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.

Virago vanity

Those regular readers who tune in for our environmental lifestyle are going to be disappointed. This is about a nasty greasy mechanical fix-job.

So I worked on my Virago the last four days. It was fun, and the only reason I stopped is because I have to go to Augusta today for business and I'm waiting for parts.

(By the way, the bike is for sale and you can find out about buying it by emailing mickatum@aol.com).

First I ran through the regular small engine diagnosis. First removing the dead battery and putting it on a charge to see how dead it really was, I hooked up a car battery that I salvaged from the demise of Aimee's Mazda earlier in the year. Then we put gas in and tried for a start. No luck. Gas tank leaking from small rust holes. Try not to worry about it while testing other systems. Pulled the plugs, Good fire. Put them back in, still no start. Pull them again, squirt a little gas in each cylinder, replace plugs. The bike fired but wouldn't start.

Carbs or compression, then. Since it was stood for five years, I expected to have to pull the carbs. The motor turned over well enough and made all the right wheezy noises, although it was hard to tell because the starter was grinding loudly and kept kicking out. But there was no major engine damage to hear, a thrown rod or valve or anything like that.

First thing next morning, set the valve lash and check compression (by hand -- my compression tester is over at our other house sitting in the back of my old VW bus), then pull the carbs. Easier said than done. It took me four hours of trail and error, lacking a manual, to figure out how to get them off the cylinders and away from the engine and frame. That night I bought the manual off ebay.

Stripped the carbs. Yech. All tarnish and resin. The front vacuum piston diaphragm is torn in two places. Goop up the holes with glue, let glue dry. (Yes, this does work, if you are careful and use good glue -- you can also use a patch. Condoms make the best patches. No kidding!) Use same glue on gas tank.

While waiting for glue to dry, remove starter for the first time. Bench test. Seems fine, actually. the noise is in the engine case, where some kind of weird starter clutch resides. Re-mantle starter for now, because I need it to test my carbs.

Clean and reassemble carbs without rebuilding too deep, just for starters. I don't beleive in fixing too much. If an engine was running well before it sat, it can usually be made to run well again without getting in too deep or risking the chance of breaking something expensive. Reattach carbs to bike. try for a start. Starts and runs on one cylinder only. But this is progress. Gas tank still leaks.

Remove carbs again. Attempt partial rebuild without a rebuild kit (too cheap to buy one -- lets see if I need it first). Goop more glue on gas tank leakage.

Find sticking needle valve and detached vacuum piston needle jet. Obvious. Duh. I missed the needle jet on the first go-around because I was distracted by the torn diaphragm find. Lots of jets and passages. Clean them out as best we can, replace needle jet. Re-attach carbs, try for a start.

Bike will start, but runs badly and cuts out at idle. See gas pouring from carb. Needle valve stuck open. Gas tank leaks from new place, from the petcock, now we have vaccum on the automatic shut-off valve. Fix that by massaging the petcock vacuum valve gasket with veggie oil. You'd leak too if you had to sit and dry up for all those years. Guess I'll have to pony up for that carb rebuild kit after all. Consult computer. $180 bucks OEM, $38 on ebay. Go figure. Order rebuild kit from ebay. Also order new battery. I figure now I can get this bike running, so it's worth the $58 investment.

Yes, the bike will run well enough when I get the carbs dismantled and remantled a fourth time, with the new needle valves in the rebuild kit. Now let's fix that starter.

Read up on Virago listserve threads on starter problems. Sounds complicated, but faint heart n'er won fair lady.

Remove starter a second time, dismantle on bench, JB Weld (epoxy glue) rig gear to main washer as detailed in http://www.drpiston.com/81_83_Starter_Paper.html

Thank you Dr. Piston. What would we do without the Internet? How did we live before?

And what would mechanics do without JB Weld?

While waiting for glue to dry, remove right engine cover. This is the first time since about 1979 that I've been this deep in a motorcycle engine. Lots of other engines, of course, but not motorcycles. But it's all coming back to me. Find weird starter clutch thing. Puzzle it out, with aid of Dr. Piston.

Use Dr. Piston's patent starter spring-cutting fix to reduce resistance on starter throw out gear. If the gear can throw itself out easier, and engage more positively, then it won't detach from the flywheel so quickly or make that grinding noise. Seems risky, but I can see it will work.

Carefully reassemble engine cover. Put in fresh oil. Try for a start, leaky needle valve not withstanding. Rear cylinder hydraulics. Too much gas in cylinder from float valve needle.

First hook up bike to car battery while car is running, jump-start style. The Mazda battery has been sitting in the shop for three months already, although I keep putting it on a trickle charger so as not to waste it, it still doesn't last long. If we get a stronger battery on the job, we might get an easier start. All the listserve threads emphasize that the Virago has a weak starter system and weak ignition and so needs an exceptionally good battery to make up for this.

Cylinder still hydraulics.

Pull the plug, turn engine over to remove surplus gas. Not so bright. Gas sprays in face. Glad I'm wearing my shop teacher glasses. Aimee will get a laugh out of this. Emergency run to sink to wash off gas, and now I stink like a refinery. Oh well. Builds character.

On return to bike (glutton for punishment), replace plug, try for a start, bike starts and runs well enough except for the failure to idle, which is to be expected with a leaky needle valve, and the starter noise is gone.

Dr. Piston, you rock. And I should know. I'm a doctor.

So it looks like I got a decent bike here for $200 plus $27 (manual) plus $38 (carb rebuild kit) plus $58 (battery) plus some glue and oil. A bike worth about $500-600 on the market, from what I can tell. Including five-six days work. Far less than minimum wage, but the practice at being a mechanic again, and the pure Zen is priceless.

Problem is, this bike is too big. I want a smaller, more efficient and easier to handle street bike. But by the time I get that new battery and rebuild kit in, the thing should run start and well enough.

Anyone want to buy a Yamaha Virago or trade a smaller bike?

I guess I'll have to get on Craig's list when I get those new parts in.

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.

Driving Miss Aimee

We spent yesterday in the truck, more or less. But I still managed to put my back and knees out again.

Let me explain.

There's a big road trip that happens each fall to get our ram back to his home farm. For several years now we've used a ram from a small farm like ours over in the western mountains of Maine. It's a two-hour drive there, two hours back.

But the occupant of our Bale House needed a new generator. We took the old, rather expensive one away several years ago after the former occupants tried their best to destroy it. I repaired it and got it running, and bought a cheaper more throw-away one for the Bale House. But that was stolen. So we weren't going to buy another. Whoever was using the Bale House would have to either buy their own or do without.

After struggling for several months to do without, the current occupant decided she wanted a genny, and I agreed to go pick one out and get it for her if she would pay. So before we could drive to the mountains with the ram, we needed to drive to Sam's Club in Bangor, Maine to get the genny. And we needed to do that anyway since I needed studded snow tires for the Ford and I like to get those from Sam's Club, where we have a business account.

I didn't want to buy a full set of four because the Ford has 135,000 miles on it. Who knows how long it will last? I still have some studded snow tires in the basement left over from the Mazda. You can get around pretty well with snow tires on your drive wheels. You don't need them on the other two wheels. But to do this, you have to bring in the wheels. If you bring in the car you have to get four, which would have been another $180.

So Friday evening I pulled the Ford into the garage, jacked it up with the floor jack, pulled the front wheels, put jack stands under the car, and threw the two wheels in the back of the truck.

Saturday morning we rose early and fed animals and climbed in the trucks and drove to Bangor. We dropped off the wheels at the tire shop, picked up the genny and a few other things, then went to the supermarket to drop Aimee off to get some groceries. Then I drove over to Home Despot to get a gas can for genny gas, some small engine oil, and a new light/fan unit for our own bathroom.

I then wanted coffee, so stopped by Starbucks. Finally, with about fifteen minutes to go before picking Aimee back up at the supermarket, I went to gas-up the truck and fill the new gas can for the new generator. As I switched from the truck to the gas can I absent-mindedly laid the gas cap on the ground. I forgot to replace the gas cap on the truck, and ran over it while driving away. So then we had to go the VIP auto parts to get a new gas cap for the truck. Which didn't fit to begin and thus required an ad-hoc alteration to the gas cap surround, which itself is ad-hoc since I rebuilt the truck bed. This crude alteration was achieved with an iron bar I happened to have left over from some random wind research job, while Aimee looked on in mild amusement.

So then we picked up the wheels and the two take-off tires, and drove home. Aimee unloaded the groceries while I fitted the Ford wheels back on, and then moved the car out of the garage to make way for the new genny.

My next job was to get the sheep crate put on the back of the truck. The sheep crate was covered in, and laying in, a snow drift. OK. Right. I pulled it out of the drift with the tractor. But not before I put my back out trying to lift the stupid thing.

(Regular readers will remember last weekend's whiplash incident.)

Then we he had to load the ram. He weighs about two hundred pounds and was not willing to help very much, but he didn't fight very much either. I probably overdid the ropes securing his crate to the truck, but you can never be too careful transporting livestock. Lifting a two-hundred pound struggling ram into a crate on the back of a truck didn't do much for my back, either.

Then we motored over to the Farmington, Maine region, Aimee listening to her favorite Saturday radio shows, me driving. It wasn't an unpleasant outing, and we dropped the ram off on time with little fuss. We did however, forget the meat. We "pay" for the services of this ram with a few pounds of lamb and pork from our stash in the freezer, which is substantial at this time of year and so the terms of this trade are good for us, but also good for the other farmers who prefer to sell live animals than slaughter them, and don't keep pigs at all. We made an arrangement o transfer the meat at a later date, convenient to both families, and went on our merry way, stopping for hot cocoa and donuts in Farmington.

We then drove back, getting home at around 4pm having spent all day from 7am to 4pm, more or less, in the truck. Aimee is not always the most patient person for big messy days like this, but she kept her cool, and we got the whole job done without incident: snow tires, genny, groceries, and ram-removal. I did, however, slip on the snow in the driveway carrying the firewood in for the wood-stove once we made it home.

It's not always that such a huge to-do list of big ticket jobs gets done without incident around here, and things could have been a heck of a lot worse. The ram might have escaped his crate in downtown Farmington, for instance. Giving father-in-law Dick another topic for his satirical wood carvings, no doubt. A study in black walnut of Mick chasing Nattick through the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington?

The possibilities are endless.

I do now have a sore back, and a sore knee. But I was pleased it all went off rather well.

Today we have a big mid-western storm barreling in, snow first, then rain, and lots of it. With a foot of snow on the ground it's going to flood around here, and then be difficult getting around. The tenant wants the genny pretty badly, but she'll have to come get it herself! I need to spend the morning doing farm chores I didn't get done yesterday, and I need to get them done before the storm hits, and then there's a Steeler's game that starts at 1pm, just as the storm begins.

I guess this generator is not going to get delivered today.

A man has to draw the line somewhere!