Today I have a mish-mash of updates:

First, the world of "let's try and make my truck legal for inspection", which started with the previously posted spark plug adventure. This time, I had to fix some rust and an exhaust leak:

But first, I had to get that darned manifold off. Good thing there is so much room under the hood.

Problem:

 

Yeah. Heat riser valve not supposed to look like that. And there is really no good way to fix cast iron.

Yet, somehow that worked. I slathered the inside of it up pretty well with muffler cement and away I went.

Next up, Insta-Body

Some of you may recognize that. It's good stuff. For the worst hole, I was not proud to resort to sheetmetal screws and galvy plate:

But it came out okay, at least for a plow truck.

On to the next subject: New Garage!

The slab got poured yesterday, but I haven't been home in the light to take pictures yet.

Also, had to re-motor my air compressor. The way life should be. Made In USA.

That's all for now. Stay tuned.

Wait, more fun! One of my trucks actually broke today. I say this like I am surprised.

Yep, it decided to start spitting out spark plugs on the side of the road. Let me tell you, I wished I had hearing protection driving it home like that. LOUD.

The end result looks like this

Guess it needed a tune-up worse than I though.

I am either a genius or completely insane. This weekend, I bought an air compressor for my new garage:

It's a professional 2 stage cast iron type, low RPM. And it weighs roughly 700 lbs on the pallet.

Why might I be insane? Because I went into this knowing it was going to be loaded with a forklift, which is something I most definitely do not have.

So then I decided to try this:

I got lucky this time, and I did not break anything or injury anybody

After that, I had to fix the stack on my tractor. It's a homebuilt affair, I put it on the machine about this time last year. I found some vibration cracks which needed to be welded:

Yikes! Good news is, it's all fixed, and I've added an additional mounting bolt to hopefully stabilize everything and stop a repeat from occurring.

That's all for now, folks. More to come Thursday when the excavators arrive

I have been majorly delinquent on this blog. So, without further ado, some updates.

First, this just happened.

me:  also, I am slowly going mad over my HHR's USB

it seems to randomly pick songs that it won't play

and once it's picked one, it never works again

but more tracks stop working

Tai:  lol

i hstr vomputytrd domr fsyd

...

me:  WTF???

Tai:  lol

had was mis alighedf

aligned

i meant to say i hate when computes screw up

me:  I think that's probably blog worthy

Tai:  lol  yes

This is fairly normal. 

I've been extremely busy at the house, there has been much work to do.

First, there were french drains to put in around my barn

Looks harmless enough, right? Little did we know...

This is how far the 3 yards of gravel I estimated got us. Somehow, I dropped a factor of 5. So maybe I should have actually written the calculation down.

 11 more yards later, I'm dumping the last of the gravel next to the barn and it's all set. Lots of weight moved, got my shovel on! 

Then, there was the cleaning out of the radiator on my Buick (which I did myself because the shop refused to touch it)

For the record, it was VERY plugged. And each one of the tubes gave me a bunch of goop like this:

 Yech. Good news is the car doesn't overheat anymore, and the radiator is *mostly* leak free ... it will do for now.

 Then, I decided to build a new garage, so much site clearing work had to be done:

The John Deere wants to play!

 Somewhere, along the way, this happened

I was less than amused. I only had one spare lens, that was 41 years old!

At the end of the day, I have a MASSIVE pile of sectioned wood which still needs to be split and stacked under my protective overhang before it gets too cold and starts to snow. 

Also, having a dumptruck is, quite possibly, the most useful thing ever.