Enter the woodshed

I feel like I reference stuff in the past an awful lot. Oh well, here we go again. You might remember some years ago (2013, blimy!) when I built the Mk2 wood rack or the second Mk2 wood rack.

Both of those are still in place at camp and doing their job well. The old Mk1 wood rack at the house got replaced with a Mk2 and that has also worked out well. However at home we store a lot more wood than at camp, I've had as much as 5 cords (640 cubic feet) of wood at one time. For the most part that wood has lived under various tarps and pieces of plywood or whatnot. That has worked with varying degrees of success but we really needed a woodshed.

I knew this was going to be a big job so I kept putting it off, finally I decided it was time.

A trip to Home Depot resulted in $400 of wood, screws, roofing and etcetera. Here we've got the 2 uprights, they're actually stacked in the picture. The one on top is 6 feet tall, the other is 8 which gives just over a 3:12 pitch to the roof.

Ben and his wife Rebecca came over and helped stand everything up, it was great to have a bunch of hands for that job. Here I've just test fit the first rafter.

Now with all the rafters on.

If you're a real carpenter you'll notice that I didn't think to put purlins on before putting on the roofing. I'm debating if I should go back and do it. I don't want to because it's a hassle since the whole roof has to come back off. It might be a little easier with the shed filled, I'll be able to stand on the firewood...

Starting on the "walls". I'm not going to fill in the walls, the shed doesn't need it and the open walls will hopefully help the firewood to dry.

First attempt at loading. We've debated a lot and which way the wood should go in. The open side of the shed faces north so this is an east/west loading. I've since decided that I prefer the wood to go north/south. This "short way" loading allows me to put dry wood on once side of the shed and wet on the other.

The shed is 7x12, the roof is actually 8 feet so we get a 6" overhang front and back to keep things dry. The front is 8 feet tall, the rear is 6 so average that to 7. So far I've loaded it 6 feet high, 7*12*6=504 or just about 4 cords of wood.

I bought enough wood to put a front on it too. If I fill in the left side I can load in that extra space at the top, as it is the wood wants to spill out the front if I load too high. I suppose I could use some straps to hold the front, that might be worth an experiment...

1 day, 3 lawnmower breakdowns, and a bonus breakdown

Buckle in folks, this is a long one...

 It wasn't so long ago I made a post on Reddit about my old Snapper lawnmower

I bragged a little bit about the buy it for life (bifl) mentality of the machine and how it's been faithfully mowing my grass since 2010. Interestingly I posted about it waaay back when I first got the machine but apparently never updated for when I got it running. I wonder if I used it in 2009? I don't remember.

Anyway, yesterday I went to mow the lawn after being away for 2 weeks. Mower fired right up, I made one half loop of the tiny front yard and the blade got loose on the spindle.

This picture is actually not from yesterday but from a month ago, I've been fighting this problem for awhile now. The blade is held on by a nut that is stepped which centers the blade and holds it on.

What has happened is that the blade got loose in the past and the step has gotten enlarged so it doesn't hold the blade. The fix is to carefully grind the step back so the nut can grab the blade again. Actually a better fix would be to make a spacer with a step out of some hardened metal that the nut can push against the blade. Yesterday I used the quick fix and ground a little more off the nut, back to work.

Made another half loop around the yard, heard a "thunk" and lost propulsion. This is another long term problem, the drive system on this machine is super simple, theres a flat plate on the end of the driveshaft, under the engine. The "transmission" such as it is, has a rubber drive wheel that runs perpendicular to the plate. Push the drive wheel into the plate and you go. Adjust where the drive wheel is on the plate and you go faster, slower or backwards. Simple system, easy to use, easy to work on.

The drive wheel is a wear item and regularly needs replacing as the rubber wears, apparently one time I didn't get the bolts tight enough and I managed to strip the holes. I'd put them back with locktite but apparently that wasn't good enough.

I decided I would make this a forever fix, tap the holes to the next size up (3/8 up from 5/16) and put nuts on the end of the bolts. I scrounged around and found appropriate nuts, bolts, washers and lock washers and got it all bolted up and locktited as you see above.

Problem: the nut on the end of the bolt needs to occupy the same space as the brake shoe...

Rats.

I experimented with custom thin nuts but it's no soap, there just isn't space, so in this shot you see the final, the nuts cut off flush. I was just thinking I ought to go back and peen the bolts so they can't back out but then I remembered that drive wheel is still a wear component and will need replacing, in fact it ought to be replaced next year. When I order a new drive wheel I'll also order a new nut for the blade spindle.

So back to mowing, this time I managed to get the whole front yard mowed when one of the front tires went flat. Fortunately I noticed it pretty much right away. In the past I've failed to notice problems like this and run the tire off the rim, these little tires can be a lot of work to put back on the rim...

Of course the tire had come off the bead so here I'm using a strap and screwdriver to force it back onto the bead. Once back on the bead I could get air into it but I could also hear it coming back out.

That's the upholstery tack I found in the tire. Well what to do now? It was after 2pm so our local hardware store was closed and I don't have a tire patch kit, or if I do I don't know where it is. I poked around a minute and managed to find a can of fix-a-flat. Does that stuff work? Well this time it sure did, I put way too much into the tire, rotated it so the hole was pointed down and put some air to it. Sure enough the leak stopped and I FINALLY mowed the lawn.

Interestingly the rest of the lawn was mowed without event, no issues at all.

Bonus: While messing with the tire my air hose developed a leak. The leak is right at the end, the part that gets handled/bent around the most. This is a Harbor Freight air hose that came on a retracting reel, it was cheap and I've had it 4 or 5 years. Recently I had noticed some weather checking on the line so I knew something like this was coming.

For now I've wrapped it in electrical tape. Does that stop the leak? Nope but it slows it down a little and makes me feel a little better about it. Short term I'll probably cut a couple feet off the line but that's just a temporary fix while I get a new hose...

Thats some good cookin!

You might remember last year I posted a little on some meals we've cooked, I figured today I'd show off a little more, and especially to focus on game meat.

This is wild goose breast with apple/cherry chutney. Angie gets an attagirl for this one. We've got a bunch of goose breasts from last fall that I was a little nervous to cook. A lot of people talk smack about wild goose breasts and I was a little nervous about these but they came out fantastic. The came recipe from the Meat Eater Wild Game Cookbook. The trick, as with most game meat, is to not overcook it. Angie sears the goose breast in a cast iron pan and then finishes it in the oven. She just chucks the whole pan in the oven.

Notice how red the meat is. Wild goose isn't poultry, not like chicken anyway. If you cook it like chicken it'll get that "gamey" flavor that people don't like. Treat it like venison and it'll come out great.

This is Christmas dinner, pheasants from last fall. There were actually two, I'd shot a hen and a cock on the same day

The hen is hard to see in this picture, she was hard to see in the field too.
 

We wrapped one in bacon with no other seasoning, the other got a dose of Vintner's spice which we had gotten as a gift. The Vintner's spice goes really well with game meat, the stronger flavors of the pheasant are complimented. 

The big deal in this meal was that Angie's parents came over. They'd never had pheasant before and really had only ever had a couple meals of game meat. They seemed to really enjoy the different flavors, but really, would anybody say no to something cooked in bacon?

This isn't really a meal but the prep for a meal. I made these meatloafs (meatloaves?) for a lantern gathering last fall. These are half venison sausage, half ground beef. We eat meatloaf pretty much every week and I always do it the same way, it works out great.

Finally, one from last summer:

You might remember these from a video back in 2012, zucchini sausage boats.

Again I used venison sausage, just a quick fry-up that you can see in the pan. I'd scooped out the inside of the zucchinis and fried that with the sausage and some red peppers diced up fine. While that going I pre-cooked the zucchini. It's amazing how much water comes out of a zucchini.

Then put the meat mix into the zucchini, cover it with cheese and grill it for a few minutes, they're delicious and a great way to use up zucchini.

It's a northern tradition!

 You might remember back in 2020 when we picked a bunch of fiddleheads, well we've done it again.

I've written about fiddleheads a few times but as a reminder these are ostrich ferns that have not yet unfurled themselves. We pick them in the Aroostook valley in northern Maine. For best results we kayak down river to spots that are difficult to get to on foot. This prevents us stealing somebody's spot and causing hurt feelings. Back in 2020 we picked and froze 52 quarts which was a record. This year we did 58 quarts, a record I think will hold for a long time.

After picking the fiddleheads need cleaning, some of them have a paper "chaff" on them that will come off in a light breeze, they also tend to have a little grit on them from where they came out of the ground. Both are easily fixed with this cleaning roller. My "Uncle Bunny" (actually he was my grandfather's cousin) made it at some point in the past, nobody alive knows exactly when. He died in the early '90s, so certainly well before that, probably in the 1960s. There is a fan that goes with the unit and blows across the drum but there was enough breeze that we didn't bother with it, sometimes the fan is more work than it's worth.

We decided to process up north and haul home frozen fiddleheads, this is my 413C on water heating duty. In 2020 I said I needed to get my Handy Gas plant up and running and I wasn't wrong. The 413 is up to the job but only just. The red cooler is full of cold water. The fiddleheads go in boiling water for 3 minutes and then into the cold water to stop the cooking process. Then out onto the towel to get the bulk of the water off before going into bags and into the freezer. We really like the zipper style vacuum bags although Angie's folks got us a vacuum food sealer that we might try next year.

We did this all at my aunt and uncle's house in town, it's really handy to have running water.

The freezer at Cushman house was a real convenience. This is half of our take. We initially froze them at the house in town but that freezer already had some food in it so there wasn't enough space for all of the fiddleheads.

With any luck it won't be all that many years before we can process fiddleheads at Cushman house. I powered up the water system while we were there and it made pressure, the same as it did last year. I'm amazed considering the age of the pump.

So anyway, even accounting for giving some away 58 quarts should hold us for a good long time, we've still got 1 or 2 bags of the 2020 fiddleheads and even one more bag of 2017 that I found while digging around in the freezer. The nice thing is that fiddleheads don't really suffer from freezer burn and are still fine to eat even when the freezer dries them out.

Long overdue tractor maintenance

 You might remember my 1952 Farmall Super M:

Pictured here with the '98 Ford 1920

Over the last couple years the transmission in the old Super M has been getting progressively louder, this isn't unusual in a machine with straight cut gears. At this point I've owned the machine going on 20 years and I've never serviced the transmission. Dad thinks it's not been serviced since the 1960s when my great uncles quit farming.

The transaxle holds 13 gallons of gear oil so first I acquired the replacement oil which brings up a fun northern Maine story. It's been a little hard finding 80w90 gear oil in the kind of volume I need so I called up MPG (Maine Potato Growers) who had plenty in stock at the best price I've seen. Dad and I headed over but it turned out the computers were down. Well that's no problem, the guy took dad's phone number and said "I'll call you tomorrow." and that was it, we left with $130+ in oil with the promise that tomorrow we could pay for it...

Anyhow it was with some trepidation that I removed the drain plug:

I was greeted by 11 gallons of tar...

Yeah, 11 gallons out of what should be 13. I hadn't run the machine since November, in retrospect I should have started it up and run it around to warm things up.

With the worst drained out I put in 4 gallons of diesel fuel for a rinse cycle. I drove the machine around the yard a little and drained it again:

That stuff was clear only 20 minutes before

This time 6 gallons came out so I suppose I got 12 gallons of the original crud.

I left it sitting open to hopefully get some more crud to drain. I should probably do another rinse cycle but really with new oil we should be ready for another 50 years.

As an aside the factory recommended drain interval is yearly...

Bismuth, getting ready for duck season

 All of a sudden it occurs to me that I don't appear to have written hardly anything about my recent forays into the world of non-toxic shot.

For those of you not in the know waterfowl (ducks, geese, etc) need to be hunted with non-toxic shot. For most folks that means steel. However steel shot is hard and will damage the barrel of a classic gun. Last year I decided I might like to hunt ducks with my grandfather's 16ga Remington model 31. The old 31 (mine is from 1924) is often regarded as the smoothest pump action gun ever made. They only made them for a few years and mine is the only one I've ever seen.

A 2020 pheasant with the old model 31

16ga is a fun, uncommon, gauge. The advertising used to say "Hits like a 12, recoils like a 20". These days its mostly out of favor but has it's adherents, including me.

So to shoot ducks with the 16 I needed a non-toxic shot softer than steel which brings us to bismuth. The other advantage is that bismuth is more dense than steel which gives it more oomph and better ballistics. The disadvantage is that it's much more expensive...

So last year I ordered a case of #5 loads from Boss Shotshells. This is not a paid endorsement of them, in fact AFAIK they don't do that. While I did get one stud wood duck last year with the 16ga mostly it shot partridge.

I guess tailgate pictures are kind of a thing for me...

Edit: I almost forgot the green wing teal from last fall that I took with the Model 31. That gun logged a great season, 1 teal, 1 wood duck, 13 partridge, one pheasant and a porcupine. Not bad for a gun that's pushing 100 years old.

When I picked up the 16ga ammo I also got 2 boxes of 12ga #4 shot. These are their 2 3/4" "shortie" loads which did pretty well on geese. I didn't have a whole lot of luck with these on ducks. Later I realized that I'd screwed up with the choke. Steel shot doesn't compress much as it goes through the choke owing to the hardness of the steel. Bismuth and lead are much softer so you need a tighter choke to get the same pattern out of the gun.

During duck season last year I noticed a lot of people complaining about finding ammunition, this isn't uncommon during the season, people wait to buy. Last year was worse because of the widespread ammunition shortage. This year I decided that I'd again stock up early.

That's a case of Boss 12ga 3", #5 shot. Should be real good for ducks. Since bismuth is heavier than steel you can use a smaller shot size which gives you more pellets per shot. I went with #5 as a compromise, it should be heavy enough for early season geese but with more pellets should be better for ducks. That case was eye wateringly expensive but as they say "I didn't come this far to miss". These shells should result in a better kill percentage and fewer cripples. I hate the idea of leaving a bird to die later.

The #5s probably won't be good enough on late season geese but we really don't have that much late goose action since the water usually freezes. If I do get a chance for late goose hunting I still have a few #4s from last year and a couple of boxes of steel BB so I'm plenty well supplied.

Finally, for some real entertainment I picked up 10# of bismuth #6 shot. I've got a couple ideas for that, one is to get my first muzzleloader duck. Back in 2017 I tried for a muzzleloader duck and failed. My 2020 and 2021 muzzleloader pheasants (and a 2021 muzzleloader rabbit) were a bit of redemption but I still want a duck. Back in 2017 I was carrying #4s because I didn't realize I could get away with lighter shot, I've learned a lot in 5 years, hopefully this will be the year.

The other thought is to load some black powder cartridges and shoot a fine damascus double. Dad has a bunch of them, these are antique guns that won't hold up to the pressure of smokeless power but will still shoot fine with a proper blackpowder load. A big advantage in a black powder cartridge gun is the ease of cleanup.

So at least from an ammunition standpoint I'm ready for duck season 2022. All that's left is to wait 4 more months...

2022, a year for finishing old projects

I've got a lot of old projects hanging around, mostly it's just laziness, stuff got started and I lost interest.

Meanwhile we're trying to clean up around the house, it's easy to let your stuff take over and when you've got a small house it gets to be a problem quickly.

A good example is my old Echo chainsaw. We got that saw back in the 1980s, it literally fell off a truck in front of my parents house. We took it to camp and at some point I think I ran some bad gas in it. It'd run but it needed choke to be able to do anything.

I brought it back to our house, took it apart and ordered a carb kit. Then I got distracted and you know how it is. Its been here so long I don't remember how long ago I brought it here, before 2016 certainly.

The other day I was cleaning up in the garage and noticed it. I was just about to put it into the trash but for some reason decided I'd take one try at getting it back together. If you've never worked on a chainsaw it's much harder than a lawnmower because everything is small and fits together just so. I figured this would be an extra hard job because it'd been so long since I took it apart.

Imagine my surprise when the reassembly only took around 3 hours. About half that time was spent digging around to find bits and wondering what some other bits I had went to. I *think* I'd disassembled a few other things in that period because I've got some random bits that I can't identify.

Anyhow after a little carb tweaking it runs great. This is an Echo 510EVL which is about the same size as my Husqvarna but since the body is all metal it's heavier. I think its got a little more torque too, it seems to power through stuff a little better.

The entire time we've had it this hand guard has been broken. I used my Harbor Freight plastic welder to stitch the parts back together. The black is actually plastic from the welder kit that I added it, I also embedded some metal window screen into the repair which should make it pretty strong.

It does need one more bolt to attach the handle to the body, that's been missing the whole time we've had it and will make it much more comfortable to use.

Did I really need another saw? No, my Husky does everything I need but once in awhile it's handy to have a backup and I do hate throwing away something that still has life in it.

Onward to the next old project!

2021 Hunting roundup

 I meant to post this earlier, I really did. In fact I meant to post some of this during the season, then I got distracted and so on.

Anyway hunting season this year started with a green wing teal the Saturday before the moose hunt. This was the first duck I shot with grandfather's Remington Model 31 16ga.

I'll admit it, I'm a filthy water swatter but a duck is a duck.

The next week was spent driving the north Maine woods looking for, and mostly not finding, moose.

We did find some spectacular scenery, this was in Garfield plantation and it definitely felt like we were on the top of the world.

The weather was against us for moose hunting, it was warm and the moose were mostly hanging out in the swamps. Considering I was hunting with a mostly elderly crew, it was my uncle's moose permit, we weren't going to be tramping through many swamps.

Warm weather was good for finding partridge.

I managed to bag 13 in the week which is an all time record for me. Grandfather's 16ga worked overtime. I wish I had a picture of the one I bagged at 50 yards, tight choke on that gun...

One night Angie made us partridge nuggets. She cut the partridge into chunks, dipped them in BBQ sauce and then rolled that in pretzel breading. Boy were those good.

Strangely I don't have any pictures but in 2021 I got to go on my first goose hunt from layout blinds. It was a typical "You shoulda been here last week" kind of day but we got 6 geese. At one point the birds were trying to land on the blinds which was a crazy feeling...

I kind of bungled pheasant season. The picture above is the second day I hunted and I managed a hen and a cock with my 20ga over/under. I decided that was too "easy" so I didn't hunt for a week. I don't think there were as many birds stocked this year, there certainly weren't as many out. Alternately its likely a bunch of hunters found the field I was hunting and there wasn't as much cover this year either.

In last year's hunting roundup I mentioned that I was working on an article for "MuzzleBlasts" and would you believe it actually got published. Check out the October 2021 issue for the whole story.

Back in August I wrote about the Ward shotgun I'd gotten. It got a chance out on the pheasant field too. This one was probably the best shot in the air I've ever made. The bird jumped up in front of me and flew right by me, I swung around and knocked it out of the air clean.

I wish I had better pictures but this was my first solo wood duck and the first duck I was able to successfully jump shoot. I stalked in to a little pond Ben and I have been hunting and got within about 20 yards of this guy. Woodies are really jumpy so if you can stalk in on one you're doing a good job. The old 16ga really rocked him, he dropped right where he was.

Finally I managed these two buffleheads. We'd originally thought they were geese but up close I could tell the difference. These are the first two ducks I shot from the kayak although I did get a goose a few years ago.

Deer season was such a cluster I don't even really want to talk about it. I missed taking a shot at a buck on our first day in Maine and never recovered. I had a shot on a doe but no doe tag and that was the only other deer I saw all season...

Anyway, it's February, only 2 more months until turkey season opens.