Fall maintenance on the Kioti

Yesterday I spent working on the Kioti UTV.  Turns out a slightly open overflow bottle connected to the radiator is not a good thing on a vehicle habitually driven through fields.  The anti-freeze was so black that I couldn’t get a reading on the tester.  I couldn’t even tell if it had been green or red.  A trip to the dealer determined that a gallon of green stuff should be in there, along with some water.  The rest of the day I spent flushing out an amazing collection of hayseeds from the radiator, long hoses to the mid engine, and the engine block itself.  It was more soup than tea.

The compressor failure in the shop nearly short-circuited the whole process because I couldn’t get the wheels off the UTV.  My air driven ratchet is a bit enthusiastic, it seems.  Turned out the whole failure was from a pinhole in the hose next to the tool-using end, but the discovery came after I had torn up everything from the compressor, out.  So now there’s a day of cleanup, getting rid of cardboard boxes and old skis.  New hoses are definitely indicated, both to and from the big reel on the ceiling.  Those fittings are larger than the standard variety, so I’ll need to take one off and measure it carefully before heading off to Princess Auto.

It’s hard to believe how many times that hoist lifted and lowered the UTV to a more convenient position over the course of the day.  How do people work on vehicles without a hoist?  Or maybe the lift is a range extender:  it lets one work a longer day before exhaustion.

By dark, after a fifteen minute drive around the area with water only as coolant, the flow from the hoses under the Kioti was running clear from the front and a weak tea from the engine.  I decided it was time to end this process before a misadventure could leave the machine without protection from an overnight freeze.  So I buttoned up, except for the bolt on the top of the engine, under the seat.  It is a hardware-store 1″ bolt serving as a bleeder valve.  Then with a clean funnel I poured in the green liquid.  It burped occasionally, but I got the whole 3.78 litres down the funnel before a little bit of prestone bubbled out onto the top of the engine, at which point I nervously threaded in the bleeder screw and tightened it.  With the engine still warm from its tour of the farm, I poured in another two litres of water (6.3 litres capacity) before the radiator rebelled and burped messily, so I put the cap on and called it a night.  Still nothing in the offending overflow bottle, but a surprising amount of steam rising from the radiator.  Diesels run hot.

While at Feenstra’s Farm Equipment I whined about the difficulty of securing the Kioti Mechron’s air cleaner due to its fastening mechanism. Rob suddenly turned and headed for the shop. “I have one out here.” I followed. Rob demonstrated how tricky it is to fasten the clasps in a tight space. “The thing is to take the whole unit out, assemble it on the bench, and then put it back in. Two hose clips and two 12 mm nuts, and the job is done.” I tried that before starting on the radiator. It worked exactly as he had said it would. A mechanic is much more inclined to solve a problem by removing additional parts than an owner dealing with an unfamiliar machine, but he provided the input I needed to solve a nagging problem.

On a passing note (an immediate update seems inappropriate): In the middle of the flushing fracas yesterday afternoon I heard this godawful noise which sounded like a failing hydraulic pump, but loudly. I looked over to a woodpile my neighbour Bill was loading aboard his truck with my TAFE tractor. I strolled over, noting that the tractor’s engine was off. Bill pointed far up into the sky, where a whirling flock of very large birds kited on the strong breeze, yelling their heads off. “They’re cranes, and from the sound of them I’d say whooping cranes.”

I had never hear a sound like this before, and from so far above that the large birds showed as dots. I had to agree that “whooping” would be a good description for it. I texted another neighbour who is the resident bird watcher. He responded that it’s that flock of fifty sandhill cranes currently spending their days in Patterson’s field, a half-mile south of the shop.

For the Love of Black Walnuts

In November our woodlot underwent an audit to requalify for the FSC rating. Glen Prevost at that time suggested that I contact the Ontario Woodlot Association. They asked me to do a film about the managed woodlot over the years. My son Charlie ran the cameras and I talked. The film dropped on December 3rd, though it is still hard to find in You-Tube’s archives.

Here is a link:

The film finally dropped on YouTube on December 12, and since then has accrued 500 views.

Mechanical misadventures with old iron

Still glowing from the publication of his second book, Boosters and Barkers. UBC Press, 2023, my friend David Roberts asked for an update on farm news dating from their visit last summer when the garage was in pieces.

The garage is finished and quietly going about its business.  My 2003 Tacoma is scheduled for a partial restoration of frame cross members in order to support its exhaust system.  I have a good welder as a neighbour but he has been discovered by local businesses and has little time to work in our little shop.  The quest for the 14 bolts and 8 nuts to fit the expensive Toyota cross member kept me amused for several otherwise idle days.  Strange thread:  M10.25 bolts.  

I asked my son for the use of his trailer hauler in the interim, and therein lay a week of confusion.  A high-mileage 2010 Toyota Tundra with a 5.7 litre engine is a nightmare to repair.  The battery was dead.  Boosting didn’t work, so I put a charger on it at the end of a long cord.  Well on into the night I tried to revive the adventure-equipped monster.  It lit up all right, but then smoke came rolling out from under the hood, a lot of it.  In the dark.  Shutting it off stopped the smoke, but the serpentine belt had been cooked by then.  The real problem is a seized alternator.  It lives underneath the power steering pump.  Access is very tight, through the right front fender and up from underneath.  Much easier if you remove the radiator….  I spent a week figuring out how to remove two, 12 mm bolts.  Today I gave up and put the right front wheel back on, the job of an hour because I couldn’t lift the thing high enough to line the holes up with the studs, and then I backed it outside to do other things.

With the shop clear I dropped the bush hog from the CaseIH 255 tractor and picked the snowblower out of a shed with chains and its loader, my first attempt to lift something heavy with the 3000 lb. tractor without a counter-weight on the back such as the bush hog.  At speeds less than 1800 rpm lifting the snowblower stalls the tractor.  Small engines burn much less fuel, eh? Just to be safe I put it in 4WD and gently eased it out of the shed, across some lawn and into the shop where a platform awaited the implement.  Today’s job was to attach the blower to the 3 pt. hitch on the CaseIH 255 tractor.  That went reasonably well until everything was complete and I tried to start it. Dead.

I’ve grown quite fond of this expensive antique.  It presents me with problems of logic quite frequently, and I derive hours of fun figuring them out.  This time a battery shut-off switch had worked its way loose from the cab firewall, still allowing the electric controls on the snowblower to work and the cabin lights to illuminate, but nothing controlled by the ignition switch to operate.  Once I had located a 25 mm socket to tighten it, it was fine.  The tractor’s most endearing puzzles happened this summer.  I was mowing around my walnut trees and it suddenly lost power and died.  A bit later it let me start up and limp to the shop.  Turned out that the fuel filter was plugged with lady bug carcasses.  Turns out that cumbersome washer/strainer in the fuel tank can’t be left off or bugs will get in.  Oh yeah, the fuel filter is 1 1/2 ” shorter than the one listed in the manual.  I blew out the old one, a metal mesh, and reinstalled it.  

Later in the summer the oil light took to winking on just before it would stall.  The manual explained that this was a feature of this model.  I went around in circles for a couple of days on this one, and finally resolved to start replacing parts.  The only part I could identify from the descriptions was the oil pressure sender, and even though I have been loath to touch one of them on a vehicle since I twisted off the one on my first VW with a too enthusiastic application of a wrench, the sender was the only part mentioned in the manual which was actually available for purchase; it was 37 years old and a ten dollar part, so I bought it.  Taking the old one off required a 28 mm wrench.  We don’t own a 28 mm socket.  Turned out Charlie has some strange short, open-end wrenches designed to snap onto a ratchet.  One of them was a 28 mm.  But since that sender had been installed, a large girder from the loader frame had appeared next to it, leaving very little clearance for tools. It took a long Stanley 1/2″ ratchet with a flex head which Charlie had spent a fortune on used in an eBay purchase.  It removed the sender with effort, but no real jeopardy.  The return trip with the new sender required a 26 mm “very short wrench” from the same gadget set.

I’ll conclude with the Case’s crowning glory:  the oil filter.  The vendor had told me he had a hard time installing the new oil filter.  He is the service manager of a tractor dealership, so I should have paid more attention.  I also had a devil of a job removing the oil filter.  In fact, it came out with 1/4″ dents all over it.  The new one went in with much cursing.  I asked my welder about this when he was working on the bearings on the hoist this spring.  He looked and explained that a plumbing fitting seemed to be intruding into the space for the oil filter.  He would be happy to re-route the pipe, if I wished.  Next oil change in anticipation of James’s arrival, I removed the mangled filter and remarked that a narrower filter of the same length would likely go in and out without trouble.  As it happened, there was a used filter from a 4 cylinder Subaru in the drain tray from an oil change.  The thing twisted right on!  I took it to Napa in Smiths Falls, where I located a young man fonder of the store computer than the parts warehouse.  He found me a filter for the Case with the same outside dimensions and thread as the Subaru one, which also met the 24 hp diesel engine’s undemanding specifications.  It seems to work.

So of course I logged onto a Subaru oil filters discussion group.  These aficionados are astonishingly dedicated to their area of study.  My ingenuous question produced a week of informed discussion on the relative merits and defects of just about every oil filter on the market which will fit a Subaru.  With links to YouTube videos, the Subaru group gave me new insight into a murky corner of automotive engineering.  Did you know that the infamous FRAM supplies current Subaru oil filters, and that there is such a shortage of them at the moment that owners are forced to research alternatives? 

I eventually figured out that in 1986 the tractor had been delivered from the Mitsubishi factory in Japan to the Laurin factory in Quebec painted with CaseIH colours and English insignia and labels, where they dropped a matching top onto it, not paying much attention to things like oil filter access, and replacing the original fuel filter with a stock item to suit available space. Then it went to an Ontario dealership for sale to a customer under the brand CaseIH.  The heated cabin is really great in winter, though, so I can forgive quite a lot.

Muscle memory: I keep forgetting it.

Today I announced to my wife that there would never be a better day to find and repair the hole the squirrels made in the roof to take over the attic in the brick wing last winter.

Bet couldn’t argue with that. The problem is that my shaky balance has kept me off roofs for the last five years. At my age I have a hard time standing up in a dark room.

Nonetheless I set about the project this morning, with my wife ready to do backup as needed. The logistics of the task sound easy: crawl out a second floor window onto a moderately-sloped (4:12) verandah roof, walk to the other end of the house where it is joined by the addition, and climb up under the overhanging soffit of the 2 1/2 storey brick Victorian to where the soffit intersects with the roof of the 1840 stone cottage. Its roof is a steeper 8:12 pitch.

The devil is in the details. The stone house originally had one dormer, but three more were added during repairs after Hurricane Hazel in 1953. The east end dormer is the original, plumbed as a bathroom. The narrow gap between the dormer and the brick wall on the other side is more than covered by an 18″ sheet of corrugated steel roofing, with accompanying nail heads protruding from the ridges. My unwelcome task was to climb twelve feet of steel roof — without enough headroom to stand up because of conflicting soffits — on hands and knees to where the squirrels had found a way into the attic of the brick house.

The only reason I had worked up the nerve to do this was because last week I had purchased a set of eighty-dollar Milwaukee heavy duty knee pads for a flooring job. Normally I am averse to kneeling because of the arthritis debt which comes due the following day and persists for weeks. With the layers of armour and gel in these sci-fi props, however, the knee pain never developed after the last session. I figured the protruding nail heads on the steel roofing would give that armour a workout, but I was hopeful.

Armed with a flashlight, I tentatively crawled up the slope. The pads weren’t comfortable, but they did the job. Then I poked one of those open concept wasp nests. Turns out there was an occupant, so I retreated for a can of spray. In retrospect, I would have been better off going hand-to-gland with the bee than what the spray did to my footing. For the record, bee spray is a fine lubricant for corrugated roofing and asphalt shingles. Instantly, the only traction I could get on the steel was when a screw top dug into the plastic on the knee pads.

The real problem with the repair involved cutting a piece of wood which would block access under the soffit of the brick house. The coping against the brick came down eight inches at a 45 degree angle, where it joined a flat piece of chestnut 12″ wide to extend to the 9X1″ fascia board. The plug was easy to draw in the shop after I transferred the angle from the soffit where I could reach it. But that was at a 90 degree angle. What happens to that coping angle when it intersects with an 8:12 slope? Short answer: it becomes about a 15 degree angle. Cut two inches off the fat part of the angle and you’ve about got it.

In three tries on the same piece of plywood, I had it. I pushed it up the slope with a floor broom. It would fit if I cut away enough on the other side of the plug to let some flashing from the other roof do its thing and leave room for a heating cable. I ripped a 9 foot 1X2 off a piece of cedar in the shop, screwed it as a handle to the half-inch plywood plug I planned to screw into place, using the leverage from the roofing below it to force it up against that portion of the soffit which vanished into the unpainted darkness.

The plug in place, I screwed the handle down to a ridge on the roofing underneath. So far, so good. Turned out I got up there with the cordless drill by climbing the handle. Everything else was still slippery. In went some fifty-cent roofing screws, and I removed the handle’s screws from the plug and gratefully slid back down it to the verandah roof, where I removed the remaining screw and re-inserted it into the steel to fill the hole.

I should mention that by this time I was walking back and forth on the verandah roof without hesitation or loss of balance. Over the last few years of variable health I had forgotten my muscle memory. Getting in and out of the window became much easier after the first debacle when I remembered that I had removed the top half of the single- hung window, as well as the lower half. Then I could step through.

The 2004 pine siding we built for the rear dormers of the house needs some maintenance and paint, and after five years of worried reluctance, I’m looking forward to the job. Today I remembered that I’m not really afraid of heights.

The coldest day in a century, and our Lexus became a brick (updated).

I’ve always been one for grabbing windows of opportunity in the weather when they present themselves, but yesterday our son suddenly announced that he would be along to pick up his M2 in two hours. Building a winter hide-away for this automobile was the rationale behind last fall’s renovation of the-garage-with-the-antlers which slouches beside the western end of the stone house on the property. Of course reality and fancy got in the way of historical accuracy, but I insist a twenty-panel, five section, hemlock and pine overhead garage door is only remuddling if you don’t admire fine cars and the convenience of remote controls. The oak man-door built to a similar pattern wasn’t intended to be ostentatious, but I didn’t have anything but red oak from which to make it. But I digress.

Charlie came to work on the car for eventual delivery to a business in Ottawa, but then all of the sudden he decided to take off, smooth track tires and all. I pushed him past the house enough for him to build up some momentum until he came to the sanded road over the hill, and from there on it was bare and dry for the short trip to Ottawa. Last fall he sent me video of a lap at Mosport where the telemetry showed this car at 142 miles per hour on the uphill straight after the hairpin turn. The same tires were not very effective on the ice of the driveway, today, though. He has winter tires for the car, but the rims won’t fit over the massive brake rotors on the front.

The text came at supper. “Would you mind bringing my truck to Ottawa tomorrow?” I agreed and suggested a time we could meet before looking at the weather forecast. Then I had to revise the arrival time to take advantage of a window of our own: clear roads until 11:00 a.m., according to The Weather Channel. Then came the follow-up note: “The front tires need air, and could you bring the air pig from the car trailer?” Like a fool…

At daylight the thermometer read 35 below F. We needed to leave in a half-hour. The old Tundra fired up just fine, then limped its front wheels over to the shop for several minutes of airing up. Then I struggled back through the snowdrifts to the car trailer, filling my boots until I discovered that the door barring my way to the air pig was frozen beyond opening without major tools and structural damage.

I struggled back to the truck empty-handed, only to find Bet all ready to go, with the Lexus idling in wait. “It started o.k. then?”

“At first the dash lit up but nothing else, so I shut it off and tried again, and then I heard the engine come on.” And so off we went.

The Tundra is a nice old beast, extensively modified for overlanding, and thus a bit heavy as a winter vehicle. It offers a cushy, relaxing ride, though the unfamiliar heater controls were hard to read in the early light. The 4WD indicator was flashing, though I had selected 2WD. Eventually after an hour or so of driving, it managed to shift out. The gas gauge was making significant progress across the dial, so I signalled a stop in Smiths Falls for gas. I pulled in and clicked the $150 button. It clicked off somewhere in the last third of that amount. Then I spotted Bet, sitting there in the idling Lexus. What about filling it now rather than later? I gestured her over to the pump and she pulled up on the outside, next to a diesel pump with a single gas dispenser. Fine. She shut off. I put sixty bucks into it and then Bet reported: “It won’t start! The lights come on but the engine won’t budge.” I intervened and things only got worse. Each retry produced less reaction from the car, until it completely ceased responding. Our Lexus had become a brick, a third of the way into an intricate journey, on the coldest day anybody can remember. I suddenly realized that my parka was nowhere nearly warm enough for the wind chill. The cold was hitting me with physical blows, numbing my mind and leaving me shaking. I dashed for the convenience store which is part of Drummond’s Gas. The next hour was a panic. The car was bricking a diesel pump, but the owner had closed it because the heavy fuel wouldn’t flow properly in the cold, so she wasn’t particularly bothered. Nice lady. A tow truck pulled in. I had called his dispatcher, but he was on his way to two other jobs and only needed gas. Nonetheless he had a look, holding his boost box with its cables. The brick had had its hood open before it solidified, but there was no way into the trunk where the 12 volt battery which powers the computers lives. The recovery guy couldn’t find anywhere to hook his cables, so he left. We hopped into the Tundra to warm up and get home to good internet to solve this mystery. The You-Tube videos from three continents confidently explained how to find the charging point for the positive cable. Any engine bolt would do for the negative. Confidently I came back with a large screwdriver and popped off the two fuse panel covers where everyone said there would be a funny sliding plastic thing which covers the brass contact plate which revives the brick. Nope. Juddering from the cold now, I retreated to the idling Tundra. I called the towing firm again about picking the brick up and taking it home. The lady said that they were slammed, and could I call another firm which might be able to come? I did. The lady said twenty minutes.

This guy came walking confidently across the parking lot with a jumper box. I popped the panel covers. He agreed there’s nothing in there. Then I mentioned that I had pried the hidden key out of the fob and found a place in the trunk latch where it will go in, though there had been absolutely no mention of that in any of the videos I had seen. He slipped it into the indicated space which I had tried, but failed to produce a result. His thumbs were stronger and warmer than mine. A wrench to the left, and the trunk lid opened. He touched his cables to the battery behind a little plastic lunch box in the right corner of the trunk, and the brick once again became our beloved Lexus. He had seen this feature often on BMW’s.

But the hood wouldn’t close. I told him I would deal with that, gave him forty bucks and gratefully sent him on to his next call. His thumb strength had saved our bacon this day.

This is the third time that hood latch had given me trouble, and I actually think I lubricate it regularly, because the consequences of neglect are so unpleasant. It wasn’t going to loosen up in this biting wind and I knew Bet shouldn’t drive it this way, so I sent her back to Forfar with the Tundra, and, gritting my teeth, I commenced the long journey home in an annoyed, nagging, Lexus.

The thing is, the car normally has a very hospitable and pleasing dash. When the hood is unlatched, though, alarms go off, no other data is available, and the car makes every effort to get you to stop driving it by making loud noises and flashing lights at you. I am deaf, but it was still wearing on me by the time we got onto the highway, and I was too frightened by the din to drive over 50 mph, so it was a long trip.

Bet ran the massive Tundra down the highway, over the hill, up the icy driveway, and then perched in the cab for long minutes, texting her memoirs to her son.

I booted the tractor out of the auto shop and ran the car in for hood and rear battery repairs. Brake cleaner got rid of the crusted grit and oil, and the hood latch functioned like a bank vault again. The battery was another matter. The car was pumping 14.6 volts into it as it idled, but it dropped to 12.1 when shut off. I tried a charger, which got it to 13.2, but a half hour later it was dead again.

So it’s time for a small AGM battery for the Lexus. This proved amazingly hard to obtain on a Saturday afternoon. So that will be a job for Monday morning, and I guess it’s time to stretch the Tacoma’s legs after a long rest. I moved it last week to plow the parking place and it lit up at the first touch of the key and idled smoothly.

From the day’s misadventures I rediscovered the value of a warm parka. Bet was a bit smug about her Canada Goose model, but at least she kept warm. Maybe I should buy one of them with what I didn’t pay out in towing fees and dealership charges today because I ran across a couple of fine, helpful people in my old home town of Smiths Falls.

UPDATE, 7 FEBRUARY, 2023. Problem solved.

Yesterday we drove into the service bay at Kingston Lexus and I had the parts guy load a new AGM 12V battery into the trunk. I paid $606 CDN including tax for the exquisitely packed Panasonic, a clone of the one I removed. The vent plug worked. Three, 10mm nuts came out and went in again. I hit the start button on the dash. The screen scrolled: “Installing program. Do not disconnect.” Then the full screen lit up but it would not go into park. On a hunch I tapped the start button again, and backed out of the garage. No problems whatever. I hope it lasts another nine years. Perhaps the high price is not for the electrical power output, but for the debugging which makes it work properly right out of the box.

Working on the Lexus Hybrid

In May of 2019 I rode the train to Hamilton to meet a fellow who had a 2014 Lexus es300h he wanted to sell. I was delighted to get access to this scarce car, and I drove it home later that day. The only difficult part was removing and replacing the licence plates in a sweltering parking lot. The car was and is great.

But a month or so ago, my neighbour Grant Stone, who has a mechanic’s eye for these things, commented that the left inner tail light, the one on the trunk lid, wasn’t working. I put it out of my mind until my friend Les took it for a drive this week and I saw the light out as he entered the garage. Funny, that bulb blew on the previous Lexus, the 2005. It was the only bulb to blow on the car in 14 years of service. And now this one.

I looked up the bulb so that I could be sure I had the right one before taking the liner out of the trunk to access the socket. I tried to do this right, so I called Kingston Lexus, parts department. I died on hold after ten minutes. Next to RockAuto.com, a reliable American catalogue of auto parts. It didn’t seem to know, and assumed all of the likely bulbs are amber-tinted. I called the Napa in Smiths Falls. Those guys are pretty good. The fellow on the phone couldn’t make sense of the same listing that had confused me. “You’ll just have to take the bulb out and bring it in.”

So there I was on a drizzly day, in the auto shop at the farm, with the trunk open, trying to figure out how to remove the twelve plastic plugs which pin into place this soft but stiff blanket which lines the trunk lid. It looked as though a screw driver might pry the top loose, or rotate it 90 degrees to free it. Nope. Broke the top off that one. My phone suggested using an upholstery tool, and the first one I found was one of those red prying things that come with a set of premium Mastercraft screwdrivers. I jammed it under the plug and wrenched it out without mishap. O.K., ten more. Of course I peeked after four and found the two halves of a wire coupler floating around in there, not connected, but I thought I should check the other side first, just to be sure. Then I came back, connected the couplers, and fixed the problem.

Maybe they don’t list tail-light bulbs for the car because they never fail. No kidding. Once I had the 2005 es330 to an indy shop in Kingston to repair a power steering leak. I had examined the evidence on our hoist and concluded that it needed a hose which cost something like $1100 at Lexus or Toyota. I decided to bite the bullet, but to have a pro look at it and make sure that was what it needed.

Actually, my wife insisted.

The car went onto the hoist and Brian, the shop owner, drove over to the Lexus dealer for the part while Derrick, the other guy, looked carefully at the repair, discovered it was the low pressure return line with a hole in it, snipped the bad part out and used some copper brake line and a couple of clamps for a perfectly effective repair. The golden power steering line went back into storage at the dealer, and the whole repair cost $200 in labour and shop supplies. The guys said that some parts are priced extremely high because the dealerships have to stock one, but they never get used.

It’s coming up to our fifth year of ownership of the hybrid, and this is the first thing to break, and it might have been the result of enthusiastic trunk lid slams over the years. The hood latch does require oiling, however, or it will put you right out of the car with a flashing warning signal indicating that the hood is not fastened. It is quite alarming. Lexus needs her few drops of oil on the hood latch, every six months, or else.

I had insisted that Les take the car out for a test drive because I was convinced he didn’t believe my mileage claims. So away we went with me coaching him to loaf and coast, and press the accelerator as if there was an egg shell under his foot. He was tolerant, and quite amused by the graphic display indicating just when the car was on battery power. I switched to sport mode so that he also had a tachometer, which often reads zero during gentle driving intervals. On our round trip he averaged 4.8 litres per 100 km, which was somewhat better than my claimed 5.1 for this route through quiet country roads.

The bonus is that all Toyota/Lexus hybrids burn regular gas.

New Year’s Day, 2023

Because of family schedules, Bet and I spent both Christmas and New Year’s days by ourselves this year, so we used the time to pursue less festive activities than the norm. Today’s task for me was to revive the motor in the photograph, and elderly Delta 3/4 hp 220 motor from a 6″ General jointer. Its user claimed that it would still start the jointer, but when the wood arrived, it would not cut it. I suspected an expired capacitor, but none was to be found. Instead, when I removed the end plate, I found this:

It was a combination mouse nest and shaving accumulation, but the poor motor was plugged. So we took it apart and cleaned it out. Reassembly took longer than the cleaning, but the old Delta was well made from good materials, and it tolerated a good deal of foolishness and still started up when asked. We had to learn the way of thinking of the motor’s builders in order to assemble it. The brushes were like new in a motor older than I am, but putting them back in was a head scratcher until we figured out the point behind a peculiar loop on the wire joining each pair of adjacent brushes. We found that loop was perfect to hold the brushes away from the commutator as we slid the assembly over the bearing. Then on subsequent attempts we discovered that the brushes can be jammed in the “up” position, to be released later to fall into place by a probe through the service ports after the unit is in place.

But replacing the two screws you see on the end of the motor was enough to drive a deacon to drink. The screws had twisted out of a pair of sleeves rather resembling empty .22 cartridges which slotted into their places on the inside of a large washer. Getting them into position and keeping them there was the problem. I decided that a bent and worn fibre/plastic insert was obstructing progress and deserved a visit to the shop floor. Then the assembly went together.

The worst thing about old motors is the length of the leads to the switch box. Connecting wires in tight quarters was aided by good lighting, but my old fingers just aren’t up to the traditional mar connectors with a bronze sleeve and screw, covered by a bakelite protector. Eventually I gave up chasing the little brass screws around the floor and twisted the more recent mars I found on the bench.

Two lengths of uninsulated wire connected the four brushes. I made sure that the long screws which hold the motor together were not touching these wires. Then we took deep breaths and hit the on switch. It started right up and ran smoothly, even though the end plate was a little off. A couple of sharp taps with a hammer rectified that.

Instructions in manuals list the motor installation as the reverse of the removal. We decided that #12 Robertson screws had not been available the last time anybody worked on this jointer, and that was why they used 1/4″ carriage bolts to sandwich the motor feet and two layers of 3/4″ plywood to the thin metal floor of the stand. Four screws and washers pinned the motor to the pad. We carefully tipped the jointer up enough to drive four more screws up through the slots underneath and into the plywood again, providing a satisfying level of tension on the belt. Then I hoisted the heavy cast iron belt shield into place, determined that it did not rub against the pulley, and bolted it into place. The thing was largely done.

A response to John Ivison’s NP article on hunting guns

John Ivison writes for a right-wing paper, but I like his work. For the most part he is well informed and fair, but in the following article he seems not to know what he is condemning on the part of those who drew up a banned list of guns.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/john-ivison-for-sake-of-national-unity-liberals-should-drop-hunting-rifle-ban

When he used my trusty Remington 870 “automatic” as an example of a banned firearm, I knew something was amiss. I have owned this reliable and versatile pump shotgun since I worked half the summer in Genge’s Red and White grocery store in Westport in the summer of 1965 to pay for it. I can state with confidence that it is not an automatic. That is the Remington 1100 of comparable age.

The original article rather strangely classified some antique firearms as restricted. The guns illustrated, including an ancient Parker side-by-side double barrel shotgun, definitely should not be fired with modern ammunition for safety reasons, but any experienced gun owner already knows that Damascus twist barrels cannot sustain the forces of modern shells. I have a bolt action 12 gauge shotgun which I have never fired because I have been told from the time I was six that if the barrel has a twisting pattern in the steel, it is only for display. Somebody gave me a fancy double barrel with one barrel split. I used it in my hunter safety classes.

Either the government committee decided to legislate rather than educate, or the opposition members are deliberately misreading the available information to attempt to embarrass the government.

The single shot Ruger lever action rifle is an unusual case for restriction. This is the rifle of the veteran hunter who is a marksman. I suppose the rifle has potential as a sniper’s weapon because of its ability to kill at very long range, but I can’t imagine anyone choosing it over almost any other rifle. The man I know who owns one of these rifles is about as Conservative and gentle as he can be, but banning this symbol of his pride will only annoy him.

In the Shadow of Detroit: Gordon M. McGregor, Ford of Canada, and Motoropolis: Written by David Roberts, 2006 Edition, Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr [Hardcover]

In his early teens David Roberts chose a 1929 Ford Model-A as his personal vehicle while the rest of us bashed around in a Jeep, VW Beetles, and various family sedans.  The green coupe sat in pride of place next to his father’s Jaguar for as long as I lived in Westport, Ontario.

After Queen’s, David went on to a career at the University of Toronto where he was one of the editors of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.  Later in life he returned to his fascination with Ford automobiles in his book on the rise of the Ford Motor Company in Canada under the auspices of Gordon McGregor, a well-connected entrepreneur who managed to persuade Henry Ford to open a branch plant across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

Gordon McGregor’s family left him well set socially and politically, though he worked at a variety of sales jobs before he found himself saddled with the declining family wagon factory.  His pleasant disposition and good sense of humour eased his way socially, but it was his magnificent singing voice which gained him entry into a wider circle than most.  On one of these performances at a church in Detroit he met Henry Ford, a self-educated mechanic intent upon building automobiles, and the two hit it off.

McGregor had a factory, and financing, but no product.  Ford had great mechanical ingenuity, boundless ambition, and little money.  Ford may have been naïve in allowing McGregor access to his patents and parts in return for a share of Ford Canada, but the two developed a trust which lasted until McGregor’s premature death in 1922.  By this time inexpensive Model-Ts had revolutionized life in the vast tracts of rural Canada as well as contributing to the development of modern life in urban areas which had suddenly become less dependent upon horses for urban commerce.

The book is at its best in the early chapters where Roberts traces the many steps McGregor took to take his company from a few employees assembling a pile of Ford parts on a pair of sawhorses to the increases in production with new buildings and capital expenditures as sales increased.  McGregor’s father William had served two terms as an MP in Sir Wilfred Laurier’s government.  His father’s son, Gordon knew his way around the Laurentian elite, and proved an excellent fixer of problems, be they federal, provincial, or municipal.  One of his lifelong tasks was cleaning up the Detroit River by promoting municipal water and sewage services for Ford City, the area where the factory buildings developed on the shore of the river, and where the auto workers sought homes.  One example of Gordon’s touch was getting a new federal charter for Ford Canada after the company outgrew its provincial charter.  One month Ford was provincial; the next month it was federal.  Gordon McGregor had the knack of getting good results from bureaucracies and newspapers.

But I digress.  It is all too easy to get caught up in the many activities, causes, and vacations of the McGregor Family, but the reader’s true interest is no doubt in the evolution of the Ford automobiles.  While re-reading the book I found myself wandering to You-Tube for visual input to match the content I was absorbing.  Surely enough, the first and best review of a Model-T which I found was of a Canadian model which was a far cry from the bare bones Detroit fare of the early years.  McGregor’s goal was to build his T’s with locally sourced parts as much as possible, providing significant spin-off benefits to machine shops and foundries in Windsor and Toronto.  A fellow named Goodyear began turning up in the narrative, selling his tires where he could, particularly at the auto shows where Ford Canada participated enthusiastically, though was looked down upon by other manufacturers without the massive technological infusion which Ford Canada had received.

BTW:  Canadian Model-Ts had all wheels and tires of the same size to simplify repairs.  Detroit T’s were forced to carry twice as many spares on long journeys, to negligible benefit.

One of the most interesting videos on Ford motors which I have seen shows a skilled workman replacing babbit bearings in a disassembled Model-T engine.  These engines may have persevered for many years, but they certainly would have required maintenance.  As long as they received oil and didn’t get too hot, they would do a good job, but the main bearings were made of solder, basically.  They could be melted out in seconds with an acetylene torch, and renewed in not much more time with another application of molten babbit.  The success of Ford Canada is a testament to the skilled trades developing in Ontario at the time, making good use of the inventions and innovations of Henry Ford, but also making large strides in metallurgy and industrial machining processes such heat treatment and accurate cylinder boring.

The Model-T became an enduring success because the cars could be repaired easily.

A large proportion of the Model-Ts which were marketed around the world in McGregor’s era were built in Windsor.  In early years McGregor needed to keep up production during the winter months when local orders dried up.  Because Canada is a member of the British Commonwealth, trade benefits accrued to Ford Canada which were not available to Ford Detroit.  McGregor went on a world tour to sell cars.  He was particularly successful in Australia, New Zealand, India and Ceylon.  Australians preferred to buy the bare chassis model and build the coachwork locally, so apparently there were some unusual Model-Ts in the southern hemisphere.  Exports kept the Ford City factory busy through the winters until Canadians learned how to use their Model-Ts in all seasons. 

Over the course of the first decade of production, Ford Canada made its owners, shareholders and dealers considerable wealth.  Where McGregor most clearly differed from his mentor had to do with Henry Ford’s peace mission to Europe in an effort to stop the War.  McGregor muted his opinions about the war, dutifully supported the Commonwealth and Victory Bond campaign, and made an effort to buffer the anti-Semitic utterances of Henry Ford when he could.

Gordon McGregor in personality was a sort of de-caffeinated Henry Ford, lacking his ideological bitterness.  This odd couple gave birth to the automobile which built a society.

Changing the battery on the CaseIH 255

I bought the 1989 tractor last spring because it combined a loader, a heated cab, and very small size with a Mitsubishi diesel. It’s a cousin of the engine in my beloved Bolens G174.

The electrical system on the tractor is complex, to say the least. There is a shut-off switch which isolates the battery. Leaving it on will drain the battery overnight, regardless of the position of the key in the ignition switch.

This week’s task came when I finally decided that its battery was toast. I had never looked at the thing before because it lay underneath a large, cylindrical air cleaner sitting horizontally on the battery. All I had done was reach in to remove and replace cables. But the new ground made no difference. The battery had to go.

But that was a bit of a problem. The hood tips forward, but not very far, before striking the loader frame. I couldn’t find any way to remove the hood. The air cleaner came free quite easily with an ingenious arrangement of buckles, hinges, and such. In removing it I realized that all that stood between the air cleaner’s metal housing and a dead short on the positive pole of the battery was the rubber insulator on the terminal. So I removed the cables, set them out of the way, and reached in to lift out the battery by its convenient handle. Uhh…. I couldn’t get two hands into the space, I’d need to lift straight up at least two feet to clear the radiator (already showing scars from previous misadventures), and I simply didn’t have the strength to raise it from this awkward position with one hand.

Considerable fussing went into a strategy to lift the overly-tall and very heavy battery. The trick would be to get it out with neither damage to the radiator nor injury to my skeleton. Slipping batteries are murder on backs. Several hours of frustration ensued without success. Night came, and in the morning the strategy was clear to me. I would attach the chain hoist to the overhead bar of the car hoist and lift the offending, acidic lump out.

But first I had to retrieve the chain hoist from another task, where it was stretching the wall of the old garage back into square. I had needed to make the north corner of the west wall lose its southward lean of about 1 1/2″ if I was ever to install an overhead garage door between the two ends. After a few false starts I had cut two round pieces of stout 3/4″ scrap steel from a broken pickle fork (for removing ball joints). I drilled a hole at the south end of the wall into the top plate to mount one bolt. I drilled another into the bottom plate at the other end of the wall. A pair of chains shortened the diagonal to where the twelve foot reach of the chain block could tighten things up. Again, there were some false steps in this process, but once I got the chain block installed and I figured out how to operate a vertically-oriented implement on a steep slope, it produced rather astonishing results. Hundred-year-old nails in clapboards and chestnut studs were no match for the implacable pressure of the chain. Before long the wall was again square (if it ever had been). I hastily screwed boards on the diagonal into the studs and plates to hold the wall in place. Then I left it to sit for a few days.

In a burst of morning energy, I jerked the chain to lower the hook across the diagonal, and the hoist was free for its next task. The wall stayed put, without a whimper.

In the auto shop there is a loop of three strands of 1/2″ rope at the centre of the horizontal bar above the car lift. I use the chain block on it to place and remove the winter cab on one of the tractors, so it is a familiar procedure to hook it on. I carried the hoist into the garage floor in a 5 gallon pail so that its trailing chains don’t get tangled. I placed the 10′ step ladder over the pail and just to the left. I picked up the hook on the top of the hoist and dashed* up the ladder with it, perched at the top with one arm over the bar, and fastened the hook into the three strands of rope, a practiced operation. I now had a sky hook to lift the battery, even though the tractor’s hood might have to flex a bit to let the chain do its work. With the odd metallic groan, up came the deep cycle marine battery. Why would anybody put a trolling motor battery in a tractor to start it? I slid a handy oak board across the arms of the loader and wiggled the load back onto it. That solved the problem.

The replacement battery was an inch lower and about half the weight of the dead one. I simply lowered it into place by hand. The new battery from Feenstra’s started the CaseIH very well, so I drove it out of the garage in triumph and promptly forgot to shut off the main switch when I stopped the engine. The new Interstate still had enough juice to start the engine a day later.

*Dashed may mean different things to different ages.

Fall Raspberries and Black Walnuts

This afternoon I reluctantly took a large plastic bowl off the counter, put on my boots, hat and vest, and headed for the berry patch. This chore has been ongoing since September 2nd, a full month.

It was a beautiful, cold fall day. The loaded raspberry bushes bounced merrily around in the unaccustomed east wind, but I persevered, scooping handfuls of them into the broad, light container. The patch is a 3′ wide row, 50′ long. That’s a lot of picking, it turns out, especially late in the season when the bushes maximize their production until the frost kills them and you mow them down. Then they grow anew in the spring, only to begin the cycle again on the first of September.

The best thing about cold weather berry picking is that the insects are largely absent, (except for lady bugs today). Another tasty thing is that over-ripe berries don’t ferment the way they do in summer. Instead they turn a dark red and wait for the picker to devour their sweetness as his reward. It was a tasty afternoon, with 3 3/4 pounds of raspberries for the freezer, left over from my feast.

That’s a maple in fall colours in the background, btw.

I have written regularly in this space about my ongoing battles with red squirrels, and how I take a measure of revenge by raiding their nut caches. This year the devious little fellows relocated the cache I had such fun raiding last year. It is now 250 yards south of the other one, and somewhat better concealed. In fact, I blundered onto it by accident while trying to figure out if all of the walnut trees in the woodlot had taken the year off from nut production. In any case, I picked up six, five-gallon pails of nuts because it looked to be slim pickings this year. Even the every-year bearer at the house seems low on nuts because the neighbouring trees are barren, there are no nuts in my two, four acre nut orchards, and the five acre pine/walnut field has only one producing tree.

There must have been a late frost which caught them. Even temperatures a couple of degrees above freezing will kill the flowers. The tree at the house is protected from frost on a still night by the chimney of the furnace. Two regular-bearers back the lane are very old and tall. Their upper branches seem to miss low-lying fogs.

So in their turn I dumped four pails of nuts into my cement mixer, with streams of water and a few round stones. I borrowed my neighbour’s drying tray and prepared the extra piece of mesh to cover the nuts. In went the nuts. On went the mesh. Then I loaded the package onto the bucket of an old tractor, drove it out into an open field, and raised the loader up above my head.

The squirrels are still worried about red tails and harriers, not to mention the odd fox and coyote, all of which love a squirrel dinner. The nuts should dry in peace.