TAFE 35DI

Day 1:

At the local Massey Ferguson dealer I have just committed to buy a 1995 Tafe 35DI tractor with 340 hours on it, a very good loader and jury-rigged cab.

I looked at an ‘87 Kubota 4X4, but after an hour of playing with this one I decided I like it and that was that.  Never went back to the high-hours Kubota.

The dealer has a couple of little things to fix, but I expect to have it in the driveway, all cab lights aglow, by the middle of next week.

Two previous owners have traded up to new 4X4 Massey-Fergusons from this tractor.  Neither, apparently, had any trouble with parts or durability.  Mechanically it’s a clone of my 1960 Massey-Ferguson 35, only with marginally better hydraulics, power steering, Roll Over Protection System, lights and safety interlocks.  The unblemished Allied loader is likely worth several thousand in its own right.

I really needed a set of working lights for snow removal in early morning at the end of the driveway on the Hill.  If the commuter needs to get onto the road before daylight, some snow removal must be done in the dark.  It’s too risky without lights.

The downside is that I have bought an orphan, and have very little prospect of ever selling it, so I’d better like it.  Mind you, a significant part of the Canadian 2010 Massey Ferguson line is made up of repainted TAFEs.

Day 2:

It went up against a high-hours, Kubota 4WD L2580 for 150% of the price.  What sold me?  I hated the Kubota’s weathered plastic dash.  The Tafe seemed very solidly and simply built.  The cab helped as well, as the day was cold.  Everything was right where I expected it, as the tractor is a homage to the Massey Ferguson 35.  What’s more, it started cold the way I expected and ran like an engine which would use very little fuel to do its job.  The 340 hours accumulated so far did not hurt.  The modern loader is just as slow as the one on the 35, but it’s a lot more symetrical, i.e:  not skewed to the left.

The layout of the back window may prove impractical.  It doesn’t open, and I’m not sure I can reach out through it to turn the handle to rotate the snow blower flume, nor can I be certain that raising the implement won’t put said handle through the rear panel.

It was Christmas and people do stupid things like taking in stray animals while imbued with the Christmas spirit.  I think I did something similar with a homeless  tractor.

After some thought I am less inclined to rue my impulse.  When it comes right down to it, what I want from a tractor isn’t necessarily practicality.  I want something that is a challenge:  what fun was it driving a 4Runner around a muddy field?  Just made ruts.  A Yamaha G1 golf cart in the same environment, on the other hand, was an absolute gas.

Like the way BBC Top Gear personality James May recommended a Corvette over an Audi R8 after a day of testing in which the Audi completely outclassed the Vette, I wanted a tractor “less good” than the Kubota.

Day 3:

I have a wicked case of tennis elbow this morning from a day on the couch with the laptop.  Holding the thing perched on my chest while performing the series of movements that works the mouse pad on the thing turns out to be surprisingly hard on the body.

I had to do my research on the TAFE in a manner a Phd. student  would approve:  exhaust the material.  When taken in bulk, online comments from tractor owners seem to be a reliable source of information.  I’ve found over the last year that similar data about politics is garbage, but tractors don’t lie and cheat, so they engender greater objectivity and respect from their observers.

TAFEs have been built from Massey Ferguson plans and castings in India since 1961.  The MF 35 was the basis of the original tractor.  Simpson is the brand on the licensed Perkins 3 cylinder diesels.  The product is painted red and labelled Massey Ferguson in India, but for export they get orange and gray and the moniker TAFE, which is an acronym for something or other.  Compact TAFEs are now built by LS with Mitsibishi engines.  The current North American Massey Ferguson 2WD midsized line, i.e.: 2600, are TAFEs.  The 4WDs are built by LS, formerly a subsidiary of LG, the Korean home appliance giant, which AGCO, Massey Ferguson/TAFE’s parent company, bought outright.  I’m pretty sure similar tractors are painted green and sold as Montanas, as well.

Massey Ferguson handles parts for TAFEs, but some dealers don’t even know what the name means.  Market penetration of the brand in North America is almost non-existent, but apparently the MF 231 is a handy parts donor.

The only complaint I read online about a TAFE 35DI was from one guy whose high-hours transmission locked between gears.  I could have told him what to do about that:  old Masseys do it all the time once they get some wear on them.  You take off the transmission oil filler cap and reach in with a large screwdriver to wiggle the fork loose.  A tranny rebuild is not needed, just ten minutes of routine maintenance for the owner of an old Massey.

Built with replaceable sleeves like their Perkins antecedents, Simpson diesel engines are reputed to be among the cleanest in the world, meeting modern emissions standards, and they are even more efficient than the Perkins diesels from which they were patterned.

Youtube has a good supply of TAFE-porn, short videos of TAFE tractors working on some British island.  They seem very much like Massey Fergusons, solid traditional tractors, but a little newer.

There was actually a line of clones of the MF 35 before the TAFE company was formed.  They were built in either Turkey or Yugoslavia, and reportedly weren’t very good.  The Indian workmanship and attention to detail are much better.

Currently the classic rounded body which looks like a British 1960 MF 35 is used on the TAFE 25DI, a two-cylinder, 25 hp beauty made in Korea.  Online advice is overwhelmingly to sacrifice the rounded styling in favour of ten more horsepower with the 35DI, the object of my current obsession.

Day 5: THE TEST DRIVE

This morning dawned clear and cold, with a wicked north wind.  I dropped by the dealership on my way to Ottawa to ask him to plug the tractor in so that I could play with it upon my return two hours later.  When I next approached the lot, a pickup was idling with battery cables attached, and a small generator was pumping 110 into the recirculating heater.  Battery dead?

The mechanic assured me that he just wanted to give the battery a good boost because “They really should be plugged in overnight when it’s this cold, but this one has a good pre-heater.”  He preheated the engine for what seemed a very long time to me, but then it lit up on the first touch of the starter and ran smoothly.  When I asked he said he had heated it for about a minute.  I’d never run my old Massey’s heater for more than fifteen seconds, but this obviously worked.

When I moved the tractor I was greeted by a ghastly squeal from the left rear wheel, most likely a brake drum dragging a bit.  It was very noisy but went away after I drove it for a few minutes.  I had started the tractor cold just to see if it had glitches like this.  The seat kept bottoming out with my weight.  Adjustments helped a bit, but were difficult in the extreme cold.

The tractor ran well.  The cab kept me warm while going east, but froze me a bit on the westward leg of my road test, as more of the north wind could get under the right hand side of the cab.

Things didn’t go so well when I parked the TAFE out of the wind behind the garage and checked for leaks.  Coolant was bubbling out of the cracked top rad hose.  A simple fix.  The power steering cylinder has a wet end, and there’s moisure around the rubber hose which leads from the pump to the cylinder.  But that’s not too bad.  More troubling was the shape of the link arm, the long, heavy metal triangle which connects the axle to the frame near the steering box.  It seems twisted about twenty degrees, yet the power steering cylinder fits it and operates in that position.  At the other end of that cylinder is a tie rod which has been welded and had a reinforcing piece added.  This doesn’t look good.  The manual specifically cautions about the temptation to weld steering gear parts.

Of course I haven’t tried the three point hitch yet because the diverter valve, a 3-way model to provide rear hydraulics, still doesn’t have a handle.

To keep the tractor from rolling down a slight slope while I poked and prodded, I lowered the bucket and lifted the front wheels slightly off the ground.  When I tried to close the cab door, it wouldn’t, by about 1/8″.  I let the pressure off the loader, and then it could squeeze closed.  I wonder if there is always this much flex in the body/cab of a loader tractor?

I left my “wish list” with the salesman and came home.  They are to have it ready in a week or so.

“Gee, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?”*

Not for the Fair Elizabeth is the blue spruce porcupine in the front yard or the desiccated Fraser fir at the local supermarket. There’s more than a little of the Charlie Brown in my wife, and for whatever reason she always insists upon an oddball Christmas tree.

It’s a ritual.  Each year the spousal unit must be driven to reluctant feats of daring to acquire the object of this year’s artistic vision, so we plan our annual trek, most often in the late afternoon of a weekday, a stealth attack upon the wilds of Sam Campbell’s Tree Farm just outside Smiths Falls.

So at 4:00, trailer in tow, we pulled into Campbell’s in the gathering darkness.  Sam greeted us with the usual balsam fir selections, but with an unfamiliar living room to decorate this year, Bet decided that we should find and cut one ourselves.  Off we went with borrowed saw through the snowdrifts to the cedar swamp at the back of the farm.

We passed through acres of neatly trimmed spruce and scotch pine, but we were after a wild tree, and that meant a hike through surprisingly deep snow to the low land where on other expeditions I had been able to find the odd balsam among the cedars.

Turns out Bet had somehow never actually cut a balsam.  Before long we found ourselves on a well-established rabbit trail through the still depths of the cedar swamp.  She wasn’t too taken with the candidates:

“These trees are huge!”

“We can cut one down, then shorten it to whatever height you want.”

“They are all too big.  Let’s keep looking.”

At least the wind wasn’t a factor.  It was almost pleasant in there if you ignored the dead branches tearing at every move.  Bet slid through the heavy undergrowth surprisingly well, though she was getting further and further from the road.  At last she located a pair of candidates:

“How about one of these?” Surely enough, two tall but healthy balsams stood before us.

“Yep, if we trim twelve feet off the bottom of this one and about three off the top, we may just have a Christmas tree.”  In an area like this balsam have to grow up above the cedars before they can develop their foliage, so they tend to be rather tall.  I notched the trunk and cut it off.  Then we had to pull the thing down through the entangling cedars, so Bet and I each grabbed a branch and hauled.  Mine snapped, tumbling me end-over-end in the knee-deep snow.  Laughter.  A few more tugs and the tree was close enough to the ground we could shorten it.

I remember as a teenager reading an Ed Zern essay in Outdoor Life about the Swedish compass, a device a woodsman could rig up to ensure he didn’t get lost in heavy cover.  Fellow hunters Frank Green and Cliff Whaley had just let me ramble on, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, about how a woodsman could be confident he wouldn’t get lost if he just cut a 30’ sapling and pulled it along behind him as he made his way through dense bush.  Now I understood. The friction from the other branches anchored me in place and guaranteed that I wouldn’t get lost as long as I held onto this sapling.  This “compass” wasn’t going anywhere until I had cut off at least half of it.

Thanks to the rabbit trail we found the road first try and then emerged into the gale for the trek back to the truck.  Next time I’ll bring snowshoes, even in early December.  The balsam proved surprisingly hard to pull through soft snow, so I picked it up.  It wasn’t heavy, so on we went.

In fact, when we got the thing home we realized there wasn’t much tree there at all, just a frame of branches defining the space with a lot of air inside.  Still, it was symmetrical and after several trims, fitted the tall ceiling of the living room.

Bet set to work and after a day of decoration decided that the reason the tree still looked funny was the white plaster wall behind it.  In the previous house she had had dark oak panels as a backdrop, so the sketchy outline of the balsam was all she needed to fill the space.

It looks as though the oak boards I bought yesterday will soon find themselves cut into panels to make a backdrop for next year’s balsam.

*Linus, Charlie Brown’s Christmas Special.  CBS.

Ice Reports: Newboro Lake 2009-2010

December 20, 2009:  A couple of test holes on Newboro Lake a hundred feet out from the village shore show five inches of ice.  While helping my friend adjust his bubbler so as to allow the northern boat launch ramp to freeze properly, I noticed that there’s a decent gravel bottom along shore once a bit of the sediment is washed away.

December 18, 2009: The Big Rideau at Portland and Otter Lake seen from Hwy 15 both showed full ice cover as far as I could see this afternoon.

December 16, 2009: The run of cold weather is firming things up.  Apart from the spots of open water caused by bubblers under docks, the Newboro end of the lake seemed to have formed a nice sheet with a little snow on it.

December 12, 2009: The ice is back, folks.  I noticed that Morton Creek was mostly frozen when we drove by on Hwy 15 yesterday.  Ice formed overnight in the bays and the village end of Newboro Lake.  Indian Lake wasn’t frozen over when I looked earlier today, but we broke a half-inch or so of ice to make way for a bubbler on a dock on the Newboro waterfront.

Watching the fireplace channel

Tom and Kate arrived for a fall expedition to their cottage.   After dinner somehow we discovered the fireplace channel and settled back to enjoy a few minutes of the flames and crackles of the sound track.  Four hours later we were still watching.

The neat thing about this show is that someone actually fixes the fire.  So we sat in our living room cave and like the subjects in Plato’s parable of old, sought to explain and predict the actions of the shadows behind us on the screen.

Kate’s comments quickly adopted the language and attitude of a figure skating judge:  “In Move #1 he begins with the standard half-roll with the poker.  You see how a loose grip with his right hand produces a clumsy stab, and he has to make a number of attempts to complete the roll.  Then he follows with a half-block dropped clumsily on the fire.  This is quite a slow beginning for the performance, though we can only hope he’ll get past the nerves and settle down in the more technical parts of the routine.”

Tom butted in with colour commentary:  “He’s an unpaid intern at the television station.  He was given this responsibility as a way to justify a passing grade after he had sat in the corner for a whole semester because nobody could think of anything for him to do.  He’s not happy about this task.  He obviously grew up well away from wood fires, and has no wood-burning skills whatever.”

I interrupted, “Nevertheless, the fire works really well.”

Kate just shook her head, “Our primitive nature makes it very easy to sit here and enjoy the fire.  The guy can’t lose.”

Kate lapsed into her Brian Williams voice again:  “That was Move #3, a slow, over-handed push left, with sparks.”

“So has he lost the nerves, or has he become more committed to his fire?” Tom asked.

I jumped in:  Commitment comes with the process.  Ask any new parent. Why shouldn’t the guy grow into this job?”

Bet asked, “How is this financed?  There aren’t any commercials.”

Kate used to work at the local television station.  “It’s a community service from the satellite channel.  It doesn’t cost them much.  They just turn the camera on, and they tell the college kid to put on the flannel shirt and do this, rather than going for coffee six times a night.

Tom had been watching the fire throughout this:  “That chimney’s gotta be full of creosote the way the wood is burning.”

Kate, again:  “The other thing they could have done is say: ‘Go out and make a film.  We need a filler for twenty minutes which will run on a loop.  It was his idea to do this because he was lazy.  So he set wood on fire turned on the camera, and this is what they got.

“But I’m watching it.“

I tried the Brian Williams voice:  “This was a two-handed poke.  He’s definitely getting better at it.  He just adjusted it.”  Silence.  I decide to leave the T.V. commentary to Kate.

“It should start from a cold fire, it’s so hard to come into a movie like this,” complained Tom.

Kate/Brian Williams again:  “O.K.  This is the fifth move of his routine.  With the poker he flips the block and it flares suddenly to cheers from the audience.”

Bet commented:  “There’s a lot of flame, but it’s not a pretty fire.”

Tom:  “I like something more controlled, decorative looking.  Look at it.  It’s kinda like – sloppy.”

“So the intern gets low marks for structure, high marks for flame.” I tried to summarize:  “And now we’re back to the beginning of the loop.  So his routine consists of five or six adjustments to the fire, and he becomes gradually more proficient as he goes through it, but he gets sloppy at the end.”

“I didn’t like the way he left it,” Tom grumbled.

As host I tried to surf away from the looping fireplace film, only to be chased back in seconds by the yammering of network T.V. on a Thursday night.  You don’t realize how soothing and pleasant the fireplace channel is until you switch to something else.

Back to our HD blaze just as the star performs the unsuccessful flip-and-roll.  “I heard someone laughing at the intern,” quipped Bet.  “I’ll bet you’re glad you drove seven hours to watch this.”

From the depths of the sofa Kate groaned, “I’ve got to stop watching this.  I’ve seen it.  I know the plot!”

“Wanta try the other one?” I asked.

“There’s another fireplace channel?  Sure!”

You want the Ranger to what?

“Drive us around in the Westport Santa Claus Parade.”  Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys was online.

“O.K.  I’ll have it at St. Ed’s School by 12:30 and you will have until 2:00 to decorate it.”

I’m always looking for an excuse to take my utility vehicle on another adventure, and this would give me a look at the inside of a revered institution, the Westport Santa Claus Parade.  I was also mildly curious to see how two engineers, Marjory and her husband, Tony Capel, would deal with a challenge like fastening a bunch of magnetic signs to the plastic body of a UTV.

I never thought I’d see anyone try to tape snow in place, but that’s exactly what Tony did.  They arrived with their car chock-full of boxes decorated to look like Christmas gifts.  I had told them the dimensions of the cargo area and they were prepared to fill it to overflowing.  Then they unrolled the cotton batting, and they taped it and it worked.  Keeping the very light boxes in place in Saturday afternoon’s strong breeze involved threading some strap clamps I found in my truck through the hinges of the tailgate to intersect with a spare seat belt at the front and back to the clamp.  What can I say?  It worked.

Marjory decided that the metal grate behind the seats and the front bumper both had enough metal to hold the signs, so on they went.  Large red bows and a wreath went on to the roll bar with cable ties.  Another bow discreetly clothed the trailer hitch.

We lined up behind David Blair’s stately 1970 Cadillac, a splendid ‘34 Ford hot rod, and a very nice vintage Mustang.  To my right the tractor guys were getting ready.  Dale Lyons had a volunteer in charge of his recently-acquired Massey Harris 30.

“Why did you buy a Massey 30, Dale?”

“The guy wanted to sell it.”

A beautifully restored Oliver Row Crop Model required a push start, then a tow, and finally a parking space because it couldn’t be persuaded to run smoothly. That’s everybody’s nightmare in a parade.

Behind us two smiling ladies carried a banner advertising Artemisia, a Westport sign shop.  Marching in front of them was a small human in a dinosaur suit.  As the parade wore on, it was obvious that lugging that huge tail was a strain upon the small person, but he/she was not about to give up.

Finally, on the home stretch, I asked Tony to take the wheel and I dropped back to play columnist.  Sharbot Lake resident Elizabeth Larocque, aged seven, was the figure in the T-Rex suit.  Her mother had made it for her because the T-Rex is her favourite animal, but in keeping with the Christmas theme Elizabeth had requested and gained a set of reindeer horns to clip on over the top of the headpiece.  So we were followed throughout the parade by a baby T-Rex disguised as a reindeer.  I wish I’d had time to meet Elizabeth:  she showed by her actions on that long stretch of street that she’s a trooper.

Driving Marjory Loveys around wasn’t at all what I expected.  Forget about sight lines and Queen Elizabeth waves.  Marjory wanted to meet everybody, so she was off on foot for the entire parade.  Box after box of candy canes went out.  It looked as though our would-be M.P. would soon be in a deficit because of the candy outlay, so she dispatched her finance minister, Sylvia Herlehy, to Kudrinko’s during a lull in the traffic.  In an amazingly short time Sylvia returned with supplies to replenish the cargo box, and Marjory’s campaign continued.  Photographer Moe Lavigne kept snapping away, but the high point of mischief in the parade no doubt occurred when Review-Mirror reporter Margaret Brand showed up and we decided to stage a shot with Marjory driving the unfamiliar Ranger.  She hadn’t prepared for this, and her reactions had us in stitches.

As the floats returned to St. Ed’s we got a chance to look at some of the other participants.  I burst out in laughter as a genuine dog-and-pony show worked its way down the street.  What else would you call a lovely young golden retriever soldiering along next to a cranky, bucking Shetland pony on a cart?  My dad would have loved the team of Belgians on a carriage which followed.

How was a Santa Claus parade different than a three-tractor procession down Hwy 15?  The Ranger is much better behaved than an antique tractor.  The V8’s ahead of us had to speed up or die, so we were soon left in their ozone.  Marjory’s need to meet everybody sometimes left her a half-block behind and out of candy, but Tony, whose job it was to control traffic flow, just told me to go ahead, she would catch up.  It turns out she can move remarkably quickly when she sets her mind to it.

It was a lot of fun participating in this parade.  Westport certainly presents itself as a friendly and welcoming community.  Maybe I’ll bring a tractor next year.

Fall madness

The trouble with fall is that one is pulled in a dozen directions at once as the calendar ticks down to freeze-up.  That’s what fall is:  a mixed metaphor.  It is also the season which defines us as Canadians.  Our smug claims to winter hardiness are just the result of a fall of anticipation and hard work.

Despite the balmy weather of the last two weeks, snow is coming, and everything has to be covered up.  Six months of moving to a smaller house underlines a basic principle of physics:  everything has to be somewhere.  We are now moved in and the old house is sold, but three utility trailers still sit in the yard loaded with stuff, and I can’t think of what to do with it.

We dubbed the new greenhouse the Crystal Palace the first evening Charlie turned floodlights on inside it.  White plastic glows rather well when illuminated from within.  Now that the wiring is complete, maybe I can just screw in green and red light bulbs and write off the Christmas-decorations chore.

But all of the space is committed to boats and cars.  There is no place for surplus chairs, an extra laundry hamper, the remains of twenty-five years of socket sets, even the half-finished lapstrake dinghy Charlie and I planked as soon as he grew big enough to do his side of the rivets.  It has spent the last twenty years hanging on the wall in the garage in Smiths Falls.

Before I surrendered the pram to the pigeons in the haymow I took some photos and put them up in a scrapbook on the Net.  Yesterday produced a flurry of messages from a guy in Boston.  He wants the hull as a project to complete with his ten-year old son who wants to be a boat builder when he grows up.  The only problem is getting a nine-foot boat to Boston.

Advertisers have convinced us that we can’t drive a car past the first of December without new-fangled tires with bits of walnut shell in the rubber and lots of slits to enhance wear.  But that means new rims as well, and that’s expensive, so I consulted Kijiji ads for a week and then set off on one of my wild-goose chases.   In the pouring rain I explored a Kingston suburb – do you know they count by fours when assigning lot numbers nowadays? I finally broke down and knocked on a door.  The occupants directed me two houses down the street, laughing about the numbering system but apparently on good terms with their neighbours.

Now in the correct driveway at the appointed time, I discovered nobody home.

Princess Auto was only a couple of blocks away, so I drowned my sorrows in Friday-evening retail therapy for an hour or so, and arrived back at the tire place just as the young couple returned.

The tires and wheels were as advertised, and the owners recovered just over half what they had paid to equip their leased Camry for three months of winter driving last year. The moment of truth will come this week when I bolt them onto Bet’s car and take it out onto the highway.

But that doesn’t help the three trailers in the yard.  What’s more, I no sooner get the fishing boats tucked neatly away in the Palace than Tony comes along to take his out for one more fishing trip.

At least the fall plowing’s done.  But Bet wants her garlic planted before freeze-up…

The thing you should never say to your mother

I’ve made many mistakes in conversations over a long career of heating with wood, but none matched my goof last week.

The Dutch elm blight in the seventies made it fashionable to heat with wood, or at least to talk about it endlessly in one’s workplace. Status went to the biggest, the fastest, the hottest.

We borrowed my dad’s old box stove for the house we had built the previous summer. Large basement windows meant that I could back a trailer up and drop the firewood to the floor below. Burning wood promised to be quick and easy.

My new pickup truck soon discovered the hazards of broken branches in the woods, so I pressed Dad’s old Massey into service with a disused manure spreader as my trailer. Aware of the huge elms on Young’s Hill, Bud Merriman sold me the largest chain saw he had ever stocked, a McCullough ProMac 850. With its 30” bar I was able to power through some massive tree trunks, though I recall two which were too big for the saw.

The remainder fell quickly to my frenetic actions with saw and spreader, and the pile of green blocks accumulated in the basement.

The odd night spent pouring buckets of water over the coals of an overheated box stove convinced me that a more controllable heating unit was in order, so I replaced it with an new airtight stove. It offered the additional benefit of a huge top opening, greatly reducing splitting chores.

Somewhere in my young mind was the idea that the green blocks would dry from proximity to the fire over the course of the winter, and that the lost moisture would provide needed humidity in the house.

My system did not take into account what happens in an elm block as it thaws. There are forty species of elm in this area, and at least one of those strains smells really, really bad as it dries in a basement.

But the weird smell could be explained away or cleared with open windows when guests arrived. The ants were another matter entirely. Apparently every elm block has a population of large black ants living just under the bark. When their nest warms up, the ants think it’s spring and emerge, all energetic, to hunt down whatever it is they eat. Most of them found their way to our kitchen.

Bet waged war at first but as the influx continued she gradually gave up on the ants, accepting them as part of the rural experience.

But the cost of wood heat kept going up. The unfinished basement needed a concrete floor. The woodpile was taking up a lot of space. It was impossible to keep the house clean. I had learned to sleep scared, automatically waking up a few times per night to check and replenish the fire.

A few minor blazes in the chimney shocked us with their violence. When our son arrived, I announced to the world: “Electricity is cheap!” and that was the end of the indoor woodpile.

Our house in town had a fine Edwardian fireplace. When lit, it proved an extraordinarily effective air conditioner. If a smoker came to the house, all we had to do was light the fireplace and a strong stream of air flowed quickly up the chimney. It was great for parties, but hardly a viable heat source. As smoking fell from favour and heating costs rose, I eventually blocked off the chimney to save fuel.

But this all leads up to our current situation: a huge old house heated by two oil furnaces, with no way to burn wood. Notwithstanding Bet’s objections, the time has come once again to look to the woodlot as an energy source.

The new system has to be efficient in both labour and energy. That means a boiler, and heat pumped to the basement. It must burn clean. That disqualifies the outdoor furnace. The search has narrowed down, then, to a boiler inside a purpose-built building with a serious chimney. The only question is where to locate it.

Mom had been after me all fall to replace her burn barrel, so I brought her one this week, and then I discovered the thing a man should never, absolutely never, say to his mother. After some discussion we placed the barrel to the north-east of the house with a view to observing smoke currents and examining the feasibility of locating the boiler at that location.

All went well until, half in jest, I suggested she drop a couple of chicken bones into the fire to create the worst-case scenario for smoke. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any chicken bones at her disposal.

Turns out she did have a number of old feather pillows.

The wind was steady from the east and blew the smoke right at the garage which was my work site of the day. For much of the afternoon I alternated between retching and running for cover.

I learned my lesson. You never dare your mother to make a bad smell with an incinerator. Mothers have way too much experience and imagination for that.

A visit to Lostwithiel Farm

When agronomist Neil Thomas is not on assignment in Africa for CIDA or helping his wife manage a vineyard and winery in southern Pennsylvania, he works on the family property near Lansdowne where they tend to acres of grapes and the area’s largest black walnut orchard.

Everyone agrees that the black walnut is the gourmet nut of choice: it has a smooth, rich flavour, complex and nuanced. Nutritionally it scores off the charts on all indicators of desirability. The only problem is getting the kernel away from the shell.

The lack of affordable processing machinery has prevented the growth of a market for black walnuts in Canada, but over the last two decades Neil has used his contacts and reputation to arrange for the development of technology to fill this need.
The latest machine to emerge from a collaboration with the Engineering Technology Department at Algonquin College is a continuous-flow nut washer.

“This invention replaces a set of five hand operations based around a cement mixer, a large screen and a pair of rubber gloves which gave me an extremely sore back last year. When Brad Thompson and a team of fellow students confronted the problem, they designed a big, shiny, three-quarter-ton beast which looks a bit like a jet engine on a test bed. So far it has not thrust me out of the barn, but we haven’t used it yet.”

Today was to be the day for the test.

First up was a trailer load of nuts from Westport. Planted in 1937, Dr. Goodfellow’s black walnut trees have proven a reliable and abundant source of fruit, and current owners John and Delcy Marchand sought Neil out as the only processor in the area.

My job was to dump the bags and tubs of walnuts onto the conveyor and regulate the feed up a stepped belt adapted from the potato industry. At the top the nuts drop into a huller, a noisy machine consisting of a large cylinder with a series of rubber pads inside set up to remove the gooey outer hull of the nuts. The hulls are forced down through a grate at the bottom as the cleaned nuts make their way out the end, down a funnel, and into a flotation trough which tests each nut’s quality. If it floats, it is discarded.

Eager to try his new toy, Neil waited impatiently as I ran the nuts through and into the trough. With a large plastic shovel he scooped the hulled nuts out of the long trough and into the hopper of the washer. He turned it on and away they went, without fuss.

The washer consists of a large, perforated, rotating drum with a slowly counter-rotating auger inside to feed the nuts along through the machine. An electronic control panel provides infinite adjustment to the rate of feed.

In five minutes John’s crop of walnuts had been washed and deposited in the rack for moving to the dryer. I commented to Neil, “Your guys certainly did a good job. That thing runs as smoothly as a Honda.”

Personally, I fancy tools that keep me on my toes, demanding all my alertness and ingenuity just to keep them working. The new washer seemed discouragingly competent to me, but Neil and his sore back just beamed.

While he prepared lunch I subjected my host to the third degree on the walnut business:

What does the black walnut tree offer to Canadian food shoppers?

Black walnut is the truffle of the tree-nut world. The nut meat is rich, with a creamy texture and often pungent flavours. This means that far less can be used in cooking and you get a lot of taste for a few calories. There is less fat and more protein in black walnuts than in other nuts. Pastry chefs cherish them for their outstanding contribution to fine cuisine.

People are prepared to pay far more for black walnut products than for other nut types.

Why don’t more people plant black walnut trees?

Farmers in this area have spent two hundred years removing trees from their fields, and don’t want to put them back. There’s also the long product cycle. In fact, though, ordinary black walnut trees should produce nuts by the time they are twelve years old, a far shorter interval than growing trees for timber.

Can you make money from black walnuts?

I believe you can, because we have test-marketed kernel at $1.00 per ounce, far more than consumers are willing to pay for other nut types. We couldn’t keep up with the demand.

What will it take to make black walnut production a successful industry in this area?

It will take a critical mass of rural landowners establishing plantations so that we can sustain production with locally-produced nuts.

Separating out the edible kernel is really the challenge. Nobody wants chunks of shell in their muffins or their ice cream, so most of our technology development emphasis is on the machinery to crack and separate. In Missouri the Hammond Company uses a very expensive optical sorting operation which nobody can afford at the farm scale. So we need to find the trick of separating kernel and shell by a cheaper mechanical means and this is where most of our emphasis goes.

For more information check www.blackwalnuts.ca

http://www.completehealthmag.com/files/walnuts.pdf

Photos are at http://picasaweb.google.ca/rodcros/LostwitheilWalnuts#

Free building II: erecting the trusses

The first afternoon I assembled seven of the eleven trusses. By that point I was exhausted from all of the bending. A couple of days later my body had adjusted and things went easily. Basically the truss consists of three interlocking sections of 3″ oval pipe and a long brace running across its width, reinforced by a triangle of shorter pipe sections at the centre of the truss.

Bolting things together with 1/4 X 3 1/2″ carriage bolts was not difficult, though I discovered a light rope and a sliding hitch helped with the fitting.

How I was going to support/hold down the trusses? A gravel pad is fine, but a light building could easily blow away. I explored two junk yards in search of inspiration, but found no solution which would not 1. cost the earth, 2. leave a lot of expensive steel rotting uselessly on the ground and 3. still require anchors.

I asked Peter Myers. My neighbour is a machinery expert and has a lifetime of experience with things related to metal work. “I wonder if that building could sit on steel fence posts?” Laconic as ever, Peter merely pointed to a piece of heavy pipe leaning against his bench. “A pipe driver? No, I thought I’d push them down with the loader.”

Peter broke his silence: “Take this. It works better.” On my second attempt I managed to lift the thing to my shoulder and transport it to my truck. The one my dad had I could at least lift. It was a piece of 2 1/2″ pipe with a plug welded onto one end and some weight inside. This one was much heavier.

My dad used to cache valuable scrap metal in and around the base of an old silo. Less valuable scrap made its way back the lane, its proximity to the silo an indication of my dad’s perception of its value and/or the likelihood of its eventual use.

Fortunately for me, steel fence posts seemed to be at the top of my dad’s scrap-iron hierarchy, because I found several dozen of them in perfect condition on my first peek into the silo pit.

Time for Peter’s pile driver. I grabbed it out of the truck and immediately it overbalanced and dropped to the ground. No damage to the truck. Ten toes still intact. Strange centre of gravity there.

The first post is the only one that won’t be wrong in some dimension, so I enjoyed driving it. The heavy pipe made short work of the packed limestone, even the coarse material underneath it. It just powered the steel t-bar through until it finally hit a boulder and would go no further, leaving about 40″ above ground. I wondered if that would do. It was certainly sturdy.

I quickly laid out a 20 X 40′ grid, using little green flags on wire posts to mark the location of each post. These markers work well on sod, but much less accurately on gravel. Nonetheless I persevered, and drove a few more posts before the driver overbalanced and crashed to the ground once too often and I called it a day.

By next morning I had thought the situation over and used the driver to start the remaining posts, but then pushed them down with my loader. This was more to my liking, even though it meant freezing my hands on the hydraulic controls while the loader did its thing, and I still had to finish each off with the hand driver, sitting down on the job was a welcome relief from jamming poles into the earth with a thirty-pound pile driver. Soon I had 23 posts neatly lined up as the foundation for my free garage. 23? Uh, the first corner turned out to be wrong, so I drove another post, but it didn’t go in very far before it hit a boulder. So I eventually decided to use the original post, 6″‘ too close to the other end, but firmly grounded. I would explain to Bet that the angled entrance is a feature to make parking easier in winter.

The moment of truth had come. I eased the loader over to the pile of trusses and balanced the horizontal part of one on the teeth of the loader. Up the assembly went until the tails hovered just above the grass. Here goes! As my wide load oscillated overhead, I eased the tractor onto the foundation pad and stopped at the far end. Now what?

The tractor’s bucket formed a “V” in which the support brace for the truss rested. It wasn’t about to fall down unless I did something drastic, so why not experiment? I hopped off the loader, grabbed the right tail of the truss, and lifted as hard as I could. Up it came and settled over the top of the post. The truss seemed to have eaten about a foot of the post and it didn’t look as if it would fall, so I tried the same thing on the other side. As soon as I lifted the left tail, the right slammed down as far as it could on its post. Another lift, assisted by a step ladder, and I was able to position this end over its post, as well. The trusses are quite flexible at this stage. Counting my fingers, I let it drop, only to have it stick a foot down, as well.

That’s what sledge hammers are for. A series of gentle taps on the post and the truss, and it was time to get the loader out of the way and let the thing thud into the gravel bed on both sides. It stood there, unwavering, without other support. Good stuff in those fence posts. Another six trusses went up before the novelty wore off and I realized I’d better put some braces on before the wind came up.

Those three great blue herons* are still around.

While eating my lunch I just watched them glide past the kitchen window in tight formation, circle the field to the north, and eventually glide right in to the shelter belt of immature pines at the north of the property. They rode the breeze like vultures, not flapping their wings until within a jump of the ground.

What amazes me about these three is the way they always travel and move together, in formation. Even when walking across the field they are a tight group, as if they think as one. And what are they doing in a field, in November?

NOTE: 11 November, 2009

Queen’s doctoral candidate Martin Mallet just suggested in an email that the trio are most likely sandhill cranes. He saw them in the area last week. The Wilkepedia description of the birds’ behaviour is very much in line with what I have observed.