The floor continues

 The difficulty with the great northern estate is really the distance from the great northern estate to, well, anywhere. That of course means I can't be around as much as I would like to and thus everything takes twice as long as I would like.

So, you'll remember a couple weeks ago when I started refinishing the floor in the camp. When I left the floor had been sanded to 80 grit and the first coat of finish put down.

I used an oil based finish with the old-school thinking that it would be a tougher coating for a floor that gets kind of tortured. The satin finish is supposed to not show imperfections so bad as gloss.

The result looked okay but felt terrible. I think that first coat raised the grain of the wood and made it feel really rough and unpleasant.

I'd used the entire gallon on the floor and couldn't locally source any more oil based finish, the stuff I could get was all water based and thus incompatible with what I had already put down.

Fast forward a couple weeks and I'm back with 2.5 gallons of the oil based finish, honestly this is the size can I should have bought in the first place. If I'd looked around a little more at Home Depot I'd have found it.

Because of the delay I needed to sand to 220 grit. I did that with my old Harbor Freight palm sander. This wouldn't have been so bad except that the backs of my knees were still sore from the 5 hour slog getting the floor flat. My knee pad straps had really dug in. I should have taken a few minutes to rig up my sander on a stick so I could do the job standing up. Oh well.

Once again I had to clean, clean, clean all the dust left behind and finally put down some of the new semi-gloss.

Semi-gloss gives a balance between that nice shiny look and hiding any imperfections in the job.

This is the dried 3rd coat just before I put down the 4th.

So with 4 coats down I'd intended to give a couple days for the floor to dry and harden but Independence day intervened and I didn't have a chance to get back to it. This is probably for the best, the longer it can harden without getting walked on much, the better. I'll be back at it soon.

While I was waiting for the floor to dry I took a minute to clean the accumulated cruft off of the pipe that goes under the dam. When I first walked out to the pipe a frog jumped. Later as I was cleaning he came back. Frogs are common around the edge of the pond but I rarely get to see them, they jump away before I get close. This guy hung out for 10 or more minutes just watching me. He was pretty big for a frog in our area, maybe just a bit smaller than my fist.

A refinished floor

 Geez its been awhile. I keep thinking "gotta write the blog" and keep not doing it. Fortunately a bunch has happened.

Most recently I refinished the floor at camp:

This is a good before shot, you can see, down at the bottom the damage from 60 years of usage.

The floor is not actually "flooring". Its just 4" birch boards and family lore tells that those boards were green when the place was built.

I didn't realize (but should have) that those boards weren't flat and because they weren't flat I couldn't just quick sand them like I'd planned. I had to buy 40 grit belts and cross sand (sand against the grain) to flatten the floor. This took 5 HOURS on my knees with a belt sander.

The 60 and 80 grit passes took 1 hour each (16x24 room) although during that last pass my knee pad straps sawed 1 inch square chunks off the back of each knee... No picture, trust me, you don't want to see this one.

I bought a new "WEN" brand corded belt sander for the job and it was flawless. That first pass produced 5 gallons of sawdust.

After sanding to 80 grit I took my old Harbor Freight palm sander around the outside of the room, also at 80 grit. I bought that sander to refinish a hood to put on Hammie my '83 240D when I bought it the second time. That'd have been 2007ish. I've gotten good value for money on that.

Then swept the floor 3 times, vacuumed the floor 3 times and ran a tack cloth over it 3 times. Even with all that I still pulled up mouse turds on the roller while putting down the finish.

This is after one coat of oil based finish. Unfortunately I was unable to locally source additional oil based finish so additional coats will have to wait until July. Because of the wait I'll have to sand again to 220 grit. I'll do that with the palm sander, it shouldn't take all that long, just enough to scuff and provide adhesion.

A secret revealed

 I've been hiding something from you, something that has eaten up a significant amount of my time and energy. Actually, some of you probably already know about this but for the rest of you.

This is the Cushman house, the parcel of land it sits on wraps around the southern end of our property. Last fall we got word that it was for sale at quite an attractive price. Dad asked me what I thought and I replied "If you don't buy it I will."

The house is originally from about 1888 but was added on to before 1920. We know that because the last owner's grandparents moved there in 1920 and the addition was already there. In this shot we're facing south west, this is what I call "the new house" because its the addition.

Facing north west, this is the original house. I haven't gotten pictures yet but from the basement it's easy to see the separation, the original house sits on hand hewn beams that are basically trees made flat on one side. The addition is sawn lumber. The house is kind of sad, not much has been done to it for the last 30 years.

The barn is a completely different story, it was build around 2007. We actually watched it's construction over several years.

The south face of the barn still doesn't have doors, that black stuff is fabric. The previous owner joked that he never did anything with the doors because "the town might jack up the taxes if it was actually finished."

The first time dad I went into the house we expected it to be musty and moldy. It's an old house and the last occupant was an elderly widower. We were surprised to find it dry and not smelly, the floors don't squeak or bounce and although nothing in the house is square there isn't anything structurally wrong with it.

Knowing that the house was sound I spent the whole winter pondering. Our first notions were to knock the place down or to sell it. In the end neither really suited, its too good a house to knock down but not really valuable enough to sell and in selling it we lose the barn, you couldn't really sell the house without the barn...

So this spring, like an idiot, I decided it needed painting.

We spent a whole day power washing and scraping paint. Remember dad's power washer? This is why I took the time to get it going.

Another day was spent masking windows. I planned to spray the paint on and I'm really glad we did.

An airless paint sprayer is basically a hydraulic paint gun. The pump pressurizes paint in the hose and it atomizes when you pull the trigger on the sprayer. This allows the pump to draw paint directly from a bucket which simplifies reloads.

With the sprayer we were able to paint the whole house in a day.

This is the north face of the house and one I really wanted to get right as its the most visible from the road. You can see the huge difference the new paint makes. I left the insulation on the window at the bottom right since that window is in the bathroom, right next to the toilet. Eventually that window will be replaced with a small window, high in the wall. It'll give some light into the bathroom but will be more private.

The whole house takes about 6 gallons of paint. With 10 gallons we painted almost everything twice but ran out of paint before we could make a second coat on the high up areas. The spraying took 2 days but the first day we only painted up about 8 feet. The explanation of that is a story in itself...

Anyway, whats next? Well I've already bought a new water heater. The one in the house was turned off 30 years ago because "it cost too much to use" and sat full for all that time. The state of Maine had a great rebate on a hybrid water heater so one is now there waiting to be installed. After that the house needs "a new everything" starting with the kitchen and bathroom. I don't have good pictures but the kitchen was torn apart 30 years ago and never put back together. The bathroom is basically functional but really ugly.

After that it'll be a long term project reworking each room, replacing windows and adding insulation. Hopefully improving the livability and maintainability of the whole place. The thinking is that we really can't make the house any less valuable than it is right now so why not give it a shot...

I'm bi-tractoral!

 For years dad and I have talked about buying a compact diesel tractor with a loader. Neither of us is getting any younger and a mechanical "pick things up" machine would be super handy. At the beginning of the year I sold some stock and started looking.

Originally I'd planned to buy a construction backhoe. I'd seen some last fall for what I considered a reasonable price. Of course as soon as I started looking the prices doubled. The other problem is that even a small backhoe weighs 14,000# which puts you into commercial transport territory. I figured it'd be around $2,000 to get one moved to Caribou.

Eventually I relaxed my requirements and started looking at farm tractors. I settled on this:

It's a 1998 Ford 1920. Ford's numbering doesn't really make any sense to me, this is a 32hp machine. 4wd with a 12spd transmission. Most folks look for hydrostatic machines so a gear transmission is usually a little cheaper. For loader work it's not the best but I think for a mower or tiller it'll be fine. The transmission on this one is actually pretty cool, its 4spds each in 3 different ranges. The 4spds are synchronized so you can shift between them on the move. In practice the only on the move shifting I've done is in high range, it's hard on it to start out in road gear with a load.

I rented a U-Haul trailer to move it to Caribou. The tractor is about as narrow as you can go and use a U-Haul trailer, the front wheels just barely span the gap down the middle of the trailer. The old Dodge did a fine job pulling but the tractor has the areodynamics of a brick. I've pulled a similarly heavy car on a U-Haul trailer before and it towed much easier.

I hesitated to take the trailer all the way in to the camp but it was 10pm and I didn't want either the hassle of unhooking the trailer and hooking it back up or the uncertainty of unloading in the dark. In the end I decided I'd drive in until the trailer got hung up but it never did. Returning the trailer require a 90 point turn to get headed back up the road at camp.

Ideally the Ford is going to take over some mowing duties from the old Super M. I plan to get a 5' 3pt mower which will be much more convenient to use. Unfortunately it appears that the PTO clutch is stuck on. I hooked on to our 6' mower but couldn't get the PTO to engage. You can hear the gears clash and jump and it kicks back out. I need to pull the clutch inspection plate and have a look around. With any luck it'll be an easy fix.

Even with the fault I'm pretty happy, the engine starts with just a nudge of the key and has no computer controls. When I bought it I asked about the glow plugs and the guy said "I've never used them." I believe him, this thing has the best starting engine I've ever seen.

Along with a mower I'd like to get a scraper blade and maybe a backhoe. Ford/New Holland made one specifically for this machine, I saw one for sale just yesterday but it appears to be gone today. Alternately there are 3pt backhoes that are probably fine if you keep the limitations of the machine in mind. For now I'm pleased to be able to move some rocks/dirt. Angie has been building a wood fired pizza oven and the dirty old Ferd hauled a bunch of rocks for that project...

A vacation, during this? Well, for fiddleheads...

Yeah I know, pandemic and all. Heres the thing, we've got this place in Aroostock county Maine, population 67,000 give or take a few and 8 COVID cases. We've done a pretty careful job of quarantining ourselves and since we would spend the vast majority of our time at camp anyway we figured we were safe for the journey. The one variation we took from our normal trip is that we didn't take our kayaks. In retrospect that was a mistake but not a big one, we were able to rent a pair up there.

That kayak rental was really important as it let us pick fiddleheads.

I know I've written about fiddleheads on here before and they're somewhat of an obsession for us. This year's trip was a little early so our normal picking spots weren't ready yet. However there was one spot we usually pass by because we were too late that was just perfect.

Our early estimate is that we had picked around 25 pounds, I'm thinking that was probably low its probably more like 40 pounds which took us about 4 hours.

We waited to process until we got home, its really hard to blanch fiddleheads without running water and a good source of ice. My old Coleman 413E did heating duties. I really need to get my Handy Gas Plant up and running, we could have used a larger burner.

This is secondary cooling. I let this get up to 15 bags and then I'd haul the first ten to the freezer in the basement. Secondary cooling ensured we weren't putting warm fiddleheads into the freezer.

We ended up with 52 quart bags. We tend to pack them pretty full, in fact we should probably get a scale to weigh out the product for more consistent results but since its just for us it probably doesn't matter.

Anyway the rest of vacation was fantastic, the weather was perfect if maybe a little warm and we got to really relax which was great. I found time to plant a garden and Angie trimmed a bunch of trees. I'll post more on that later.

Snowed out of camp

I've been going deer hunting with my Dad in northern Maine for a week every November for nearly 30 years now. Usually the first or second week of November we head up there and spend a week not shooting any deer.

This year was different, on Tuesday we got snow, it was supposed to snow until noon, in the end it snowed all day, in the end we got about eight inches. Eight inches of snow is generally no big deal, the roads were clear, stores were open, no sweat. Then remember that our camp is 3/4 of a mile from the road...

This is the first time we've ever plowed snow at camp, we've had snow in past years but usually only a couple inches and a warm day or two usually takes care of it. This year it was cold, like single digits cold and Thursday the weather report was for another five inches...

I'd never had to shovel the path to the outhouse either.


Wednesday night Eric got his pickup (the Chevy pictured above) stuck in a snow drift. The only way to drive in this stuff is in 4wd with a heavy foot, carry some speed into the drifts so that you don't bog down. He was going slow and hit a particularly deep spot. I managed to get him out with my truck but it was a near thing...

Thursday morning Eric and Michael headed south, we couldn't go back on the woods roads since we couldn't see the water holes and wouldn't dare to carry a bunch of speed on the woods roads anyway. Hiking around in the woods wasn't much fun either. So I couldn't blame them for heading out. In fact once I read the weather report I told Dad I didn't think sticking around was a good idea for us either.

That last picture is deceptive, we're pointed down a hill, the snow at the bottom is probably 12-18" deep where its drifted in from the field on the right, this is where Eric got his truck stuck. Just after taking the picture we headed down and even though we were going at a pretty good clip we still nearly got stuck.

By the time I got home that night (9 hours later) it had just started to snow at home. Even in MA we got 5" of snow...

Another week at camp

Deer camp was last week. For context deer camp is the week we hunt deer, as opposed to moose camp which was the week we hunted moose or just any regular trip to camp.

We didn't shoot any deer although Dad saw two which is always nice. Deer are pretty scarce in northern Maine. Back around 1980 there was a spruce bud worm infestation which killed a lot of the spruce trees. Its not unlike the asian bark beetle thing people are all worried about now. In the wake of the worm big sections of the forest were clear cut which removed much of the habitat for the deer. In the winter the little buds on the spruce trees are just about all the deer have to eat and theres no place to hide in the clear cuts. So the deer moved out and the moose moved in. The moose don't mind behind out in the clear cut and they browse on all sorts of things that come up in the first regrowth so they had lots of food.

Now its almost 40 years later and the spruce trees planted in the wake of the worm are nearing full maturity, they've grown in thick in the way that the forests used to be and in ways that the moose don't like. If you're an 800# moose you don't want to be pushing through thick spruce forests so you head out to more open spaces. Today the moose population is in decline and the deer population is on the rise. When I shot a moose in 1999 our butcher skinned and quartered 14 moose in one day. This year when Dad shot his moose the same butcher figured he might do 14 moose in 2 weeks. In '99 he thought he might process a couple deer, this year he figured on 50 or 60.

Anyway I do bring a couple projects for deer camp, this year I installed a couple 12v reading lights:

This is above my bunk, to the right of the light is the mount for Angie's battery powered light. Dad's bunk is on the other side of the wall, theres a hole behind my light with another wire that goes to another light at Dad's bunk. The lights are 2.5w when on full and have a low power blue light setting as well. They throw lots of light and are great for reading. Now that we have solar it seemed silly to have batteries for flashlights as a continuing expense, these lights were a test and since they worked so well I'll be ordering some more.
Last summer Dad installed a 20w LED fixture over the kitchen table, the gas light was producing too much heat to be comfortable. If it'd been me I'd have looked for about 10w, the one he got is really bright but its nice when you first get to camp to be able to turn on the inverter and hit the switch without having to turn on the gas. I'm going to get another 12v light to go over the sink, the inverter draws .25A all by itself, the reading lights are about .20A.

A few years ago I spent a bunch of time learning to make the best french fries possible. One thing I learned is you can't beat frying in lard, nothing works as well or tastes as good. This year we tried something new and made fried shrimp:

The batter is just ploy mix, the trick is getting the right consistency and letting the shrimp dry a little before battering them. Dad tried to recreate my shrimp a few nights later but couldn't get the batter to stick as well as I could. He didn't let his shrimp drip so his batter got too wet. Maybe I should make a video on this...

We didn't see much game but one day I spotted this little critter:

In this picture I'm about 3 feet away from him and he's finally starting to get upset. When I spotted him we were in the truck, I rolled down the window and called out but he didn't move. I got out of the truck and he didn't move. It wasn't until I got this close that he finally got upset with me. A second or two later he ran down a hole under the stick and wouldn't come back out. Weird squirrel...

A very Maine week

Went moose hunting with my dad last week. Its kind of a big deal since there were only 2140 permits this year. Dad drew wildlife management district 19 which is waaay outside of our normal range. This is "downeast" which is to say the far eastern corner of Maine.

Dad rented the Mickey Finn cottage at Shoreline Camps in Grand Lake Stream, Maine population 109. Driving to Grand Lake Stream takes half an hour less than driving to our camp in Caribou although its nearly 50 miles closer...

A few months ago dad went up to scout around since we don't know the area. Fortunately there woods roads just like up north.  My uncle Guy and dad's friend Dave also came out so the four of us piled into my pickup truck and into the woods we went.
This is good moose country and we saw tons of tracks:

The first day was mostly a bust, we saw one partridge but it was really windy so Dave couldn't get close enough. Dave said he heard a couple others in the woods at different times in the day but no luck there. We saw a porcupine on the side of the road and dad took a couple shots at him with the .410 but he didn't seem terribly bothered by it. We also saw a turkey, I had never seen a turkey on a woods road before since we don't have all that many in Arostook county. I'd also never seen a lone turkey before but we didn't see any others.

Late in the day we found this cow moose:

She was big, probably in the 500-600# range, about 80 yards from the truck. Dad's permit specified a male so she was safe. We all agreed that if she had been a male it would have been worth shooting but she was out in a big swamp and it would have been a long hard job to retrieve the body.

On the way back to camp I noticed a couple roads I hadn't seen in the morning and made a note to try them the next day and I'm glad I did, on day 2 we hadn't even reached the end of the first road when there was a moose standing right in the middle of the road. Moose are big critters and standing in the middle of the road this one looked like a giant towering over the truck even though it was a good 50 yards off.

Being that we were heading east and the moose was right in front of us the glare from the sun made it hard to tell if there were antlers or not. I was quick with the field glasses and called out "Antlers!" Dad sent an 11.5mm, nearly 1oz bullet down range and the moose dropped like a stone. The bullet took him in the right shoulder and while it was a good shot and he wasn't going to get up again he wasn't dying with any real speed. The other barrel of dad's cape gun had a 16ga round ball which being that its 16ga (ie 16 balls to the pound) weighs in right at 1oz. That ball deflated the right lung and ended any suffering real quick.

Thus began the dirty work. Being the good son this falls to me. I'd done the job once in '99 when I shot a moose and again in 2009 when dad shot his little one but on a big moose like this the field dressing is a big job. The skin is thick and theres a membrane between it and the internals that has to be cut, you don't want to cut too deep though since you don't want to puncture the guts which will stink and can spoil the meat. I was very careful and managed to not cut anything bad, in all the field dressing took me close to an hour.

Finally the big job of loading the animal started, we had brought ramps with us and tied a strap between the tie down points at the front of the pickup, we then used a come-along to winch the moose up the ramps. The come-along cable was short so we could only go about 3 feet at a time with the moose trying to slide back down the ramp every time we had to reset. If you've ever used a come-along you know how frustrating they are.

After another hour we were loaded and headed back to camp. We paused for ice, its important to get the body cooled as soon as possible to reduce the possibility of spoilage so I put 10# of ice into the body cavity right away. We quickly packed up camp and headed to Waite, Maine to get the moose weighed, tagged and logged, this is also the traditional time for picture taking:

Waite is a small place (population 101) and we were definitely the biggest thing that happened all day. The cape gun was a character in this story in its own right and something nobody in Waite had seen before.
Places like Waite and Grand Lake Stream are always full of characters and we met a bunch of people who claimed to never have seen a moose before. I find that odd since we had seen so many tracks in the woods but we decided that those people must never leave the paved roads. If you want to see animals you need to go where the animals are.

In Waite I bought another 20# of ice to pack the body with for the 2 hour ride north to Caribou to our butcher Scotty of Scotty's Meat Shop. Scotty has cut all our moose for us and does a fantastic job. Since it was early in the week anyway it got to hang and age for a day or two which really improves the flavor and texture of the meat. The last time we shot a moose the meat still came wrapped in paper, these days its vacuum sealed:

I took the picture after we'd already taken about 1/3 of the meat, in all we used all the coolers we had, plus we borrowed one from Scotty, bought another and filled an apple box:

Scotty cut the skull cap for us so we can have the antlers. When I shot the moose in 1999 I cut the skull cap myself, having done it once paying Scotty $50 to do it is a great investment...

There was so much meat my parent's upright freezer was overwhelmed, we had to tape the door shut so meat wouldn't fall out.

Thats after filling the freezer in the fridge upstairs. Angie and I brought a cooler full of meat home the next day which helped the situation. Dad will give Guy and Dave meat too so this animal will feed lots of folks.

Fish day

We've got a farm pond. Its about an acre which means its maybe 100 yards long and about 30 yards wide, maybe half the size of a football field. My great uncles built the pond in the '60s by scooping out a bunch of dirt around a natural brook and piling that dirt up to make a dam. The dam has a pipe running through it that lets out excess water. The pipe is an L shape with the foot of the L through the bottom of the dam and the top of the L a few feet below the top of the dam. The pipe is the magic that makes this kind of a farm pond work, if you just let the water run over a spillway it will gradually eat away the spillway and the dam will fail. The other clever trick is that inside the dam wall there is (or at least was) a rubber barrier around the horizontal part of the pipe. This barrier kept water from leaking out around the pipe when the dam was new. Considering its been standing for 50+ years I'd consider it a good design.

Most farm ponds have fish in them, its a handy way to keep down the bugs and entertain the kids. The pond was last stocked in '95 or so after a copper sulfate spill upstream killed everything in the pond. We took over the farm in 2002 and sometime around 2005 somebody stole all our fish. I don't have a problem with somebody coming down and catching a fish occasionally but these people left baited hooks specifically to steal our fish.

Anyway dad and I figured enough time has passed that its time to stock again. To do that you need to get a permit from the state which dad finally got, then you take a ride to Frenchville.

The guy's operation is great, he's got several of these tanks half submerged in his yard. Up the hill there are some ponds too but we didn't go up to see them. The guy is one of those people thats always moving and busy so we didn't want to take up too much of his time.

We bought 50 6-8" brook trout which ran about $2 apiece. The process is pretty simple, he dips a net in the tank and counts 25 fish into a bucket of water, then comes the clever bit.

He dumps the bucket into a plastic bag, squeezes out the air and inflates the bag with pure oxygen. This hyper-oxygenates the water ensuring the fish survive the journey. Its about an hour ride from Caribou to Frenchville. The fish guy said the fish would be okay for up to 3 hours so I didn't hurry too much on our ride back but neither did I dawdle.

In retrospect I'd have brought a box to put the bags in but this bag didn't move an inch. The other bag rolled around the back of the truck some but the fish didn't seem to mind.

I ripped the bag open and submerged it in the pond. The fish didn't seem all that interested in coming out so I had to pour them out of the bag.

I put them in kind of a shaded spot under a cedar tree with another cedar laying in the pond. I'd talked about cutting the dead tree last year but now I'm glad I didn't. They congregated around for a minute and then went crazy eating the bugs on the surface of the water. Within about ten minutes they'd dispersed and over the next day we only occasionally saw them come to the surface to feed.

At first I'd thought that 50 fish seemed like a really big number but when you disperse them into a pond it seems like nothing. Dad says by the time we go back in October the fish will be 10 inches long or so. We won't pull any out this year, the winters are hard and we don't want to stress them so they'll have the best chance of spawning in the spring.