Chainsaw Logic: That One Little Wire...

I think this post constitutes part of a series. I've written often here about Occam's Razor, and in this instance it and the old "For the Want of a Nail" allegory.  

It's easy to forget the simple, in our age of wonders, how one simple technical issue can make everything stop. Right now, I am streaming a BBC World Cafe concert with Gillan Welch and David Rawlings. My 1980 self could not even fathomed that as possible.

It's a form of magic, following the precepts of Clarke's Law. Remember, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We get baffled when the technomancy suddenly halts, the screen locking up or the phone "bricking," even a damned advertisement on the YouTube concert-feed popping up mid-song, despite my ad-blocker. The spell is broken, though in my case that stupid ad lead me to the NPR ad-free original. 

Until we fix things, we sit like our primate ancestors before a sacred stone, bewildered at the departure of our gods. Yet sometimes we can bring fallen technological deities back to life.

Recently a friend of my wife's had an enormous Red Oak tree fall in her yard, nearly hitting her house. It would have totaled the place, frankly. now it lays in her yard, some 70' of tree with 40' being straight and nearly 36" in diameter. It's what furniture-makers would call a "veneer log" for the lack of hollow core, lack of limbs, and straightness. Yet we cannot get any log buyer to look. Apparently these folk want a bunch of such logs (worth several thousand dollars each) before driving out.

After inspecting the tree, I came back with my little "firewood" saw and The Big Dog, a $1000 Husqvarna 365 with 5hp and a 20" bar.  I had planned to keep the beast the rest of my life.

"Woof Woof!" said this Big Dog, until it would not bark for me, let alone start. 

I gnashed my teeth. I pulled at my beard, having no hair on my skull. I cursed the gods of Sweden and two-stroke internal combustion, to no avail. I considered the expense of even a diagnosis at the dealer, looked at (heresy!) a $500 Stihl "Farm Boss" saw, ready to spend MORE money. 

No. I was doing what an academic colleague calls "catastrophizing failure," meaning that I assumed a small setback would lead to an utter and permanent disaster. 

Realizing then where I went wrong, I began replacing Husqvarna parts myself, starting with the simplest parts and least expensive that can lock up a saw: a new spark plug, a kill switch, then an ignition coil. Still, Occam failed me. The saw would not even "burp." A second wave of self-doubt followed as I watched more YouTube "how to" chainsaw videos by burly men with Southern US, Scottish, or Scandinavian accents.

Then $30 later, I fixed the saw and it fired right up. Even that 30 could have stayed in the bank. I checked the electronics, working backward, to my new spark plug. What if the wire that attaches to the plug had turned sideways when I pressed on the rubber "boot" that covers the end of the plug? 

With a razor blade I cut open enough of the cover to see that the wire loop connected to the plug. It's the little metal piece shown in the image at the top of the post. I slipped it over the plug. Then I pulled the cord.

"Woof! VROOM!" The Big Dog barked!

I've learned from working on engines a little bit, whether on old tractors or late-model cars: a single wire can bring done tons of working metal. So can a pinched gas line. So once again, Occam proved right in the end. This is why we pay a mechanic 25 cents for a screw, and $50 for knowing which screw to replace.

Now back to that tree. I just felled a section the size of a normal tree in 30 seconds, a task impossible with my firewood saw. 

Never give up working on stuff. A fix may be simpler than it seems. And now I have some spare parts for the saw. 

I was about to put the saw on a pagan altar and make offerings to it. Clarke was right but so was Occam. Keep moving up the chain of causality to the problem, and one can fix nearly any machine (and maybe large societal or environmental woes, as well).

Better Safe Than...Botulism

When my weirdo friend Gary and I were little, as precocious little boys with a love of reading do, we would say the names of ailments and diseases. We would then laugh like busy pint-sized demons.

Leprosy!
Jungle Rot!
Hernia! (This one we thought should be a first name)
Rickets!
Malaria! (Also a name)
Botulism!

Not so funny now, and we've lost Gary (to none of those listed).  For my part, I want to avoid Botulism if I can. When I can. During canning.

I put up a fair quantity of my Middle-Eastern tomato sauce this year, using my typical recipe and adding lemon juice to each jar, as today's varieties are not as acidic as those our grannies grew.

And being stupid, I canned them in a water bath, as I have long recommended at this site. All the jars sealed, but today I'm going to pop the lids, empty the jars, re-sterilize them, add more lemon, reheat the sauce, refill and can the jars in my pressure-cooker canner.

Why all that work? One, I love that sauce. Two, the jury is out on water-bath canning or pressure-cooker canning for tomato sauces, with my canner's manual recommending boiling water for salsa (is my recipe that?) and the National Center for Home Food Preservation (yay academia!) recommending pressure-cooker canning for spaghetti sauces without meat. Here is their FAQ page. They wisely advise on that page "The specific recipe, and sometimes preparation method, will determine if a salsa can be processed in a boiling water canner or a pressure canner. A process must be scientifically determined for each recipe."

So let's call my sauce vegetarian spaghetti  (without even one meatball and therefore, no bread. Google that one). And I will use the pressure-cooker method the National Center recommends, since it guarantees that food reaches 240 degrees. That will kill off any bacteria that can cause botulism. 

Boiling water is not hot enough.

Friends, do not trust all the homesteading and DIY-bloggers on this matter. Go with the scientists, and good luck with your late-season food prep.

All The Rain At One Time: Hurricane Season Again

I've written here before about the feeling of living in a shooting gallery as tropical storms and hurricanes roar over ever more frequently.

Hurricane Ian follows a track so close to the one from my 2020 post's image that I'll just be lazy and use the image again.

This year we decided to be a little more proactive as Ian approached. It looks like gale-force gusts tomorrow, but no sustained winds of more than 40 miles her hour. The ground was dry, too dry even, this morning, so we hope the rains do not uproot any trees. I did rush out in the final dry hours to plant some lettuce seeds and a row of peas, hoping to cheat Jack Frost.

I also hope we don't lose power, but I filled up two five-gallon containers with potable water, just in case. Our generator cannot run in the rain, so we'd have to rough it a day or so or until power returns. A whole-house generator is now under consideration.

As Ian looked likely we had ordered a few supplies, including a USB-rechargeable Streamlight flashlight; it's our third by that company. It arrived in a soggy box as the first rain-bands hit. Law-enforcement, the military, and first-responders praise the brand. I find them rugged and waterproof. Cheaper lights exist, but you get what  you pay for in a flashlight.

I had to use the new light right out of the box to help Nan find a chick that had gotten itself under a coop. The little critter would have perished in the mid-50s weather we are having, as the storm passes us.

It seems that I forgot flashlights in my earlier list! You can recharge these sorts of lights from your car's power outlet or USB ports. So let's add USB-Rechargeable light with at least 250 lumens to our storm-prep.

In 2020 we did not have our Walkie-Talkies, one of the best investments we have made. Their battery life would be a few days if we lost power. Add them to the list.

I'll message my nephew Chris Essid with Homeland Security to see what I've forgotten in this and my earlier post. Check in with your neighbors and family in the path of these storms. Good luck until hurricane season ends.

Old-School Tools: Walkie-Talkies!

 

A WALKIE-TALKIE? Get out, you might say, in the era of ubiquitous smart-phonery. 

Agreed, up to a month ago. I associated these devices with the Radio Shack of my pre-teen years, in the 1970s. Yet when my wife suffered a debilitating fall in 2016, on an icy slate, it took me a while to wake up to her yelling for me. I began to consider, as she made a remarkable and hard-fought recovery, whether we might install an intercom system back by our chicken coops. On and off this consideration went, for five long years. Now we have something, but not an intercom. Those serve a certain need, but they are not perfect.

Her parents had an intercom between their auto-repair shop and their house. It came in handy in many regards, mostly for "lunch is ready, Edward!" notices but even altering them to a burglary. They left the unit active 24 hours a day. My tough-as-nails father-in-law went to the shop after the shop's mic signaled a break-in. He surprised the burglars with a shotgun and he told my mother-in-law to call the law. The bad guys dutifully put up their hands (no arguing with both barrels of what I refer to as "Old Painless") until the deputies took them away.

I've no plans for backyard heroism, but we do often have issues with our animals at dusk, usually a hen gone missing but also our too frequent encounters with Copperheads. An intercom lacks portability. Then I began to research walkie-talkies. They have come a long way as electronics evolved and rechargeable batteries improved. We knew that our phones do not have perfect reception from every location on our property, including the deer stands I use in hunting season, when a call for assistance might be essential. Moreover, we could take them to our land in Buckingham, where one needs to do a certain dance on a certain spot to have ANY cellular reception.

I'm not going to recommend a particular model. Take a look at reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. Some offer more water protection than others, including boater models that can survive "man overboard" situations. 

We purchased a midrange Midland pair of walkie-talkies for under $60, shipped. We use the low-frequency band (you pick a channel among 22) for a range of up to 25 miles (high-frequency use requires an FCC license). We are delighted. Just the other night, a Copperhead was cornered by our livestock dogs and I needed to respond ASAP. I got the notice from the walkie-talkie. Most other times, it's simply me (I do the cooking) saying "Queen Bee, come in, dinner in 5." Some things never change. My old man had a CB radio in his Cadillac, when he went to Florida to buy loads of tomatoes. His handle was "Big Joe Tomato." I use that one once in a while.

So far this old-school tool has more than paid for itself.  We never forget to carry them now when one of us leaves the house. We just make sure the other person has their radio and it's on.

 Don't rely on that fancy phone, if reception is spotty and your land has nooks and crannies you walk, hunt, or work. Buy a walkie-talkie and learn to use it. It might save your life.

And yes, I miss the living hell out of 70s Radio Shack. DIY electronics! I should write a post about the drawers of resistors and the soldering irons...

That Hurricane Thing, Again

Every year what I call the Atlantic Shooting Gallery lines up with tropical disturbances bound for the Caribbean and US East Coast. Though we live far enough inland to avoid the worst effects, my experience in 2003 during Hurricane Isabel and Tropical Storm Gaston taught me to prepare. My nephew Chris, with Homeland Security, has tried for years to get the family to do the same.

If Chris is reading this, I'll add that it's like shouting into a hurricane. It seems that only the bad experience of living through one does the trick. So what DO you need, beyond the expected candles, first-aid kit, oil lamp, flash light, battery powered radio?

A water filter: I was recently asked about backpacking filters, and I'm fond of the household and personal ones from Sawyer. But MSR and other firms make fine ones. Be sure you get more than a filter; get a purifier.  We used one of Sawyer's household units for over a month until we got a UV filter put into our well. It was clunky but we had lots of drinking water.

A full tank of gas: When the power goes out, so do the gas pumps. It's so easy to forget this one. I topped off our daily driver today, just before tucking it into the garage.

A fistful of dollars: I love cash. I don't like the government or big corporations knowing my spending habits. Yes, I'm Libertarian that way. Cash may wane in decades to come, especially after the pandemic ends (Amazon has been a good friend this year) but when the lights go out, cash is still King.

A chainsaw: Don't wait until the next storm hit to teach yourself. Also, don't get me wrong; if you don't know how to use one, don't get one unless you are willing to put in the time learning proper use and care. They are as finicky as they are dangerous. An electric won't do you much good after a storm, but it might be your gateway to a gas-powered one. I cannot comment on cheap brands, but I will say "buy a Husqvarna or Stihl." I own both, but currently I'm leaning "Husky" because it's lighter, starts easily, and I actually enjoy using it. The Stihls seem to have a life of a decade, and they are heavy as logs.

I am so enamored of sawing wood that I bought my own chain sharpener, an electric bench-mounted device. You might opt for a spare chain, and get the shop to sharpen yours as needed (it's not an expensive service). My one tip for new saw owners is "do not store E-10 gasoline in the saw. Ever." I have a source of ethanol-free 93 octane, and I mix a gallon at a time. I burn about 3 a year. If you don't have a source for such gas, either buy Stihl's expensive Moto-mix fuel if you don't use a lot, or buy high-test and never mix more than a gallon. Empty the saw after you run it.

A camp stove: We used our Coleman for the 12 days in 2003 when we were without power, since we had an electric range in the kitchen. It was simply nicer to cook outdoors, anyhow.

Block Ice: You may lose your power and food in the freezer, but even with a generator, you can only keep so much fuel (in our case, Propane) handy. I like to make block ice to extend a dead freezer's useful life. It can go in coolers, too, or be put in pet water when the AC is out.

A big tarp: Let's say the worst happens: a tree or part of it punches through your roof. If you have a tarp and some nails, you can make a temporary repair so you don't have flooding, too. If your roof is too steep to reach, don't even think of trying this. I did, however, once put down a tarp over a roof that a roofer had left partly uncovered, when a terrible rain storm arrived. So now I keep a few handy, and they have lots of other uses. If not exposed to UV light, they can last many years.

Now what did I not think of? Booze. But the sorts of folks I like all enjoy drinking. They have that one covered. And if you get through this storm unscathed, remember: this is early in the season. Get ready.

Plan B Skills

All of us dream, right? Of that perfect job, that special place we want to live, that special someone. We know that even with those three ingredients, if we have difficulty, help is a phone-call away. And there's Internet everywhere, true?

Many times it all ends well. But not always. So what are some key skills that every person should have by, say, age 25? Here's a stab at it, without going down the Prepper rabbit hole. Some of these skills would be of NO use in an apocalypse.

I thought of this after hiring Quentin, a man in his 20s who had very good skills with a chainsaw. He impressed my taciturn, highly skilled brother-in-law, too: a real feat. We'll be hiring him again.

So here goes. No, no instructions or lessons. That's your quest. I think we should all know how to:

Build a fire, using matches: The trick is twofold, finding dry wood and building a "tipi" type fire.

Sharpen a cutting edge: Hatchet, knife, axe, shears...it doesn't matter. With a stone or a metal tool. Keeping blades sharp, paradoxically, keeps you from cutting yourself. Mom taught me that one.

Change a tire: This requires learning to use the jack in the car and understanding how to loosen, then tighten lug-nuts by hand. Not every car has run-flats. There's a thing called an "owner's manual" in nearly every car. Read yours.

Jump-start a car: How can it be so hard? Positive to positive, negative to negative. But oh, the results of crossing those wires!

Start and run a chainsaw safely: I use these a lot, as we heat with wood. No need to rehash the advice here, but a novice can learn the basics: Check for a sharp chain and tight chain. Add lubricant for the chain when you fill the other tank with gas (and knowing which tank is which). Learn to use a choke. As for how to cut up a downed tree or how to fell one, that's something I'm still learning in baby steps.

Drive a vehicle with a manual transmission: Guilty! Busted! I'm learning, however. It's been a lifelong goal to own a straight-shift vehicle other than a tractor. I'm going to have one soon.

Find directions by sun or the North Star:  If you know how to find the Big Dipper, you can find Polaris and north. And if you roughly know the time of day, you can find at least one direction by the sun, though it gets tougher at mid day.

Understand investing: Basics here, the difference between equities, bonds, cash, and precious metals. I follow Bloomberg's site regularly. Do you know the difference between the DOW and S&P? Long and short-term bonds? Trends for gold and silver? What it means when the Fed changes the money supply or interest rates?

Do simple math by hand and manage a monthly budget: Here I love it that I learned and can still do long division.  Knowing these basics lets you keep track of expenses and project where you need to be, financially, in a month or two.

Be on time & be neat: Quentin really impressed me here. When he ran a little late for an understandable reason one day, he contacted me. He smokes, and like a soldier on a five-minute break for his squad leader, he cleaned up his cigs after. Compare that to the "friend" of a house-sitter one summer, who ruined one of our watering cans with hundreds of butts. Better than putting them in our yard, but that sitter was not hired again and we docked her pay for the cost of replacing a nicotine-ruined watering can.

Load and fire a handgun, shotgun, and rifle: Controversial, but I'd claim that knowing how to operate a semi-automatic handgun or revolver is a life skill you never wish to have to use, but if so...I'd add bolt-action rifle to the mix. Semiautomatic rifles can be more complex, but the "manuals of arms" for most pistols and revolvers are similar enough. Hitting a paper target with any of them at 30 feet is also needed for basic competence.

What skills have I left out? This might become a series!

Water Water Everywhere

And not a drop to drink until you boil it 5 minutes or run it through a filter.

If you get your water from a well, you are effectively a water-quality manager who oversees a water-treatment facility.  And when things go wrong, you learn about hydraulic engineering, geology, and pathogens.

For the past three weeks that has been our life, since seven inches of rain fell in a few days' time. Our dug well had developed a crack and a bit of missing casing, most likely from the earthquake of 2011, and that meant fecal coliform bacteria in the drinking water rose to levels that are not necessarily healthy. We had a water test last year, through a Virginia Tech extension agency program, and that proved marginal for coliform. The heavy rain changed things, fast.

Soil filters rain water, and coliform bacteria are present in most soil. Yet that can present an issue for Dug wells, commonly found on older properties, which are more prone to contamination; I understand that some banks will not issue a mortgage to a home that does not have a modern bored, deep well.

That's not us. Our well is only about 30 feet deep and 3 feet in diameter. I tested again when the heavy rains made our water cloudy. Test kits are cheap, and the consequences of not testing regularly? Serious illness in the worst cases.

In my home test after the rains, we failed. So what to do if you suddenly find yourself living in the 1840s? Digging a new well or even repairing this one would cost many thousands of dollars we do not have handy.

Time to boil and filter, as I would on a backpacking trip or, more ominously, after some disaster.

There's an entire section at Cabelas I call "The Doomsday Aisle" full of "survival" rations and gear, including some serious water filters and purifiers. The the distinction is critical; the latter remove bacteria from water. Most simple filters do not. I have used prefilters when camping, if rainwater has debris. An old Melita coffee filter does the trick.

I suppose The Doomsday Aisle gives suburban preppers the same false confidence that a backyard bomb shelter provided in the late 50s or, today, a seldom-fired handgun tucked in the nightstand or worse for the untrained, waistband. But I have found that these same folks also vainly try to "tick proof" their manicured lawns, killing helpful insects in the process, and panic at every tick bite; I keep a jar of the four or five that get me, weekly.

Thus I have decided to give up on telling such people that you cannot buy skills. But if you are still reading, here's a tip: only buy gear that you actually use sometimes, not tuck away in the utility room. The test of such supplies and, in our case, water filter, need not be the coming of Mad Max. It might simply be a hurricane that interrupts power and potable water for two weeks, as happened in 2003 during Hurricane Isabel. My nephew Chris, with Homeland Security, gets blue in the face trying to explain that two weeks of supplies are all one needs to mean the difference between life and illness or death.

That photo is so reassuring looking, isn't it, to those fretting about apocalypse? Yet no supplies will help you without potable water. I got a $60 purifier at Cabelas, made by Sawyer; I like their backpacking purifiers a lot. Like the smaller units, the big one is reverse-flushable and good for 100,000 gallons. More than enough! I like that it could be mounted to a bucket and gravity fed into a container to drink.

The first step in addressing problems such as ours was to "shock our well." Those of you on city water may imagine me sneaking up and yelling "boo" into the well house, or telling an off-color joke to the plumbing. As the Centers for Disease Control's site makes plain, however, it's a rather lengthy process.  You make a bleach-water solution (in our case, 3 gallons of bleach), pour it in the well, wash down the inner casing, and run the taps. A lot.

Eventually the bleach smell vanishes, and our shower tiles were cleaner. But a week later, I tested the water again for bacteria.

Another Epic Fail.

We had our well service visit, the folks who fixed the well several years ago. They suggested that short a very expensive repair, we install a UV light in the well, at the cost of $1100 and with an annual maintenance fee of $150.

Of course we said "yes. NOW." As for timing, we are still about two weeks out from installation, perhaps another from when I test the water again.  We have gotten adept at filtering drinking water nightly, using tap water to wash pots and pans, and running the dishwasher on "sanitize." So it's less 1840 and more an inconvenience. We could, in theory, go on this this forever.

But I am thankful that we do not have to.

e.e. cummings and the Log Splitter

At the memorial service for my dear departed friend Steve Gott, I sported a lovely and livid scar just over my left eye. It was so recently acquired that I had to be late for the service to stop the bleeding. It added some levity to explain why I was late. In short: I fought the log, and the log won.

Anything with 27 TONS of downward force deserves respect. Lots, in fact. Not all logs look as docile as the one in my picture.

I recall looking at the log-pile and thinking "these are nice straight ones. I don't need my goggles."

Force of habit made me don them. Just as I was finishing up (when such things tend to happen) a twisted bit of wood caught my eye, literally and figuratively.

I looked it over, fine-grained. It evoked driftwood, not a trip to the emergency room, so I popped it under the splitting maul.

Being hard-headed, again literally and figuratively, I kept the pressure going on the wood as the splitter began to squeal.

Oops. the wood split with an enormous pop, as an errant bit sailed toward my left eye like a planet-destroyer out of the original Star Trek series. Joe played the role of Commodore Decker...

My goggles saved my eye, and the wood skidded up my forehead. Now I'm going to be wearing the forestry helmet too.

Moral of the story? I'll leave that to e.e. cummings:

OSHA told him; he couldn't
believe it
(his sister told him; he
wouldn't believe it)
the Stihl chainsaw company certainly told
him, and his
(yes mam)
wife;
and even
(believe it or not) you
told him: i told
him; we told him
(he didn't believe it, no sir)
it took
a corkscrewed bit of
the old fallen oak
tree; in the top of his head to tell
him

(to wear his damned forestry helmet)

Praise for Owner's Manuals

After being exasperated about the rotary cutter's manual, especially its lack of clarity for a potentially expensive repair unless maintenance is done, I found a gem.

An old, but never used, Marlin 783 rifle with a nice Bushnell scope came my way. It's a varmit gun par excellence, in case Phyllis and her groundhog family manage to get past the Mountains of Mordor...I mean past the ramparts of what I am now calling "Fort Tomato."  Yes, cute as they are, I'll methodically yet with regret kill ever one I see if they begin destroying the garden.

That's another post I hope I'll never write, since for now, the groundhogs are cute and graze on clover.

Meanwhile, owner's manuals. Guns are even more dangerous than mowers, and though I'm familiar with long arms and pistols, I'm still thankful for this gem from the 1975 edition manual's section to load the weapons with "the bullet end toward the muzzle."

Shooters know what that means. Would a novice? Luckily, a handy photo shows a close up of loading the rifle.  Only a dunce--and there are dunces in abundance--would simply ignore the brief bit of advice and put, say, a bullet in backward. Yet I suppose it has happened, so it has spawned both The Darwin Awards and the titanic owner's manuals of our decade.

Such manuals bother me. By the time a reader wades through 20 pages or so of safety instructions, only then can a new piece of equipment be operated. My concern is that most won't read the manuals at all, facing such a daunting task.

I do read them, but then I wonder if I'm at all typical.

In addition to reading the manuals, I do Internet-based research, plus I chat with old-timers, before I begin with a new piece of gear. Thus I'm working on a chain-guard, common on the fronts and rear decks of newer rotary mowers, to add some protection for me when I pull an antique rotary cutter we have. It cuts grass like a master barber clips hair, but it not safe until modified with a chain guard.


There is no need to have one's name added to the Darwin Awards: read your manuals.