren’t insulated, exactly as it should be. once cleaned up and inspected, I put the motor back together and made sure the brushes didn’t hang in their holders. I also tested the brush springs for proper tension and found them satisfactory.  Next step is to take the battery and a good set of jumper cables and see if it spins…..

I’ll let you know once I’ve done that.

Water Pump is Installed…

Friday night I got everything ready. The water pump was in a box in front of the front door, new seat next to the box, bolts for the seat, pump to head gasket, GoPro camera charged, everything I could think of. Saturday  I was up bright and early and headed to the property thinking to myself ‘Today I will drive it”.

I admit, I was in a really good mood.

I got up to the property, unloaded everything and got to work. Everything was just as I left it last weekend, even the cardboard over the water pump hole.

Bolting up the pump is a pretty straight forward deal. One gasket, three bolts, make sure the belt is on it. The radiator is a little banged up, so I’ve been wondering if it has any holes in it, but I still make sure I keep the pump well away from it when I’m moving it around. No need to add any more damage. The pump went in just fine and I’m one step closer to driving it!

I’m not happy with the old radiator hoses still on it though. I have new ones, and the clamps too, so lets just get that part done and over with. 15 minutes later the new hoses were on. I even put a new brass drain on the lower hose just to be thorough.

It was time to see if the cooling system had any leaks. I filled the radiator and saw that there were a few minor issues. I had to fiddle with hose and clamp positions, change the top most clamp from the old style to a new worm clamp, but in the end it sealed up. The old beat up radiator holds water, haven’t seen a single leak yet in it. So that’s a small victory. Next up, install the choke rod to make starting easier. I have a part to change out on the carb first though.

It took me a couple looks at the carb before I figured out exactly why the choke rod install didn’t make sense. If you look at the parts in the photo above you can probably see what the problem was, a whole section of the actuator was missing. I installed the new part and everything makes a lot more sense. That one piece does a couple functions by the way, it controls the choke by pulling the choke rod and it changes the mixture by turning the choke knob.

Installed on the carb with the choke off, butterfly plate open.

In the choked position with the butterfly plate closed.

And this is connecting the choke rod to the actuator. Enlarge the picture to see how they interlock. Then the spring pushes down on the tube to keep the two parts interconnected and also helps push the choke into the ‘open’ position. It’s a slick way to make the whole thing work with very few parts.

Here is a picture of the actual choke knob in it’s stock from the factory location…… on the passenger side of the car.

So, it was time to fire it up and double check the water level after a few minutes. I put some gas and Marvel Mystery oil in the little reserve tank, pulled the choke, and hit the starter. It fire right off and I was happy. Everything seemed to be good for about 30 seconds and then I smelt raw gas. Uh oh. I looked around and saw gas coming out of the carb in a little stream, so I shut everything off and went to inspect. Dad and I had a problem with the carb float sticking last weekend, allowing too much fuel to enter the carb bowl, so I tapped the side of the carb a few times to see if I could get to to unstick. That didn’t work, so I decided to pull the bowl off and see if I could figure out what was wrong. I saw the reason as soon as I got the lower half of the carb off.

That the carb float. It’s supposed to float on a small bowl of gasoline and keep the carb from overfilling or going empty. Obviously it’s not going to float with that big rip in it and all misshapen. After seeing this, I’m surprised Dad and I got it to run so well the other weekend. Thank goodness I filmed it, it proves that they will run even with most of the parts worn out or broken.

At first I thought my weekend had come to a stop until I could order a new float. Then I remembered that I had bought four Model A engines for another project, the Pietenpole engines.

Yup, four Model A engines that I picked up just over the Nevada border for $250. I still grin when I think about that trip, I’ll have to post about it since I have some neat pictures. Turns out one of the engines has the same carb on it.

It’s in rough shape but it had a good float in it. I did a quick check in a bucket to make sure it had no leaks and would do the job. Here is a pic of the good float next to the one that came out of the ‘running’ chassis.

Bit of a difference? Yeah. I put the carb back together and hooked the fuel tank back up. I watched it for a couple minutes and the float seemed to fix the gas overflow issue.

Ok, back to running the engine for a few to see what the cooling system and rebuilt pump are going to do. I hit the starter and …

Nothing. Nada. Not even a hint of life to the starter.

Dad says I must be getting close to being drivable, otherwise it wouldn’t be fighting me so badly.