Never, Ever Give Up on Fixing Something

I learned a great deal from my Depression-Era parents and grandparents not to throw things away needlessly. That habit can lead to hoarding, but in my case, my Type-A personality tends to sort things and only toss or recycle what can possibly have no future use. I find all sorts of useful items tossed out in city alleys, when working on my rental property. Many I have repaired and put back into service.

Sometimes, however, I still make mistakes. 

A few times this month, I nearly spend money needlessly. It's a lesson to 1) read the instruction manual on appliances and 2) Watch more YouTube videos.

First it was our lightweight Shark Vacuum, a well-rated device we'd paid decent money to buy at a big-box store. It simply stopped running. A quick check on YouTube and a vacuum-repair site showed me a second filter in the body of the machine. In ours, it was completely clogged. In five minutes, the machine ran again, saving us perhaps $800 on a new vacuum we'd been eyeing.  For under $30, we purchased new filters to keep the old vacuum going for (I hope) many years.

Then it was house paint, something that costs forty dollars a gallon or more already, not considering how ill-conceived presidential tariffs may influence prices soon for so many things we buy. I have saved a lot of paint for a decade that was used when renovating our rental property, but a good deal of it came in older metal cans. These rust, unlike newer plastic paint cans. Some paint had to be tossed out, but I carefully opened two cans, salvaging what I could and finding the paint still viable. I put the remainder into plastic jars saved from the kitchen, in case our tenant needs more touch-ups.

I was ready to get a new range for the rental house too; the oven door had gotten liquid between its two glass panes. It proved tedious work but I removed the door, disassembled it, and cleaned the glass. Now it again looks nearly new. The culprit? The door's handle was loose, and the handle seals the top of the door assembly. My last tenant must have burned something in the oven, so steam worked its way into the door's innards.

Finally, I was faced with hard water and stained porcelain. Our commodes looked horrible because of our well water, as did our shower floor. No amount of scrubbing with brushes and Barkeeper's Friend (or more caustic products) would clean things.  I was about to purchase two new commodes and consider re-tiling the shower when I read about pumice blocks. Suffice to say that these did the job, for under $10. The grout in the shower and the basin in the commodes look clean again. The shower will take constant vigilance, and here Barkeeper's friend with pumice and a small brush for nooks and crannies made showering a pleasure again.

 Learn about your house and vehicles. From an HVAC tech I learned how to unclog a drain-tube in our heat pump; last year that saved me an expensive service-call. Then I learned to flush my hot-water heaters annually, too. Do you know how to do that? It can save you hundreds of dollars in deferred replacement costs, since it extends the life of the heater. 

The economy looks shaky to this cheapskate, with lots of wishful thinking and tomfoolery of crypto-currency that screams "Charles Ponzi" at me.  I suspect that hard times lie ahead for spendthrift nation that is so poorly led. What can you do now to save money on repairs and replacements? Might be time to read that owner's manual again, or maybe for the first time. 

 

 

I Can't Get That Part: What to Do?

Though one of the primary rules for this blog has been "no politics," I am going to sound out about tariffs, in general. In my Macroeconomics class way back, we studied how they tend to punish the populace of the nation that levies them, especially when import-substitution may take years or decades to accomplish. 

Our 2006 Honda needs bushings for the rear differential. Our 2003 Silverado needs oxygen sensors. Both are DIY jobs, but the Honda's work will be tedious so I asked a mechanic doing some brake-work to replace the bushings.

 "Sure, if I can get the parts," came the reply.

That prompted me to order the Oxygen sensors for the pickup NOW. I'm certain they are Chinese made. I think lots of Americans are panic-buying ahead of the tariffs taking effect, hedging their bets against chaos. Costco the other day was rather feral.

But let's play along with our so-called leader for a moment. In particular I want to test his crazy notion that we can bring manufacturing back home fast.

Let's say I wanted to open Tractorpunk Bushings LLC tomorrow. I'd apply for a loan, find a location in a light-industrial park, purchase equipment. In theory, I might get my first bushings molded and listed for sale in a year. But how many could I produce, even if one could 3D print them in polyurethane or rubber? And how would I buy rights to bushings patented by major manufacturers, domestic or foreign?  Where might I find employees skilled at running the machinery, which these days requires computer skills? I'd need someone to manage the advertising, shipping, and order fulfillment.

And how many vehicles in need of bushings are on the roads and in the fields of this nation?

 As a Distributist, I think we should have local manufacturers: tens of thousands making and selling things from open-source designs licensed in the Creative Commons. I could even foresee a galaxy of small firms building a hundred cars and trucks locally each year, based on low-tech utilitarian models with good pollution controls and safety features. Customers wanting high-tech or luxury in their vehicles would pay more or pay a specialist to come to Tractorpunk Cottage Motors to install that infotainment system or leather heated seats.

My idea goes back to something I wrote about before: vehicles have gotten too complex and it's best to buy a really old one and fix it yourself if possible. YouTube makes that work. Where do you think I learned to change O2 sensors and bushings? The best videos come from small companies that sell the parts. But where do they get them?

My Distributist alternate reality for a million cottage fabricators would be even harder than the Free-Market, patent-driven Capitalist model I described. 

So for now, stock up and watch YouTube. You may have to DIY things for a while. If you are serious, invest in jack-stands, a creeper, work light, and a good set of wrenches. You are going to need them.

Plant a garden too. Learn to can and dehydrate. Save seeds. Think about how to defend yourself. Meet your neighbors and share work, without talking politics or religion. Put down the phone on which you are doom-scrolling, turn off the TV for a few hours, and learn a craft for making, mending, sewing, knitting, building.

These are troubling times. I don't see them improving without a crisis of the sort we in the States have not witnessed in many, many decades.

This post may be one of the gentlest slams on our leadership, such as it is, as you will ever read. Maybe we should be screaming. I think we will, once the real price of arbitrary tariffs sink in and cut into our household budgets.

Semi-Sufficent? Is that Enough?

I've written here about the folly of trying to be self-sufficient, instead turning to the notion of self-reliance, an Emersonian virtue I embrace.

Recently I read a fine post from Kirsten Lie-Nielsen, a homesteader, that she and her spouse have left farming largely behind, at least as a full-time, rural venture. This experience, one where she attempted to become an influencer but met hostility for her left-wing political views, gave me pause about how I approach rural life. 

These words in particular strike me as wisdom: 

We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress.

When this blog began, I thought that I might use my writing skills to follow the path of a farmer like Joel Salatin. Now I've my doubts, and not because Salatin and I are very different animals when it comes to politics and religion. I deeply respect the way he manages the property at Polyface Farms, and I've had two nice chats with him about how one can run a farm sustainably. I no longer follow his blog, however, because of right-wing extremism and Doomerism, mostly by his readers, a similar pattern that led me away from another writer who once used to visit my classes to discuss his work. 

In case of a national disaster, no one is an island, no matter how many generators, solar panels, firearms, or cans of food on hand. Only community and self-reliance might ease the troubles, though I'd prefer we search for ways to avoid them altogether.  

I'll employ a simple example of semi-sufficiency here: the other day, my brother-in-law and I skidded two 12' long poplar logs out of the woods. A huge twin-trunked tree had split in a storm; we wanted to save part of it for his sawmill. Poplar is a delightful wood to work. I've made a good bit of weatherboard for our farmhouse from trees we cut, milled, and planed in years past.

I could never handled that sort of job alone. We used two saws to cut the logs (for when one saw gets pinched and stuck; it happened once to me). We then used a long cable and electric winch to skid the logs across a wet-weather stream at the back of our property, with me walking beside the skidway with a Peavey Tool to roll the logs around when they got caught on something. Finally, I got on my tractor and hauled the logs the final distance to a trailer.

No one person I know could do this. With my spouse still recovering from a broken leg, she couldn't help. So in hard times, who can you count on to help with rural work? My other best helper, who lives nearby, voted for the other side, but we get on well.

Community, despite adversity and personal differences, keeps the Amish on the land, but influencers have followers, not co-workers.

That's the mistake too many misty-eyed homesteaders make who want to be famous. 

Rain at Last!

One of the saddest facts about human-caused climate change is how easy it is, for urbanites and suburbanites, to ignore its effects on other living things. In Richmond, most folks seem to only notice our ever-more-common dry spells in early Fall when their monoculture lawns die off, or the city limits watering.

In the country, however, those not on deep wells began to fret this year about the time of our State Fair. That's usually when we get rains to break the dry, hot weather.

Not this year. Even our 2000 gallons of stored water did not seen likely to outlast this drought. As of last week, about half of that had been used for garden and perennials, plus some recently planted trees we were struggling to keep alive.

With a high-pressure system the size of a small nation parked over the East Coast, even tropical systems steered around it. That's a salutary side effect, with one aspect of climate change battling another. We living things, both animal and vegetable, got got caught in the middle of this clash of titans. And yet hardly a drop of rain fell in my part of Virginia for eight long weeks.

Now, thankfully, we have a real soaker, just in time to save the small trees that have been so stressed on our property. We've lost a few, but others we kept going with watering bags of various sorts.

I hope we see more rain like this, on and off and not in deluges, in 2020. This recent day of rain may have broken a pattern but it did not do more than dent the drought. I checked a six-acre field that I needs to till this weekend. Below an inch down, the soil seems as dry as the deserts of Mars. Yet there's more rain in the forecast for Sunday. Hope, unlike rain, does seem to come upon us through an act of will.

We need other changes, too, if we are to address climate change's pernicious and, ultimately, civilization-ending dark promise. Let's get busy on that and vote for sense. Virginia has an election in a month, an I plan to vote against the party of environmental destruction. I hope  you do, too.

Intensity or Communion?

"The search for intensity is the shadow side of the healer."  One of my Yoga teachers, Nitya, said that, something she'd learned from one of her teachers. Now I share it here.

So what in the Sam Hill does that principle of Yoga have to do with DIY country life?

A lot, actually.

Modern farming--to feed a nation of more than 300 million souls--does involve a great deal of intensity, not all of it sustainable. Yet food is the best healer I know.

I suppose that if farmers saw themselves as healers, fewer of them would engage in practices that are fouling our rivers and depleting our topsoil. They'd put back in windrows and riparian barriers around waterways.

If consumers saw that food was healing, those who could afford it would pay more for local food grown sustainably, even if it meant cutting portions and losing a bit of weight. I joked that for our Thanksgiving turkey, I felt as though I knew the turkey. I did now which farm it came from.

If county councils saw the land is what heals us now and will sustain the next generations, they'd not rezone things so suburban sprawl, that odd mixture of cancer and cannibalism, engulfs prime farmland. These "public servants" would thus serve future generations, not merely the next election cycle and the pressure from deep-pocketed developers. As Edward Abbey, whose work so influenced my thinking in my 20s and 30s, put it, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

It's a dream that we'll change our ways, but dreaming is good. In the dark years to come following a disastrous election, we are going to need to keep our own long visions as the evil in high places destroys itself. It so often does.

I'll keep turning the soil, but keep in mind that Shadow, the shadow of intensity.  Edward Abbey also advised us to "Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

I plan to do so, and I dream of those days to come.  Begin your own journey by healing yourself, and then spare a little healing for the soil that birthed you and sustains you still.

Blessed Solstice, all.

DMCA Reversal that Helps the DIYer

Ironic, isn't it? At the very time of "Maker Fairs" and a renewed DIY culture, it takes Federal action to insure we can work on our own modern cars and tractors.

Glad to learn from Hemmings Daily's Terry Shea that the Federal Government has clarified the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to permit owners to work on their own cars.  I am not joking.  To crack the code of a modern computer-assisted vehicle--for the farm or the road--risked violating Federal law, because the code and many of the tools used were proprietary to the company making the original equipment.

John Deere apparently was among the firms fighting to keep the safeguards for their profits in place buy penalizing any customers who worked on equipment they owned. Shame on Deere. At one time, as with my 1950 M, the company deliberately designed all machinery so a small farmer could do any repairs that did not require a machine shop. I saw that on a friend's Farmall Super A as well, where we pulled the cam and replaced the cam gear with hand tools.

Modern computer-assisted systems make such tasks harder, but not out of reach of the enterprising DIYer. Go at it, friends. Check YouTube for how-to videos. I learned to reverse-flush the power-steering system on our Honda after the dealer told me doing so would run $120. NAPA had a sale on the Honda-only fluid at $3 per bottle, so for $12 and 30 minutes of my time (plus 15 more watching videos) I did the job myself.

I would be the first to say that we should not return to the engines of the 1950s. They ran dirtier and consumed fuel at rates that would make us stagger today. Car engines might last 50K miles before being shot. Yet at a time when our phones have more power than any early PC, we should be able to get diagnostic tools and connect them to our cars to repairs and other modification, including, yep, hot-rodding. I felt damned good after rebuilding my first carburetor.

There's a hunger for this out there. I see it at festivals and meetings. Perhaps we can blame Steve Jobs.

He helped to make many of us even more helpless, and in the age of mobile phones I'm actually seeing my students LESS able to write code, manipulate software, or fix hardware-software problems than their peers 10 years ago. Jobs, unlike Apple co-founder Wozniak, wanted enclosed boxes with proprietary hardware--damned well made and lovely hardware. The look of Apple speaks to me like the lines of a '67 Pontiac GTO or a current Audi coupe.

Maybe I'm shallow, but I buy cars that look fast and trucks that look like trucks, not toys.

Apple fanatic I am, mostly for the hackability of their UNIX-undperpinned OS and durable hardware, I should not be a critic. Yet Jobs never wanted ease-of-modification in his hardware. I've come to realize that it was an anomaly of the late 90s when he came back to Apple. My wife has owned two Mac desktops that have worked well for a total of 16 years. But I was able to update their hardware. I added Firewire to a "gumdrop" iMac in a lickable grape color that lasted us a solid six years until it could not run the newest Mac OS. A parent in Alaska bought it on eBay from me and his daughter continued to use it. I then replaced the beloved gumdrop with a G5 that lasted nearly a decade. I put a power supply in that second machine, using a unit from a mom-and-pop repairer in New Jersey, and sold the G5 for a handsome sum on eBay to a guy who was going to replace all the capacitors on the mother-board (my soldering skills are pretty good but not that good). It was near the end of the line for Macs that could be opened easily and upgraded. I'd still have that G5 and bought a new set of capacitors if the generation of computer ran a current operating system or applications.

Jobs' plans for his customers resulted in my being unable to hack my iPhone or sleek MacBook Pro easily. Though Nan's amazing new MacBook Air looks ready to last a long time (partly due to having a solid-state hard drive) it's as incomprehensible inside as our Mini Cooper's engine bay.

Microsoft is going the same route with Windows 10 and its alluring-looking Surface laptop, it seems. I do love the docking-station / keyboard aspect of Surface, something that steals a march on Apple's designs, yet I expect Microsoft to emulate Apple's model under the hood. Hacking Windows' Registry has, after all, always been far more daunting than getting deep into Apple's OS.

Making us consumers brings profits, and DIYers can be dangerous to the bottom line.

The allure of early PCs, the Apple II, and the Macs of the 90s-early 2000s was how one could open the cases and have fun tinkering. Given the DMCA changes, some upstart maker like Tesla will figure this out and make vehicles for tinkerers again. I'll be in line to buy one. For the small farmer, I'd say buy old equipment if your operation is small. Careful repairs and maintenance can keep the old stuff going nearly forever.

Wood Stoves Safe in Virginia

Sitting by my wood stove and typing this, I'm actually delighted with Conservatives I usually find rather insane. We know the sort, who tend to block any environmental laws, deny climate change, and take behind-the-back payola, I mean campaign contributions, from corporate polluters.

Usually, I want to pour that sort a toxic-waste Martini. But today, I will reluctantly raise a glass to them. I actually believe they led a worthwhile effort, by protecting citizens' right to heat their homes with wood. I have been using this source of heat since December 2012, and in the coldest weather it saves me $200-$300 per month.

That's not big money for me, and I do have to cut, transport, and season my wood. For poor citizens in my part of the state, however, wood is the only source they can afford. In a cold winter, my neighbors and I each need about four full cords: a stack 32 feet long by four high by four deep.

Wood stoves may well contribute to local air pollution, especially in areas subject to temperature inversions that trap smoke. We've a newer stove that is efficient and burns hot with good seasoned oak. I burn other stuff in a pinch or as kindling, of course.

If Virginia lawmakers had not acted, we might have EPA regulations that would affect new stove installations, not a ban but regulations about the types of stoves that could be used. In theory, I do not oppose that. The poor with older stoves would be grandfathered in, including my current stove that cost us about $3000 for the stove and installing a stainless steel chimney liner. It has paid for itself now, even with an annual chimney and stove cleaning that runs me $250.

My fear is, however, rather like those of some gun owners. Over time, initial regulations would tighten and threaten my right to burn wood.

Government has a role in protecting public health and insuring the natural world is not damaged. I'd like stronger and faster action on climate change, but burning coal is a far worse threat to our planet than tens of millions of wood stoves in colder parts of the nation. Coal ash spills into rivers when containment fails, and mountain-top removal is a great evil of our age. Unlike coal fields, commercial forests can be managed in a way that is sustainable for fuel and the environment; my stove consumes about two matures oaks per year.

We have made progress with new cars that are more fuel efficient, thanks to CAFE standards recently adopted, and that initiative too reduces pollutants. For wood stoves, EPA might work with industry and provide tax incentives for innovations that reduce emissions.  If the car makers manage to do it, so can Dutch West, who built my stove.

Just don't come for my stove, ever, let alone those of my less affluent neighbors. For now, my state officials have "got our backs" on this issue.