This is what happens if I don’t pick tomatoes for a day or two. Gotta love summertime.
Gravel in the Greenhouse
It’s been as few days since I posted anything. It’s been hectic at work and the evenings are the only time it’s cool enough to work or exercise, so the blog suffers. Lol.
A few days ago I finally took the shell off the back of the pickup and went for a load of rock. I ended up with just a smidge over a ton of gravel to bring home according to the loading scale. The poor old truck was barely riding above the axle bumpers and I took it slow driving home. It took most of the drive for me to realize I now had just over a ton of rock to unload… by hand… in the heat. *Sigh*
Upon getting home I made a path from the truck to the greenhouse, aired up the wheelbarrow tire, grabbed a shovel and got to work. I loaded up the first load in the ‘barrow and it was then I realized there would be no easy way to dump the contents since the door was too small. Ok, so I pulled a side panel off thinking I’d dump it through the side. Nope! The panel is about 2″ too narrow to get through.
Crud.
So an elegant, if not irrational, thought occurred to me. And the result was this….
Yup, tip the whole damn thing up and prop it on a broom handle. As you can see, it made it a snap to dump the contents of the wheelbarrow into. Time to get that shovel working. About an hour into it, I had gotten this far….
I was starting to curse myself for ever taking on this project. It was still in the upper 90 degree weather range, the sweat was combining with the rock dust to make an uncomfortable covering on my arms, and I had only accomplished THAT MUCH?
Double Crud.
Enough whining, time to get back to shoveling, this needs to get done. Another hour later and things were looking better, at lest there was enough rock to cover the weed barrier. A half hour past that and I had the base pretty much full. Yay!
But….. I still have a bunch of rock in the back of the truck. Do I leave it there? Pile it somewhere else? I figure if I’m going to move it, then I dont want to move it again. And its NOT staying in the back of the truck. Ok, might as well start on the next phase since the rock is here and I’m already hot and sore from shoveling. So, out comes the weed barrier and a couple barrier staples to hold the cloth down.
Time to see just how much rock was left over from filling the greenhouse base. Turns out there was a bit more than I thought would be left over.
Airplane Rescue
Part of my job is to find and recover airplanes that have been forgotten or not wanted anymore. I’m usually looking for Piper aircraft since thats what we use as our trainers at the school. Last week I found one, it had been disassembled and sitting for quite a few years, but before that it had barely been flown. It’s kinda like finding a 70’s era muscle car that someone barely drove then sold it to a guy who tore it apart and let it just collect dust in the garage. In other words, a prime find. Heres a couple pics from the ad I found it in.
Overall, very promising and the price was good too! Unfortunately the trailer its sitting on wasnt for sale, so I had to make arrangements for that. A quick call around the Auburn area found a u-haul trailer about half an hour from the airplane, so I could at least do highway speed for half the trip there and back.
Some hours later found me navigating the most twisted warren of roads I have ever seen, and dragging a trailer to boot. My coworker that went with me didnt think the trailer would make some of the curves, but we got there and got it swapped from trailer to trailer. This is what an airplane on a trailer looks like.
Yup, thats how I brought it back. I did the same for another Tomahawk I found in Chandler, Arizona last year. The rest of the parts were scattered around so we gathered them up and loaded them in the back of the truck. And for those wondering, it’s just like going and getting a project car, all the extra parts are in whatever bin happened to be handy at the time. Take a look.
Heres a final pic, just before we hit the road for the 55mph, trailer hauling journey home.
Probably the most fun of the whole retrieval is watching the looks on peoples faces as it dawns on them that it really is an airplane on the trailer going down the highway. I always get several cars that speed up or slow down to take a good look and sometimes a couple of pics. Sometimes I have to drag them though a town or city and there you will get people on the sidewalk pointing as you go by. I much prefer to fly them home, like the tomahawk I brought back from La Belle, Florida. That was one fun flight and a lot of good memories. Maybe that would make a good post all it own. If you think so, leave a comment saying so.
A quick post
Just a quick note since things have been hectic at work. First off are those crazy carrot plants. These things are stupid huge and the flowers are big enough to bend the stalks over. Take a look.
Next on the agenda is a pic of the greenhouse with the panels installed. I left the protective film coating on the clear panels for two reasons. The first reason is that I want filtered light and will be putting some solar screen inside the greenhouse, so the frosted plastic helps my overall plan. The second reason is that it protects the clear panels from the hard sprinkler water, so if I ever do want to go with clear panels they wont be covered in hard water spots.
I plan on putting the gravel in the base of the greenhouse and maybe starting the landscaping around it this weekend. If I do, look for follow up posts.
Hammer Time…
Just for the record this post has nothing to do with MC anybody. 😉
Sunday morning was under 80 degrees, so it was tolerable to fire up the forge and play a bit with some hot metal. And of course since I’m twisted, my metal needs to be twisted too. Lol. First things first, I had to make a simple boring handle for heavy steel crucible I made to use in the aluminum melter mentioned in a previous post. Time to get the coals hot and ready.
Lets see…. Forge full of coals, hammer, water bucket, more charcoal, and a big piece of metal heating in the forge. We are all set. And to save you the boredom of a simple piece I will fast forward to heating the metal for something more interesting, a slender version of an ‘S’ hook.
For this post I’m going to show you some of the steps to make one of these hooks. A few cranks on the forge blower brings the coals to a bright yellow, almost white, heat and gets the metal to be worked temperature up to speed. Lets get the hot metal over to the anvil and start tapering the end to a point.
The metal has cooled to a cherry red while I try to take a picture, but even at this temp its still workable. I hammer the end, drawing it out to a point and trying to keep the taper consistent and concentric. Once I have the taper to the point I want (no pun intended) I place the very end over the back of the anvil and start scrolling the end by moving a little more rod over the edge and hammering it over. I heat and re-heat the rod as necessary to keep the metal workable.
Once I have the end curled, or scrolled, the way I want it I heat the rod and use a cold chisel to cut the overall length of hook off from the rest of the rod. Then its time to start scolling the other end. Once again it all starts with tapering the metal down to match the other end. A taper in progress looks like this.
Keep adding heat and hammer work and you will end up with a double scroll, one on each end facing each other. Once I’ve got both the scrolls roughed in I go back and try to make them symmetrical, even in curvature and point and laying flat on the anvil.
So are you wondering why I made a ‘C’ shape when I really want an ‘S’ hook? It because of this last step, where I have to twist the hook to get that spiral in the shank. I need to heat just the center portion of the ‘C’ and keep the scrolls fairly cool so that they dont distort when I twist. I should have taken a pic of applying heat to the iron since most people use a torch to apply heat to a confined area, I use coals and bank them in areas to heat and remove them from places I want cooler. I’m not against using a torch, its just more of a challenge to me not to use one, and in my mind its truer to old world smithing. Once the shank is properly heated I grab both scrolls with tongs and give it 1-1/2 twists to make the ‘S’ shape.
The scrolls distorted a little bit, but I’m not going to rework them. I kinda like the imprecise nature of this one, it doesn’t look machine manufactured. Narrow ‘S’ hooks like this look better than the fatter ‘S’ hooks that I make for certain things. for instance, hanging my hummingbird feeder looks better with a narrow and long hook because it matches the lines of the feeder better.
Till the next post, keep it hot and hammered. ;)-
Mmmm… Bellpeppers!
Finally pulled the first thre bellpeppers. I love growing my own stuff, they SMELL like bellpeppers. I have a big smile now.
Carrot Flowers
Happy Saturday everyone!
Melting metal…. with charcoal
Yup, anyone who knows me well knows I like to do stupid dangerous stuff. Things like really hot metal make me happy. Yes, I’ve burned myself (many times) and had some really really close calls but I never seem to learn my lesson. So if hot metal is good, molten metal is WAY better. I have a small kiln I use to melt down gold and silver for doing jewelry casting, but nothing big enough to do a decent pour in aluminum. Off to the internet I went and found plans to fabricate a small melt furnace powered by …. charcoal! I have to admit I was pretty excited, no propane or other gas fuels, nothing like a pesky cylinder to blow up if I get back-flask or the regulator goes wonky. So I built it, now to test it.
A handfull of charcoal and a blower fan out of a roadside dishwasher and we are in business!
After lighting the charcoal and turning on the blower I noticed that it didnt take long for heat waves to start pouring out of the vent hole, so being the smart person I am I opened the top to see what was going on. The charcoal was starting to catch good, lots of red ember. So I put some aluminum scraps in an old soup can and placed it deep in the furnace with some coals around it. Top goes back on and crank up the blower.
This is what it looked like at this point. Nice red hot color in their nice and bright….. wait, ….. whats that smell? Oh damn thats hot!!! I think I just melted off my eyebrows…..
Yeah, it was way hotter over that exhaust hole than I thought it would be. So I put a piece of aluminum over the top to deflect the heat coming out of that little hole to hell. In about 3 minutes I had this..
The exhaust had melted thought the aluminum 3″ above the hole and the force from the blower blew the center of the hole wide open. On the bright side, if its melting aluminum OUTSIDE the furnace, it must be hot enough inside to do the same, lets look at the pyrometer and see…
Yup, it should be nice and melty in there. Being me, I cant just leave it at that, I have to see for myself. So, turn off the blower, get welding gloves and some hay hooks to lift the lid off, pull out the soup can and turn it out over the concrete.
That my friends is melted aluminum. I made sure the concrete was plenty dry before casting the aluminum out on top of it, I dont need steam turning the concrete and aluminum into shrapnel for my face. Now to figure out something to cast for the next post……
Feeling the need for land
*Warning, this post is more rant than anything else. 😉
For a couple of years I’ve been looking through the local area trying to find a good piece of land to move to. I like certain parts of the local foothills, like the place I looked at in the header photo above. I need desperately to get out of the city I currently live in. I was born and raised in the country away from all the BS of city life and the years spent living IN a city have taken their toll. I’m tired of looking across the street and seeing all the houses in my tract that I watched be built now being bought for section 8 rentals. Tired of the domestic disputes across the street like my own personal live ‘COPS’ show. Tired of the ‘ghetto bird’ circling at 1000 feet with the turbine on full power and the blades beating so hard the windows and shelves shake. I grew up wandering the hillsides in peace and being able to hear my own thoughts mingle with the wind in the trees. Where I am now I cant hear my own thoughts if I scream at myself in my own head over the thump-thump-thump of overdriven bass speakers and hoards of welfare children.
What I want is some acres, with neighbors that have their own acreage. Room to plant my garden. Room to blacksmith, forge, melt and cast metal, machine parts on my mill and lathe, room to open the door to my garage without the recovering meth head across the street trying to asses my net worth and whether I would be an easy victim for cash to get his next fix.
Room to relax… Room to breathe… Room to just be me without outside interference.
More Greenhouse
I started putting the panels in place on the greenhouse. I mentioned in the last post that I liked the panels that were supplied because they were corrugated plastic, not just flat plastic sheet. This gives them an air gap for insulation, similar in action to dual paned windows. I hadnt taken any pictures of the panels until this morning so I couldnt post any until now. Here is what they look like…
You can see how the panels are hollow in the middle just like cardboard, but really transparent clear. They look good put in place on the greenhouse too.
