More snow and very cold

It's cold. The high today may have been as much as 10 F here on the farm. The low last night was -7 F.

That's too cold for hens, dogs, and babies, so the hens have a heat lamp, the dogs only go out for short spells, and the baby doesn't go out at all except to a car that is already warmed up thoroughly.

The sheep just get an extra bale of hay and are fine with that. They don't even come in the barn at night, although they have an entrance and can do just that. They don't seem to mind how cold it gets. They do come in the barn for snow sometimes, and always for rain.

The Rover, which is supposed to plow the snow, is giving starter trouble. Part of the problem is the newly rebuilt and "tight" engine, which is hard to turn over when cold even with a good starter motor. I'm looking into getting a new one, but the replacements for the old Lucas "Prince of Darkness" motors are expensive, probably around $300.

Given that it will warm up to 40 F on Tuesday, and give rain, I'm not too worried. No new big snowstorms are forecast. Indeed, we haven't had a real nor'easter all winter, a typical El Nino year. Yesterday it snowed all day but only managed a few inches. I eventually got the Rover started and running today with a heat lamp, a magnetic block heater, and a jump from the Nissan, and plowed this small snowfall in a few minutes.

Inside all possible sources of heat are on, electric baseboards, the oil furnace, and the wood stove. It's nice and cosy. I don't like burning oil, and indeed try to burn very little of it under most circumstances, but I like frozen pipes even less than I like burning oil. I'm letting the old bathroom sink run a little to protect against freezing, and keep checking the temperature in the new crawl space under the extension, but that is steady at around 44 F.

Postscript: The well pump did eventually freeze during this cold spell, because the bulb that is supposed to keep it warm popped. That night it was -17 F, according to Aimee's car's dashboard temperature read-out. The well pump thawed after a half hour of an electrical heater. I'm going to fit a second bulb holder in there.

Here's your "moment of Zen", little Edana trying to make a phone call.

Not a great start to spring

The problem with trying to run a farm and raise a baby that isn't toddling or talking and so not really playing with other children yet is that there isn't much time, even with two parents. We're always watching her. As a result, I tend now to rush things a little around the farm, whenever I get the all-clear to run out and get some work done.

Case in point: She's sleeping now, which gives me chance to finish up this post which I started five days ago, but she'll wake up at any time, so we'll see if I finish it.

That was also the case last Saturday morning. Aimee took Roo to do some shopping, while I had a list of spring chores in my head. I began with putting the Nissan truck on the lift, pulling the wheels, and spraying the salt off the underside with the pressure washer. That done, I lowered it to the ground for safety, and left it to dry thoroughly. Then I went to till the garden with the Kubota tractor and tiller.

You can see next what ensued:

I tipped the tractor over on a very slight undulation in the ground with a bucket of particularly wet and heavy compost. I was reversing with the bucket too high, and turning to the left all at the same time. Had I lowered the bucket just slightly, or made a wider turn, this wouldn't have happened.

So, we had to resort to the Land Rover winch.

 

No worries, mate! The only damage was the loss of a couple quarts of engine oil, which I then had to scrape up off the ground with a shovel.

Here's the compost heap after I loaded out about four tons of very nice black muck. I think most of this was two-year old stuff.

I got right back to work and was able to finish up, just in time to plant peas with Aimee and Roo later that day. All's well that ends well.

In other news, we are learning to like pancakes! Yummy!

Finally, I laughed out loud when I saw what Aimee inadvertently did the other day:

 

Here's the FB caption I used:

"Headline News: British citizen tortured by American housewife! Is no-one safe? In a breaking story, once-famous British subject Bungo Womble may have been stripped naked and hung by the ears by an American woman. Upon arrest and interrogation by the Special Branch, the suspect is alleged to have cited racial theory. Apparently our British Wombles are "too dirty" for American children.

The shame, the pity...."

With a great roar...

... and a rather volcanic outburst of black smoke and soot and even solid fragments of carbon that had been lodged in the muffler, my massive Lister-Petter TS3 genset came to life Saturday. It took about half a bottle of starter fluid -- note to self, buy more starter fluid -- but after a short while the injectors bled through and were primed and then it ran just fine all on its own, putting out 117 volts at each pole of the three-wire connector.

Well within the tolerances to run this old house the next time we get a four-day power cut.

Here's the home movie I took of the second start-up. This one lacked some of the drama, but I wasn't going to be futzing around with a camera if it exploded during the first attempt.

All said and done, I was fairly pleased with this result. It's been a while since I got this deep into an engine project, and it was fun to dust off mt skills.

There remains a little work to do on the Lister. It clearly needs a new muffler, for which we'll adapt a cheap bit of car muffler from the parts store. There's the small matter of a new oil pressure switch to replace the one I managed to burn out while trying to sort out the electrics the other week. And I ordered a large external fuel tank, one that comes on wheels, so we can take just the tank and not the whole genset to the gas station to fill up. And it needs wiring and connectors to connect it to our power distribution panel the next time we get a big outage. 

I haven't decided where to put it yet, either. It really needs it's own permanent shed, some distance away from the main house in case of fire, but I may also just find a good solid secondhand trailer and fit it to that, after which it will be possible to move it to other places around here that may need power.

As the most recent power emergency showed, there just aren't enough generators in the county when the power goes out. Most of our public buildings were closed, and eleven public schools were completely dark, and even some of those that had standby-generators couldn't get them running, because some key experienced people had recently retired. If I fit this big genset to a trailer, it may one day be of some help at someone else's house or for some other useful purpose.

In other mechanical news, our big "new" Nissan four-door pick-em up truck needs a starter motor. At least, I think it does, and will have to change out the starter motor before I know for sure. It has the dreaded no-crank, no start condition on cold mornings, until I hit it with the 200 amp starter, then it goes just fine. The rest of the day, it takes one or more turns of the key. This beast has the same Nippon Denso starter that the Camry had, the one where the copper contacts wear out after a while, producing these kinds of symptoms. But a bad neutral safety switch will do pretty much the same. I ordered a reconditioned starter, and will soon find out which one of the two possible causes it is.

I'm just hoping the starter arrives before the next snowstorm, but it's not looking good.

As for baby Roo, things are pretty swell there most of the time. Aimee is still very sore from sleeping with her own personal parasite more or less firmly attached all night, but Roo is getting better and better at entertaining herself and us. She has begun to "talk", by which we mean coo repeatedly, having "conversations" with us. She also now likes her baby gym, and can entertain herself there for anything up to a half-hour.

Eight weeks tomorrow!

Here's Ernie the English Shepherd doing his shepherd-dog thing, guarding the house and watching for Roo. He loves her like she was his own baby. I'm sure he would get a pretty good bite of anyone that laid a hand to her.

Our precious wee mite will be eight weeks old tomorrow, and we seem to be settling into the role of parents well enough. Aimee is having it harder than I, mostly because breastfeeding is time-consuming and keeps you in one spot. She's off to do the shopping and get a massage, a new treat for her, although probably also a necessity.

 

One important trick we discovered early on is that Roo falls asleep to the sound of white noise, especially machinery. The Kitchen Aid mixer is the best, but lots of other things have worked, from cars and trucks, through the drill press, to the new 3D printer in my workshop at college.

Accordingly, I recorded the mixer to my Mac laptop and play it in a loop whenever and wherever we need her to "go down." Here's the set-up, Roo in the rocker and the computer playing the mixer noise. Brings new meaning to the old phrase "mix tape."

Although there's way too much to do still, it's hard to get much done around here with weekends pretty much solid child care from front to back. We essentially have to plan out household and farm chores ahead of time, taking each others' plans and needs into account, and prioritizing. Even so, I've managed to find time to run the fat lambs to the butchers, deliver the meat, winterize the cars, clean up the yard, and put about half of the garden to bed. I'm waiting for a good solid hard frost for the potato harvest, then the rest can go to bed too.

Here's the underside of the Nissan pick-em up truck, getting what will be an annual coat of fluid film.

And her's a new investment, a diesel generator set built on an old British Lister Petter TS3 diesel. This cost $400 off Maine Craigslist. I got up at four this morning to drive up to Greenville to get it, leaving Aimee to look after Roo by herself for a short while. Turns out, when you have a baby and want to go dickering, you have to go early if you can, so you can get back to do your share of baby watching.

I'm looking forward to getting this beast running. It's 18KW, which is too much really for this house, but if we ever decide to build again, especially if we build off-grid, this will be ideal for running heavy duty farm machinery and shop tools. It can also be run off biodiesel and waste vegetable oil, like the grease cars the students use to build at the college in the early 2000s. I've been wanting to try a Lister grease-generator conversion for years.

The garden is still pretty to look at in places. The marigolds we planted to keep the flea beetles off the brassicas have done their work and then some, then decided to give us one final show.

Even Roo likes a walk in the veggie patch. Daddy is lousy at baby-selfies, though. Don't drop her!

Finally, here's Shawn doing his thing. The two at the front are breed ewes. Shawn is at the back, trying to keep up.

All in all, a very active late fall.

Snow will come soon, though, and I'm not ready yet. I need a few good days.

Six weeks old!

It's been hard to write for the blog lately. For one, there isn't as much time. In particular, we're up all hours of the night, and so my previously much-cherished and peaceful early mornings from 4am to sheep-feeding time are now more likely to be spent in bed trying to get another hour in, or at least enough sleep that I can get through the workday without sleeping at my desk or, worse, on my feet in front of a class.

We've been lucky, though. Our little bundle of joy does actually sleep through the night already. Not all the way through the night, but enough of it. The only problem is that she has to be latched on to Mom to do so. This makes Aimee achy from not being able to turn over, and of course she's missing out on REM sleep.

Even so, farm life goes on, and if these days aren't all to be a blur, some record must be kept. I find myself going back over the blog several times a year to find out when it was that we did such-and-such a thing, or which sheep gave birth to which lamb, and so on. The value of having a diary has been well-proven over the years. And, of course, family members and friends all over the world want to know what is happening here in Maine.

So what has happened around here, other than our daughter is now six weeks old and beginning to grab Mommy's hair and make "social smiles", all earth-shaking news in itself, at least to the proud and sleep-deprived parents?

Well, we sold three breed ewes to an island farm Saturday. The farmers came with a nice big livestock trailer. They were pleasant and sensible, and the photos on their webpage and FaceBook page show some pretty good husbandry, and so we feel that these sheep will go to good homes.

The island farmers seem surprised at the large size of our sheep, given that they also keep Romneys.

It isn't the Corriedale blood. Corriedales are no larger than Romneys. Both are multi-purpose breeds, and look so similar they can be hard to tell apart. But since we grain our sheep daily all year, they grow out to the full potential of the breed.

They may have a ram for us next year, which would be nice. Little Roo might be old enough by then to enjoy a trip to an island. All in all we were pretty pleased with the deal.

Then yesterday the three fat lambs went to the butchers. By the end of the week they'll be lamb chops. Aimee was asked to help with the trailer-loading chore. This is a job she has avoided every year, mostly after giving up on me in frustration when I've struggled to load pigs, but I know she also feels sorry for the poor doomed critters.

This time she was so shocked at how difficult it can be to load multiple animals into our small home-made livestock trailer, she immediately acquiesced to our purchase of a "proper" one, much like the one the island farmers brought. This was a great day for me, because I've struggled for so many years. But the money we could set aside for farming has always been tight, and so we can't just spend it willy-nilly. I believed that if we could get by with a little home-made trailer, then we probably should.

A larger, purpose-built livestock trailer would transform my year, taking the two hardest jobs and making them easy. And the "new" (eleven years old) Nissan pick-em up truck will be able to draw such a trailer easily. One day, if we can find some more land around here, I'd like to have a proper piggery and more sheep, and so a bigger trailer would be needed.

Finally, Shaun the ram is also sold, the deposit in hand, and he will leave soon after he has completed his tupping rounds. He began yesterday and got off to a bad start. His notion was simply to run down the ewes when they wouldn't at first stand for him, a real "rough wooing." This of course will not work for him. He'll have to learn to be nicer. But he soon got tired, so this is the sort of behavior that is likely self-correcting.

All this sheep-selling leaves us with only seven ewes, of which five can and are being be bred to Shaun. (The remaining two are his sister and daughter, now seperated.) That's the fewest sheep we've had since our first sheep purchase all those years ago, and reflects our desire to have an easy winter, this first winter that we're a family of three.

An elevating experience

Our regular hay supplier called late Sunday afternoon to ask if we were ready for the hay. We were. We'd been watching the weather and seeing the farmers out in the fields and knew that hay day would be coming.

The Day the Hay Comes has always been a big one around here, and indeed before we got a bit smarter about it, it used to take us several days of very hard work to fill the hay mow above our barn. That was back when we used to go pick it off the fields ourselves with the old Nissan pick-em-up truck. That old flatbed was designed in part for hay, but it could only take 42 bales.

But the farmer that sold us hay we had to pick ourselves would only give us a fifty cent-discount, and picking was a three-person, not a two person job. Our friend Alysa would come to help, in return for gleaning rights over our garden. We would probably have let Alysa glean all she wanted for free, especially after she and Anders had baby Nils, but she preferred to trade work if we had anything for her to do. Since we have a lot of surplus in season, these gleaning rights were not inconsequential, and the one thing we needed help with was the Hay Day. It was a pretty good trade.

But Alysa is long gone, back to Scandinavia, or at least Wisconsin.

The updated hay system is to have Amishman Simon S. deliver the hay from his Jackson fields, and he and I together heft it into the barn.

Simon operates a dairy in Thorndike, but rents a couple hay fields just up the road. Being an Amishman, he has to hay with horses, and truck hay with horses, unless he hires an outside helper with a vehicle. But that costs real money, which being an Amishman he'd prefer not to spend. So what he does is that he sells us the hay from the Jackson fields and uses the check to pay for his outside help, a neighbor that drives truck to help him get his whole hay mow in. This is probably a couple weeks work for the neighbor, plus gas and wear and tear on the truck, and we usually buy around a thousand dollars worth of hay, so it works out about right.

It was with this in mind that I bought and refurbished that old hay elevator. I don't mind pitching hay bales into the door of the hay mow. If the bale is a normal weight, I can even do it directly from the ground, even with a standing start. If the wagon or flatbed is nice and high, that makes it easier. Simon, who has a decade or more on me, can throw a hay bale accurately anywhere he wants up to about forty feet. Neither of us is any slouch when it comes to hay bales.

But after two or three hundred such throws, both of us are getting pretty tired, since each throw is essentially a thirty-forty pound shot putt-type of maneuver. The elevator sure takes the edge off this job.

Above is Aimee's movie of our hay operation this year. You can see how much easier it is for me. So I was pretty pleased with the whole business, and the elevator was a good investment.

That's neighbor Larry minding Simon's baby Benjamin. Larry is retired and doesn't heave hay, for medical reasons. No doubt Benjamin will, in another year or three.

You can hear Ginnie the Guinea cackling in the background.

The sheep are voting for the new elevator, with their mouths. They always like Simon's hay, and they like hay day too.

Simon, who prefers the inside job, stacking the hay, was less aided by the machine, but seemed pleased that it took less time overall. That allowed him to get back to his other hay fields in record time.

I think he likes to be inside to give him a break from the sun. Normally, without the elevator, inside is easier than out, but with the elevator, inside is harder.

One slight snag -- the elevator motor must be jump-started, but will jump-start in either direction, up or down. Occasionally a particularly heavy bale would send it into reverse and we'd have to stop the operation and jump it again in the right direction! This could be discombobulating. Good steady rhythm is everything with manual labor like this.

I don't know whether this is by design or by mechanical fault. If anyone reading this knows the answer, let me know in the comments or by email. It's a Snowco elevator, and I assume the motor is the original. But don't know for sure.

We've had great hay weather this year. It's been sunny and dry, not at all humid, for nearly two weeks. The whole first cut is nearly in, across the whole of mid-central Maine, and the landscape has changed accordingly. No longer do we see quite as many huge bright green fields of wavy grass. Now we see a more yellow patchwork.

I always enjoy these landscape changes, as I drive around the state.

Maine is a good state for growing grass, which makes it a good state for growing sheep.

Lamb daze done and other news

Wednesday was shearing day at the farm, the biggest sheep management day of the spring season. Our shearer is Edi, a UMaine agriculture student with a talent for efficiently and gently removing all the fleece from a ewe or ram. First up was Shawn, who met his match and lived up to his name. Then we ran through all the ewes and ewe-lambs, finishing with the last three thought-to-be-pregant ewes, only to find that all was not as thought to be.

In fact, they were not at all pregnant. Not even a little bit.

So much for Shawn the home-grown ram. Growing your own is clearly not always better.

But poor Shawnie. He's probably sealed his fate at that. No-one will buy him if we can't point to a good lambing rate, so he'll have to go to be ramburger. He has one more season on the farm, but we won't want to keep him around after that. Even if he does better he won't live long enough for us to find out how well he did. It's just too much trouble to keep a ram you don't need anymore.

If Shawnie had done a better job, he would have had a better chance of being sold on to another farm.

Before another horrible anti-farming, anti-meat activist sends us snotty comments, think it through. This is not as horrible as it sounds. Our experience is that sheep tend to die pretty painful deaths at eight or nine years of age, if you keep them around to die of old age. A few good years of good health, all the feed and sunshine you want, the chance to reproduce, and then a quick clean unsuspecting death is not all that bad. And where do you think the manure comes from for the compost used in organic farming?

As for me, I get to sleep through the night now, after nearly five weeks of night checks every night.

 

Here's Quinn with her two black lambs, one boy and one girl. I only have pre-shearing pictures because my camera batteries died. I need to pull out the charger and charge up some. Still, you get to see how strong the lambies we do have are doing. They're very sturdy, all the troubles with white muscle disease left far behind.

 

Here's Flamie very excited by the sheep and lambs being put out to graze for the first time the other day. The grass has taken quite a while to grow, and is not at all up to snuff, but we decided to let them have a go at the island paddock. They were getting very tired of hay.

Finally, here's the "new" Nissan pick-em up truck on jackstands waiting for a new muffler, having failed inspection on that count.

I'd asked the mechanic, Mr. Thompson on the Valley Road in Brooks, if he would weld the muffler while he had the truck on the lift to change the tires, but it was cracked in more than one place and he gave up on it, telling me I had to get a new exhaust system from the catalytic converters back. Then followed a fairly hectic few days of mechanical work for me as I tried to cut the old system off, and then locate all the pieces needed to make a new exhaust system.

The problem is, as a long bed and four-door model, this truck's body style is fairly rare, and there are several different after-market exhaust system configurations, some of which don't have the same parts. The Nissan place in Bangor was no help. They didn't have as much as a single gasket on hand. In the end I went to CarQuest in Bangor for the muffler, tailpipe and intermediate pipe, ordered online for the crossover pipe, went to NAPA in Belfast for one gasket, all they had, and Autozone in Belfast for gasket material with which to make my own second gasket.

I still need what looks to be (from online parts diagrams) a long-bed extender pipe, which no-one seems to supply. But I also noticed that the old muffler, not original but after-market, had used a second intermediate pipe for this purpose, so wonder if it isn't just the same thing, and that's why no-one has it. If I do this I need to cut the rear flange off the crossover pipe, but I think it will work. We'll find out when all the parts get here.

In any case, all the work came to a temporary end after I managed to get a hot shard of steel embedded in my right eyeball. I needed to grind off the rusted bolts on the old muffler with the angle grinder, but at one point forgot to lower my goggles. This is an easy mistake. Getting middle-aged as I am, I can't actually see that well for close work anymore with either my glasses and googles on, so I'm in the habit of pausing work and lifting them from time to time, to be able to actually see what I'm doing. Sometimes I forget to lower them again. In this case I was rewarded with a very nasty injury to my eye.

This was a particularly painful splinter, as I couldn't get it out for several hours. It was tiny, but had penetrated the cornea and was stuck hard. Aimee, with her usual good timing, had left for the day to do fieldwork with her friend Pam, and so I had no-one to help me. In the end, after a couple hours of sporadic attempts to clear it, interspersed with attempts to continue work, it came out after a lucky swipe with the edge of a towel soaked in hot water, but the eye was still very sore.

It didn't help that the second job I wanted to do, with the muffler all off, was to spray phosphoric acid on the rust and bare metal, where I'd been using the wire wheel on the hand grinder to remove the big flakes. The breeze was light but variable and the acid mist kept drifting my way, coming through the holes in the side of my goggles. In the end, after washing off several times, I persevered and got the whole frame properly etched and ready for POR 15 paint, but I probably added slight acid burns to hot steel shards on my list of eyeball injuries.

You really need a full protective suit for these kinds of jobs. And a lift.

After a particularly painful evening in which I resorted to lying on the couch with my eyes closed listening to a radio play -- Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood on BBC Wales -- rather than watch TV, I went to bed with some Ibuprofen, and awoke to be much better although still not a hundred percent. Today is graduation, so I think I'll take it easy. But it's also a good day for transplanting starts, so we'll see.

This is a lot of effort to go to for this truck. I'm starting to think I made a mistake. The price given for this truck in the Kelly Blue Book, assuming good order, 144,000 miles, and no major defects is $6,800, for a private sale. I've invested around $6,700 already, and still don't know if the timing belt was properly replaced at 120,000 miles.

Still, with a bit more work I'll have it where I need it to be, assuming my eyesight holds up. If nothing else shows up to confound my plans, we'll not be too far over the target price. Certainly we'll be under the dealer price for the same truck, and I'll have the security of having confidence in the work, having done it all myself.

Sheep and vehicles

 Because that's all I've been doing lately, apart from work.

Uma is the oldest lamb, and a big strong girl. She'd win prizes if she was a purebred Romney or Corriedale. As it is, she's a likely keeper. We like them big and strong around here. None of your girly girls.

 

The sheep get outdoor hay, but the last batch we bought was not so great, so they waste a lot of stemmy stuff. We plan to make a lot of compost this year. Normally a pile this big would be a half-day job for the little Kubota tractor, but I have a secret plan: Our buddy Tim has to come by with his John Deere to put in the septic extension that was a condition of our plumbing permit, so we'll pay him a little extra to scrape up all the waste hay and make some nice compost piles.

 

Quinnie's two black lambs are also growing like weeds. The black ones don't show the dirt as much I say, just like cars and trucks.

Requiem for the old Nissan. Poor old truck. But the engine was still going strong. The wrecker driver was surprised to find that it would start. 

That old flatbed served us well, but only extended the truck's life for four more years after the bed rusted out. The new one has rust in all the same places, but not nearly as bad, and now I've discovered Fluid Film, it doesn't worry me.

 

Here is the new truck after a work-over yesterday and the day before. I cut off the rusted bumper and ordered a new one, as well as a tailgate latch, removed and de-rusted the trailer hitch and re-fitted it with new galvanized bolts, removed the rear wheels and checked the brake pads and drums, fixed a muffler leak, fitted a battery hold-down, did an oil change, drilled out some broken bolts in the sump cover and fitted new, self-tapping ones. Now all it needs to pass inspection are tires and the new bumper. Pretty good truck for $5,000, I'd say, and certainly a useful one, being a four-door extended cab as well as having a cap, and a solid, heavy duty hitch for towing a trailer.

And here's Aimee's "new" 2009 Matrix, which doesn't need any work and can't have any as it's still under warranty. I don't want to void the only warranty I've ever had! But once we get to 3,000 miles or three months, whichever comes first, it's getting new brake pads all around.

If I know Aimee she'll burn through 3,000 miles in way less than three months.

Shade tree update: Too much stuff going on!

I haven''t been able to post much in the last month or so because, well, dear readers, there's just been so many things happening, there hasn't been time for me to tell you about them.

Much of the business stemmed from the fact that my sister managed to sell our mother's retirement bungalow in the Glamorgan valleys for a good price, after two years languishing on a low UK house market. (Well done, sis!) That meant that I received a modest inheritance. I'd planned to pay off the farm with it, but the recent low interest rates made that unnecessary. We refinanced last year with PenFed (one benefit of being a veteran), now have a very cheap mortgage, and don't owe very much compared to the value of our property.

Which all meant, once I'd paid off some credit cards and put much of the rest in retirement, I had a lot of vehicle work to get done.

There has been an awful lot of vehicle maintenance put on hold for want of time and money these last few years, and indeed, for want of vehicles that had any useful life left in them worth the investment. It was well past time to put this situation to rights.

This is a long story, and has been a major theme of this blog over the years. Aimee and I never have compatible work schedules, and there isn't any kind of public transportation or car pool facility available to us, so we both need our own vehicles to get to work. Aimee gets a reliable car, which in recent years was our lucky Camry. For many years now I've managed to get by using a series of end-of-life junkers, first a succession of Saabs, then the Mazda, and eventually the old Ford Escort wagon.

There's also a need for four-wheel drive vehicles in winter, and for vehicles to do farm work. Our venerable 1971 Land Rover is my winter truck, does a lot of the farm work around here, and will last the rest of my life if I take care of it. But Aimee also needs a winter vehicle, which for as long as we can both remember has been her old Nissan Frontier pick-em up truck. She also needs a vehicle for her summer field work in marine biology.

These are well-documented vehicles. The Nissan Mazda, Camry and Escort are all mentioned in numerous posts on these blog pages. The Land Rover has both blog pages and even a FaceBook page, showing the original restoration work. The most relevant to today's post, however is this one here, where I explain why the Ford needs to go to that great junkyard in the sky.

In all this long saga of beat-up old jalopies, there's one theme: How to get the maximum useful life out of a vehicle with the minimum payment. That's mostly my job, for which I have a significant array of proper tools, a small shop, and big dooryard with the appropriate shade trees for a traditional "shade tree" mechanic.

We've done quite well. The Mazda gave us over 60,000 miles for about $2,000 total, the Ford has managed about the same. The Camry has given us 50,000 for around $5,000 total, but is still going strong and has lots of useful life left in it. The Nissan, which was new when Aimee got it in 1999 while a graduate student at UMass Dartmouth, ran on and on, and gave us 212,000 miles in the end, until I foolishly burned up the transmission.

The plan was, once mother's house had sold, for Aimee to get a new car, as well as a replacement transmission in the Nissan, while I would take the Camry. The first part of this was achieved the first week in April, when we secured a "new" 2009 Toyota Matrix for Aimee. This is likely to be a reliable and cost-effective vehicle for her, and because we got it from a dealer, it even comes with a three-month warranty, the first car or truck I've ever owned that had such a thing. The mileage is especially good, at what seems around 35-40 mpg. We looked at a Prius, but were put off by the low ground clearance, as well as the high cost. The Prius mileage was only touted at 45 mpg, so the Matrix was a better deal. It also has side air bags, stability control, and ABS, all needed because Aimee isn't the world's best driver in the snow.

My experience with Toyotas, having now owned three, is that they have superior rust protection and are easier to work on because of sensible layout

Once the Matrix was in hand, I started driving the Camry. We traded the Ford Escort for a couple days of sheep-sitting from a young person with a little sheep experience. They needed a car, and the Ford can probably serve, if it passes state inspection. If not, the price of scrap is high enough these days that they can sell it and use the money for a different car. They will pick it up tomorrow.

All the cars taken care of or in hand, I then turned my attention to trucks and particularly the Nissan's transmission. With some reluctance I stripped away the old wooden flatbed decking, the result of previous efforts to keep this truck going. My intent was to clean up the frame and replace the decking at the same time as I did the transmission.

But once the decking was stripped away and I got a good look at the frame I realized there would be no new transmission for the Nissan. The frame work I'd done four and five years ago, in 2009 and 2011, had managed to last alright, but there was new rust in different places, while the cab was also rusted out at the rockers. I realized that a new transmission was not going to be such a good investment. I sold the truck for scrap, then looked for a replacement.

Both Aimee and I were a little sad the day the wrecker came. We've had this truck for a long time, and gotten a lot of useful service out of it, but all good trucks come to an end (unless they are Land Rovers).

The knowledge that the frame was gone should have made me feel better about burning up the transmission, but didn't. I hate to waste money, especially with stupid mistakes like that.

But still, I had to bite the bullet and get a new truck, so I started reading the classified and driving around to look at what was on the market.

In the end I got us another four-wheel drive Frontier, just slightly newer, a 2002. I picked it up at a wholesale lot in Bangor for five grand, plus taxes. It needs work, and I have it on jack stands in the dooryard right now, while I go through it, but it came with a cap, a tow hitch, and an extended cab, so it seats five. It has 144,000 miles already, so we know we won't get that many more miles out of it, but it only needs to do a few thousand miles a year. Most of Aimee's miles will go on the Matrix. The new truck's rear frame is rusty, and the bumper rusted out, but it's still better than the old one was when I worked on the frame all those years ago, so If I catch it now with rust converter and the wire wheel on the grinder, spray the heck out of it with undercoat, and use Fluid Film every winter, it should last for at least five years.

Fluid Film is a godsend. I should buy stock. Until I discovered this stuff, all my cars rusted out no matter what I did. It's the only thing that makes sense out of driving in a New England winter, with all the road salt used around here. Even the Land Rover would corrode if it wasn't for Fluid Film.

Plus, it's made from sheep's lanolin. What could be better?

If I get time later today, I'll take some pictures of the new vehicles to add to this post. But yes, I've had my work cut out for me recently. All this and lambing season too. (We now have six, but more are coming.)

Mother would be happy enough, though, with what I've managed to do with all her hard work and savings. In particular, as many Great Farm Diary readers know, Aimee's now expecting. I should think my mum would want her first and only grandchild to be driven in safe vehicles. I should think she'd also be glad to know how much she's helped our family financially. She was a very practical woman when it came to houses and money.

I put a lot of this in my eulogy for her, but it took a while to come true.

Waiting...

We keep looking at our two sheep-mountains, ewes Quinn and Quetzal, as they waddle around, wondering when they'll pop. They are so huge! But nothing ever seems to happen. Night checks are tiring, and so I try to fit in a nap during the day, but that's impossible on Mondays and Wednesdays when I have a late class. Hopefully they and the other three smaller pregnant ewes decide to give birth soon. I need more rest!

In other news, Aimee now has the long-planned "new" car, a Toyota Matrix with just under 60,000 miles, in very good shape. This, the culmination of about three weeks of car shopping that began in earnest during our spring break. That means I'm driving the Camry now, while the Ford, whose rust has become almost terminal, is up for sale.

Accordingly a couple weeks ago I listed it on Maine Craigslist. I wanted at least $600, and so turned down a couple of offers of $500. Then I clumsily missed a gear one day while making a left turn and caught the unmistakable whiff of clutch burning. At 167,000 miles without ever having had a clutch job, this car is well overdue. And no-one in their right mind would put a clutch in a car whose body was so rusty.

At about the same time a young person with some sheep farming experience called about the ad, and so one thing led to another. The Ford had to be discounted, on the grounds that I couldn't sell anyone a "lemon" without full disclosure and a price reduction, while we needed farm help with watching pregnant ewes and lambs on Mondays. In a series of email exchanges, we agreed to discount the price of the Ford to a couple of day's of sheep watching, throwing in a promise of mechanical help with the sticker.

Since the car can probably pass the Maine State inspection after a couple of small jobs are done, and if not, has about $150 scrap value, this seemed like a fair deal.

Since then a neighbor dog appeared and sniffed around the perimeter fence before being chased off, so we are even more concerned to have the coverage.

Three more full work weeks and a few days of grading are all that is left before our three-month summer vacation. Already the list of projects is growing. I plan to finish my ongoing trailer project (of which pictures will come later), switch out the failed transmission in the Nissan truck, complete the insulation project on the main house, hang T-111 siding over the new insulation and the extension and finish it with UV-proof wood finish, build a deck, grow our usual massive vegetable garden, and on and on.

This weekend so far has been pleasant, and I've made a start with the trailer. But it's inevitable that we're in wait mode for so many such projects, as well as for the ewes to give birth.

What was it that Dr. Seuss said about the "waiting place?"

“For people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow.”

Unfortunately, with sheep and summer breaks, waiting is inevitable.

Done with interesting

Life has been interesting -- as in the Chinese curse -- since the last time I posted. About a week ago I was getting some drywall up in the new extension and girding my loins for the last anemometer tower lower of my two year campaign.

That much was routine -- I raise and lower these towers each summer, crunching the data in the fall and winter. What was not routine was that this was the weather, which has seen us with on-and-off torrential rain for much of July. We seem to get a few days calm weather then a serious period of rain, often several inches, much of which is subtropical. It's not the weirdest weather, but it is unusual. July is usually hot and humid in Maine, with thunderstorms every so often, but not that much precipitation. We managed to get the tower down safely enough, but not without getting wet a few times, as well as stuck in the mud of the farmer's field where the tower had been sitting. I was pretty tired by the end of last week's work on anemometer towers. The experience was just a bit too interesting. In fact, it took me a few days to recover from how interesting it all was.

Then there was, and is, the slight problem of the Nissan pick-em-up truck transmission leak. This leak sprung while on a trip to get a new lawnmower.

(I finally broke down and decided to get one. I hadn't mown the lawn in several weeks, because the old ones had both quit. This sounds terribly untidy, but it wasn't actually that bad around here because the sheep do most of our mowing for us. But I'd had enough of our shaggy front lawn, as well as the many thistles that had sprouted. It would be important to get these before they matured and the thistle seed flew.)

So, off to Newport I went, except to realize along the way that I was having slight transmission trouble -- the truck having a hard time pulling off from junctions and revving high in first gear. Recognizing the symptoms, I put in a quart of transmission fluid, but in an act of pure denial like any alcoholic or climate denier, I managed to convince myself that the pool of oil under the truck when I parked up at WalMart to look at lawnmowers couldn't possibly be from my truck.

I guess I wasn't interested.

That was my biggest mistake. My second biggest mistake was not having my cell phone.

Accordingly, when the transmission finally quit completely, having lost all it's oil, I not only had a broken-down truck on a blind bend on the side of a road in the middle of Nowhere, Maine (or at least in the middle of Dixmont, which is much the same thing), but I also had a brand new lawn mower still in the box, and no way to call home. Interesting problem.

People are generally honest in this part of the world. The climate and lifestyle require dependence on your friends and neighbors, so Mainers, for the most part, are inclined to be decent to said friends and neighbors. We're also less impacted by youth culture and urban fashion than the rest of the world, both of which tend to tilt society towards criminality. If I'd broken down in Sheffield, or even on a farm road outside Sheffield, that lawnmower box would have been gone in a trice.  In Maine it was probably safe.

Even so, I managed to fit the mower box in the truck cab, at some cost to my back. Then I hoofed it about a mile or so to the Dixmont Corner store, where I bought several bottles of transmission fluid and called Aimee. She came to get me, we poured the oil in the truck, made it back to the Dixmont store, and then went home and called AAA, who called a tow truck driver, who towed the truck home.

All's well that ends well, except I need to find the leak if I can and pronto, since our new roof for the extension will be ready to pick up tomorrow and I need the truck for that. Fixing the truck will be today's job. It will probably be interesting.

The next interesting thing that happened was a search. Although my team, being composed of college students, is stood down for the summer, I remain part of the Maine SAR system, and when a second system-wide call-out for a missing elderly woman was initiated Sunday, our resources were getting thin, so team or no, I went to the call out. Technically I wasn't required to, but I felt I should.

Arriving at the command post, a Maine Warden's Service truck in the driveway of the summer cabin where the victim had been staying, I found some very tired Wardens, many of whom had been up all night. I was assigned to go with one, Warden Tripp from Deer Isle, and drive the roads that marked the southern boundary of the search area. As we were just getting done with one of the roads, we received a cell-phone call from the CP asking us to go collect the victim, who had been found by a Warden searching the lake shore by boat.

It was as we were driving back and I was chatting with the victim and gently ascertaining how affected she was from staying out all night that I discovered that she was a famous academic in my field, author or co-author of several books I use in class. Small world! I'm not going to mention her name since I'm sure she prefers her privacy, but this was quite the coincidence and everyone on scene commented on it.

Even so, the weekends exceitement was all too interesting, and I was glad to get the Land Rover home early Sunday afternoon, and get back to routine stuff like taking the trash and recycling to the transfer station, and mowing the lawn with the new mower.

None of that was very interesting.

Thankfully.

A very stupid place to put an alternator

We've been busy around here. Earlier in the week we'd taken delivery of two hundred bales of Amish hay, as well as the last and final load of pig feed. The firewood was in and drying nicely. I'd gotten the extension project as far as I could without spending money we don't yet have on lumber.

But all good things come to an end. I got done with back-filling the foundation hole yesterday, had some lunch, took a short nap, and then, finally, had no remaining distractions or excuses not to start a job I'd most definitely not been looking forward to -- switching out the alternator on the old Nissan pick-em-up truck.

This truck is superannuated by now, having gone past it's 220,000 mile point. We long ago switched out the old rusted-out truck bed for a wooden flatbed -- which project, although I did it from necessity, to pass inspection, gave the truck a whole new lease of life and more usability, since the old 6-foot metal bed was not very good at carrying hay or plywood, two items we have frequently to carry around here.

I'm very happy with the "new" wooden bed, now three years or more old.

Since replacing the bed, we've used the truck for no more than two or three thousand miles a year, pretty much all of it load-carrying, except for a few miles in the deep snowdrifts each winter. I expect to kep it running as long as I possibly can, and have maintained the frame, suspension, and brakes accordingly, but one day a major engine problem will surface and that will be all she wrote. I could rebuild that engine, or even put a secondhand one in, but I'm not going to. Too much trouble. That will therefore be the point at which we scrap this old truck.

The plan is, one day, when this truck finally dies, to simply get a large trailer that the Land Rover can pull, and not need a pick-up truck at all. I fully expect to keep the Land Rover running until I die.

In the meantime, keeping the old truck running well is a fine art. In particular there's a small oil leak from somewhere or other, and a tiny coolant leak near number four spark plug, that shorts out the plug every three or four thousand miles, so you get a misfire, and then the plug has to be pulled and cleaned or replaced. One oxygen sensor is out on each side of the exhaust system. Both are essentially unreachable without some special tool. There's also a tiny brake fluid leak inside one of the wheel cylinders. I'm not sure which one, but whatever one it is, it's not sufficient to wet the drums or discs and reduce the braking power, so we just top off the fluid every two months or so. The wooden tailgate on the home-made bed is tricky and requires a secret special "thump" in just the right spot to get it to work well. And the whole under body gets a good thick coating of Fluid Film underseal every winter.

It was a bit of a setback, then, to have the alternator on this truck go out, just when we most needed the vehicle to run.

When the alternator light came on, I wasn't exactly sure what was happening, since the air bag and automatic transmission temperature lights also came on. I pulled the codes just to see if that told me anything, but the computer didn't say anything different about anything, except the stupid old oxygen sensors, so I bit the bullet and ordered a secondhand alternator from an online junkyard sales place. It cost only $95, and came quickly enough in three or so days, but I was still crunching to get the concrete work done with the rented cement mixer, and after that trying to finish out the joist structure, so I just set the new unit aside, for nearly a week, and made do as best I could. It slowly got buried under building materials in my workshop

In the meantime, I had to keep fetching such materials on almost a daily basis, so we either used the Land Rover to get things, if they would fit in a Land Rover, or we charged up the truck battery and hoped for the best.

I guess, also, I just wasn't looking forward to trading my clean light, breezy, airy workspace on top of the floor decking for the underside of a nasty greasy truck.

Finally, I knew I was getting serious when I pulled the Chilton's manual from the pile of automotive manuals we have in my workshop. That was Friday night. Saturday afternoon, I started the job.

I needed the manual because this particular alternator is not exactly visible from the top of the engine. I knew more or less where it was, but I didn't know how to get at it.

Usually alternators are easy to do. The Land Rover's alternator would probably take me less than four minutes to switch out. But the Nissan Frontier makes you jack up the vehicle, put it on jackstands, take off the sump plate, and then lay on your back with your arms at full stretch working on connections and bolts you can't see.

The whole underside was greasy due to the oil leak. My hands were stiff from building work, and kept getting cramps, while me poor old fingers had lost a lot of their mechanic's sensitivity as a result of working with rough boards and concrete.

To top it all, since I've been getting older my glasses have to be off for me to see close work, while I can't see that well with goggles on, and so grit kept falling in my eyes.

It wouldn't have mattered had I been made blind. You could only actually see the heads of a couple of the bolts, and none of the three wires. I needed to use a mirror to figure out how to dishook the final connection.

But eventually, after much ado and quite a bit of cursing, we got the alternator switched out. I tried a quick test start before putting the sump plate back on, and got a satisfying 14.25 volts at the battery. It took only two hours.

Considering that I'd just spent three weeks essentially in a hole in the ground sweating daily, I have to say I took it quite personally that my alternator went out at this particular time. And that it was such a nasty, hard job to replace it. I know it's character-forming to have to face adversity, and I know that long ago I made a lifestyle choice to be self-reliant and less dependent on the rest of society, but this particular job wore my patience, and my body, out pretty good.

Still, I expect it saved us at least $300.

After celebrating with a run to town for a milk shake, and to have the old alternator tested at the chain store auto parts place, just to make sure it was completely dead (it was -- diodes, field coil, and rotor were each burned out), I spent much of the rest of the day sleeping, and went to bed at 8.45 pm.

I plan to take it a little easier today.

Hill farmers and green growing things

We have five days, including today, left of our Spring Break "staycation."

At least for me it's been a staycation. Aimee went to a marine science conference in Savannah, GA, where she presented a poster with a write-up of her rockweed study so far. She has photos posted on her Facebook page. She had a nice time, and was in good spirits when she came back, despite the fact that we still have snow on the ground here in Maine, while Savannah is of course several weeks into the spring growing season already. I think we'll make it to Finals Week and Graduation, although it's going to be insanely busy.

I was a little jealous of the flowers she saw, and the warm weather, but of course I get to go to conferences too, so there's not much point being jealous. I used to live in Georgia, and didn't like it much, so I was happy enough to stay home and watch for lambs.

We rarely go anywhere together (except to see Aimee's family in VA once a year), since someone always has to stay home to look after the animals.

So, I was "it" this time, and stayed home and looked after the animals, and vehicles, and house, and even did some college work, a large important report that will need to be polished up some today.

The Ford passed its safety inspection yesterday, rust and all, sailed through in fact, as did the Nissan pick-em up truck. Another year of legal driving for both. I'm not sure if I'll get another year out of the Ford after this one -- those Maine rust mites will eventually spread to a major undercarriage mounting point and that will be all she wrote. The Nissan has some rust on the body, but nothing terminal, while the frame and undercarriage are still solid. I'll wash the salt off it as well as I can, drive it only sparingly this summer, spray it with Fluid Film underseal in the fall, and she should be good for another sticker next year.

The Ford will have to be replaced with another daily driver when it rusts out. Something that gets good gas mileage, is what we'll need. I'd like to get an electric car or a hybrid, but we probably couldn't afford one as they remain still too expensive (except possibly a secondhand Prius or Insight -- we'll see). More than likely, we'll get another newer car for Aimee and I'll take her Camry into its second hundred thousand miles.

The Nissan is not scheduled to be replaced, except by a large agricultural trailer that the Land Rover can pull, to carry hay and transport heavy equipment and building supplies. I imagine I can get a few more years out of the truck before I actually need the trailer, but if I see a nice one going cheap enough, I may get it early just to make my haying a little easier.

Spring is coming more slowly this year in Maine than in past years. We're scheduled for another snowstorm today, albeit just a dusting. Our lambs are staying firmly inside their mothers, and I don't blame them. The gestation period for a sheep is five calendar months, give or take a couple days either side. I checked the sheep book to see if we had ever had an early lamb, and there was one year where twins were born at something like 142 days, but never any earlier. The online lambing calendars (yes, even shepherds have online calculators these days) all point to March 29th as the due date for the ewes that were bred first.

There are some pretty horrific stories in today's paper about hill farmers in Britain losing thousands of lambs to the cold weather they're having. An old service buddy, Geoff A., is a freelance press photographer in North Wales and he has some pictures of snowbanks on his Facebook page that are more like Maine than Wales.

The farmers that are losing lambs are the ones that don't lamb indoors and don't lamb in the in-bye pastures, usually because they don't have lambing sheds or enough in-bye. These are the hill farmers that still lamb on the fell, and still use the traditional and hefted breeds that can handle that kind of treatment.

Here in the hill farms of Maine there's no such thing as a hefted flock, the weather sucks for lambing early, and all we have is in-bye and woodlot, no fells, so we lamb indoors. The Womerlippis are extremely careful about this, with night checks and constant vigilance this time of year. The minute a sheep shows signs, she's pulled into a pen by herself and kept there until she lambs, or proves to be a false alarm. So far we've had one false alarm, and as a result poor Molly spent a night in isolation with nothing to show for it. 

The hill farmers in the UK would ordinarily be able to handle a spring snowstorm, but they've also recently had an outbreak of Schmallenberg virus over there, a midge-borne illness that causes abortions and birth defects in the first few years, until flocks become immune. This bad weather comes as a second major blow, and unless the government does something, many hill farmers will have to sell out and go on the dole. Ordinarily a UK government could be relied upon to help farmers out in any situation like this with some kind of compensation or insurance scheme, but this current government of the "feral elite" is a nightmare. Despite most of them living in rural Oxfordshire, at least on weekends, they make the stupidest decisions about rural affairs.

The RAF is dropping feed from helicopters to try to save some lambs, but the government just made the decision to privatize my beloved SARForce in 2016, a stupid, stupid decision, considering that the current Sea King squadrons are the pride of the country, especially since Prince William joined SARForce. The RAF Mountain Rescue community is bemoaning the decision today, all over Facebook and the blogosphere.

Happy seventieth anniversary, RAF SAR! 

Seventy and out. Brought to you by your friendly coalition government. I've half a mind to write to my MP, but since the MP for Sheffield Hallam, my home ward, is bloody Nick Clegg, the Deputy PM, I don't think I'd get very far.

I'd like to see them get Bristow, the US firm that won the contract, to drop feed to sheep in winter.

Here in Maine we still have snow, but it's melting rapidly and should be gone by the end of next week.

The Womerlippis do have some green growing things despite the cold, albeit under glass, with heaters and heat lamps.

Here's our spring plant start set-up in my den, where there's a south-facing window.

 

The picture is blurry, I know, but you get the idea. We invested in new lamps this year, not cheap at $14 apiece, plus between $10 and $15 per bulb. We used to get by with small bulb-holders, not strip lights, but the plants would often be spindly as a result, and hard to transplant later. I had to go to four different hardware storees to find all eight bulbs (two per unit), since these are not common items. I expect we'll get a visit from the Maine DEA, since this is the kind of operation the local nasties use to grow pot. We're of course only growing tomato starts, plus a few brassicas and squash. We don't plan any new nefarious business enterprises, just a slight improvement to our veggie operation.

Once the plants get going, they can go out to the glass greenhouse, which has been refurbished with new plastic sheeting inside, as well as some floating row cover, to trap the air and cut the light intensity. One thing that happens this time of year in Maine, with all our snow and sun, is that there's often actually too much light for plants that have been begun inside, and when the full March sun is at the zenith, an unprotected glass greenhouse will actually get too hot for most plants.

 

I think I may have spent all of $80 building this greenhouse years ago (pictures here, here, and here). It was cheap because I used all the leftover storm window glass we had, after putting all new double-glazed windows in the house. After a while though, the storm windows cracked and had to be replaced, and lots of air leaks opened up as the cheap wooden frame shifted around. The plastic sheeting solved the air leak problem, and this year it seems to be working well. 

I should think that one day we'll want to demolish this old thing and buy a nice new metal framed greenhouse, but for right now this is doing just fine.

The tomatoes and squash will stay in here until they're quite large, then get planted out and in the new hoophouse, built only last year. We'll grow early and late toms in the hoophouse, and the main crop out in the garden.

The brassicas can be put out in the hoophouse anytime now. I have a soil thermometer out there and the soil temps about 40 degrees F in the early morning, even after a hard frost.

And so begins another year's round of modern small-scale agriculture on the Great Farm of Jackson, Maine. 

1806-2013, not out.

Wassail and Amen to that.

Keep watching. Lambs will come soon.

Rusty old Ford

That old Ford car of mine will "never get to heaven," as our old boy scout song went.

I'll be lucky if it will get me to work for another winter.

I shouldn't complain. This car had 124,000 miles on it when we bought it for only $1,200. It now has nearly 160,000.

I was searching the Great Farm Diary trying to find out when we actually bought it. I think it was in the spring of 2009, after our old Mazda finally and very similarly rusted away and had to be junked.

So, if I've driven it for four years for only $1,200, plus a pair of rear strut mounts and some paint, underseal, plugs and plug wires. That's only a little more than $300 a year.

Other people pay as much per month.

Even so, I do hate that I can't keep it decent. The salt we spread on our roads in winter in this part of the world just eats cars away, no matter how careful you are with washing and underseal.

In the Ford's case, the damage had been done before I ever set hands on it. The rust had already reached the flakey stage in quite few places. I tried to slow the rot with red oxide paint, body filler, and underseal, but the chassis is now full of holes where previously it was just flakey.

You can slow the inevitable, but you can't stop it.

These cars don't have a proper frame that could be welded like the Land Rover or the Nissan, both of which have well-patched frames by now. All there is, is a pressed steel sheet that makes up the underside of the car. This is called monocoque or unibody construction, and it's a death knell for cars in New England. The steel panel that makes up both the floor of the car and the chassis is too thin, and now too rotten, to weld, so there's very little that can be done.

In fact, I tend to think that at this point if I were to pay too much attention to the underside of this car with the wire wheel on the angle grinder, the normal preparation for any welding attempt, I'd simply find myself abrading off much of the chassis along with the rust. It would need dozens of small fiddly patches for which no repair panels are available. It would take days, and even then the rust would just continue to eat away at every spot that hadn't been repaired.

The New England rust mites don't just affect the chassis of your car or truck. Suspension parts and brake parts also suffer. These can't be ignored. As long as you check it every once in a while, a chassis can be left to its own devices, until it becomes actually dangerous, but brakes and struts have to be repaired.

I heartily dislike working on cars when it's cold outside. Metal tools are too cold to touch and your fingers lose their feeling. So when the brake lines sprung a leak, a few weeks ago, in the coldest part of winter, I pulled the car in the shop for a diagnosis, but as soon as I saw how rotten the pipes were, I just backed the car out of the shop and right into a parking place and left it for several weeks, trying to forget about it, allowing it to get covered in snow until the weather decided to cooperate.

I knew I'd have to replace all the rear brake lines, which would take at least a half a day. If I was going to spend that long underneath a car in the middle of winter, I at least wanted the outside temperature to be above freezing.

Yesterday, off work for Spring Break, and with the daytime temperatures now in the upper 30s and low 40s, there was no excuse. I cleared the tractor and some other gubbins out of the shop, pulled the Ford in, and took a set of tin snips to the brake lines to see how much needed to be cut away.

This is the result:

 

Each of these pieces is a stretch of brake line that was almost completely rusted through. Although there was only one actual leak, there would have been others later. All the corner bends were particularly rotten. 

The pipe bending process at the factory is the cause. It affects the paint on the raw pipe, causing it to weaken wherever there's a tight bend. The rust does the rest.

Both rear brake lines would have to be replaced as far forward as the back seats. I set to.

 

Life wasn't made much easier by the fact that the car was dripping water as well as brake fluid. At one point a drop of cold water hit my trouble light and exploded the bulb, sending glass flying around underneath the car. 

Yuck!

 

I used a double flaring tool to prepare new pieces of line, and to flare the cut-off ends of the old line to accept the necessary brake line nuts and unions.

 

Here's the rear driver side union, joining the good section of the old brake line to the brand new section.

Aimee is away for a few days at one of her science conferences, so I was missing my brake bleeding partner. This is a two-person job, and she's fully trained up by now. I tried the one-person improvised method, whereby you run the bleed line into an air-lock made of a couple inches of brake fluid in a can, but as usual the results remained a bit spongy. 

Still, we now have brakes, so the car can be driven, and they can be bled to perfection when Aimee returns. Indeed, in older cars where master cylinder seals are a little weak, sometimes the brakes bleed themselves after a little time driving. 

The total cost of the repair was about $98, most of which went to pay for the flaring and cutting tools, which I didn't have already, and some extra line, nuts, unions, and brake fluid. I have enough to do several more such jobs in the future.

Although I'm tired and a little sore from scrauming* around on the floor all day yesterday, I was pleased with my day's work, since I can now begin to wear out this old Ford again, instead of our more expensive four-wheel drive vehicles which I had been using to get around. 

I don't worry about wearing a thousand dollar Ford out too much. It's hardly an irreplaceable item. I can find another one in a few days if I need to, on Craig's List or in Uncle Henry's. It would take weeks, and big bucks, to find another Land Rover, or an affordable four-wheel drive pick up truck in good nick.

Not only does this save money, it conserves the remaining working life of the pick-em up truck and the Land Rover. 

Now I have to run this old Ford down to Brooks town and get a State Inspection, since the old one expires this month. 

Next week I'll repeat the process, more or less, fixing the emergency brake on the Nissan and then getting a State Inspection for that vehicle too.

Luckily, there's no inspection item for rusty chassis panels. As long as nothing vital is rusted away, no strut mounts or other main mounting points, and as long as there are no jagged edges of metal visible, you can get the sticker.

In other news, we had another big snowstorm Tuesday and Wednesday. About a foot of fine powder fell, blanketing the yard and forcing the freshly sheared sheep back under their heat lamp. 

I took the dogs for a walk, but Flamey balled up with snow, poor pup!

 

Ernie, for his part, was sleek and snow free.

I guess Australian Shepherd fur is designed for barbies on Bondi Beach, not for New England spring snowstorms!

Maybe Ernie is actually a New English Shepherd, not just an English Shepherd.

*"Scrauming" is a Sheffield and West Yorkshire dialect word for crawling around. Just one of a whole bunch of words I grew up with that are not known to Google Blogger spell-checker. See this old dialect book here.