Debur That Chainsaw Bar!

Ruger's Auction To Benefit The Light Foundation

Ruger has a beautiful M77 Express Rifle on the auction block this week.  French Walnut, Express Sights, and 7mm Magnum, together make an irresistable package!  It is New In Box in Ruger's vault, just waiting to be shipped to the winner's FFL.  This fine rifle sells mid-day, August 30, 2017.  Click Here to read the full description and to place your winning bid.  $1375

Tuesday Torque: Old Threshers Starts Thursday!

Flyboyslc1 posted this video from Old Threshers in 2013, the last year I made it up to Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. I spotted a few remarkable things to look for. From the 38 to 48 second mark you will see a couple of Gade engines; one of my favorite makes. At 1:07 his camera glides by what looks to be a 3 HP Falk engine; a very rare bird. At 2:21 you see the inverted Master Workman engine, made by Temple Pump Company in Chicago, Illinois. I first saw that engine at Mt. Pleasant in 1965. I hope it is still being shown. At the 1:55 mark you get a glimpse of a barn fresh IHC. I think it is a Famous, and it is maybe a 6 HP model.

The Saloon Girls have been embarassing unsuspecting guys for decades. I know better than to go in there while a show is going on!

Let The World Know You're Working

Just try to sound a little better than a Maytag engine!  They are loud little critters!



Back To The Old Grind!

Happy National Dog Day!

We certainly had a good time today on National Dog Day.  We have our two Schipperkes, plus Koda and Bear (fosters), and now we have Titan, a young male Schip that was running astray in Springfield, IL.  He was quarantined for two weeks by a vet, and now he is relearning how to be a house pet at our house.

He walks well on leash, he knows sit and down; so we think that someone is broken-hearted over losing a pet they had obviously worked with.  Titan is very high in energy.  Turn him loose in the dog yard and he really rips.  Show him a kibble and he comes right to you.  He knows "Inside", and is easy to get back into his kennel.  He nearly starved to death while he was living on the streets, and he is still pretty bony.  He is going to be a good companion for some lucky family.  Don't contact us at this blog's email address.  If you are interested in adopting a homeless Schipperke, fill out an adoption application with Midwest Schipperke Rescue.

Got Locomotive Helper?

What do you do when you have to pick up a 200 ton loco and put it back on the rails? Watch the crew at Fort Wayne Railroad as they wrestle frogs down in the ballast, in the rain! These guys are good!

 

Thanks To Merle for spotting this great video!

Getting Past Your Education

Did a teacher ever tell you wrong?  Have you figured out all the mistakes your teachers made?  My favorite was my fifth grade teacher, a lady I actually argued with one day.  She told us that if we ate the same thing every day we would get tired of it.  I spoke up and told her that I would never get tired of hamburgers, and that ticked her off a little bit.  I look at the overweight people in the various burger shops and think of her once in a while.  Millions of obese Americans prove that gal wrong every day.

The picture is a nice black walnut we are growing.  They will teach you in forestry schools that when you have multiple stems you should cut off the smaller one if there is a U transition.  If it's a V you should leave it alone.  I still hear that being given as advice.  You can see above that I cut two sprouts off the base of the dominant walnut.  One wound sprouted back and is making an unmerchantable stem, but it did heal over the wound.  The wound closer to the main stem did not heal over; it barely has a callous ridge around it twenty years after I made those cuts.  The open wound allowed rot to enter, so the stump has decay; we just don't know how much.  My advice, from experience, is to leave these extra stems alone, unless you can catch them when they are just an inch or two in diameter.  We don't prune off limbs after they reach two inches on timber trees, and I now apply that standard to multiple stems.  Here's a big clue that tells you what I should have figured out sooner.  When we prune live limbs off the trunk of a tree we leave the callous ridge at the base of the limb.  That is fast growing tissue, and it allows the tree to close the wound quickly.  There is no such ridge at the base of a sprout growing from the stump.  It might heal, it might not.  There is no need to take that risk.

Crime And Punishment In Illinois

Got Some Live Ones For You!

Coming home through Dahlgren, IL the other day I saw some good ones to share with you!

Area Code 618.

Ruger's Auction To Benefit The Light Foundation

Ruger is offering a workhorse this week! It is a 2012 production P95 in 9mm, with a Picatinny rail and two 15 round magazines.

This fine pistol is New Old Stock, and has been residing in Ruger's safe since it was built. Click Here to read the entire description and to place your winning bid.  $525

Tuesday Torque: Road King's Got A Maytag!

The Road King is really moving on this project, so we are going to put up several videos here to catch up.

Eclipse 2017, Far From The Madding Crowd

Location is darned important. This is where we would have liked to go:

There's a little cemetery south of Carbondale, near Makanda where we have ancestors. This is Mary A Pollet Morgan, who passed in 1870,  a month after giving birth to Francis Lee Morgan, one of my great-grandfathers. The problem is, Carbondale was the focus of he Eclipse Crowd.  I-57 was going to be jammed on this day, also Hwy 13 that goes to Carbondale from the Interstate, and Makanda was being mobbed.  If we got there, we would also have to get home, and it's a two hour drive when the traffic is easy.

 Click on the photos to enlarge.

We studied the eclipse maps, and we didn't have to go far to get into totality.  We settled on Thompsonville. Good highways there, and we could take off into the country on township roads to get a bit farther south.

We stumbled on the Liberty Methodist Church and graveyard just as the eclipse was beginning. The only other person here was a man mowing the lawn, and he was just ready to leave.

We have witnessed partial eclipses before, so this was quite familiar.  My welding helmets have #10 filters, so I doubled the filters on a helmet to be safe, thus the ghost image.

Susan had some genuine Eclipse Glasses, and they were effective, too.

Susan also made a pinhole camera, and we all had a good time with that.

It's getting closer!

We thought is was supposed to cool down!  Here Susan is fanning her mother.

Pattie could not lean back or raise her head far enough to look directly at the sun, so Susan held her up as totality came on. Everybody tore off their protection and we were amazed to see the corona show. We could see wisps reaching out and coming back to the sun, plus the roughness of the moon, and the diamond ring effect at the beginning and end.

The next one in seven years comes right over little old Belle Prairie, so we won't have to move an inch to watch it!  We got really lucky today.  We could see vertical development in clouds all around us, but it was clear overhead.  The crowd in Carbondale had overcast, and one report we heard said that they got to see 3 seconds of the eclipse.  We got a full 1 minute, 20 seconds at our private showing just out of Thompsonville, IL.