not not only tires get changed

Good news; bad news. Fortunately, that's usually the case. I picked up my neighbors tire...big slit in the side wall (didn't notice this until I had muscled it all the way up into the truck). Then I went to my friend's ranch to retrieve his tire and the same thing. Hmmn, Martin, do ya think there might be a reason 500 dollar tires are lying out in a field? So two for two on the tires.

But then the good news. I went on to the tire store and they had found 2 used (50% tread) tires for $125 a piece. I bought them.

simply changing a tire

I need to get my road graded so that I can drag the back hull section from where it lays on the road side (If you are not familiar with why part of my boat would be laying on the side of the road, see blog entry about popping a wheelie).

Problem is I have one tire that is flat and 1 tire that is in such bad shape I cannot fathom how it even holds air. Time to change the tire.

I call up Les Schwab and find out that a new tire is going to cost me 510 dollars. One tire. New rubber all the way around my grader would be 3 thousand bucks. I think I'll scrounge around for what I can find. For starters, my neighbor has a tire he'll give me. It's a 14.9 x 24 instead of my 13 .00 x 24, but beggars can't be choosers as gramma used to say, so I'll use it as it's really only 2 inches bigger in cross section. The first number is a measurement of the circumference and the cross section of the tire and the second number refers to the diameter of the wheel rim.

I get the grader jacked up and on blocks, persuade the wheel nuts to loosen up and, with a big Kung Fu kick, get the wheel off the grader. But, watch out! This wheel is so heavy that if it tips over, I won't be able to get it back up. I carefully roll it away. Not sure how I'll get the wheel up into the pick up for the ride to the tire store.

open to the light of day

I decided that I wasn't going to take the tank to Chuck, the welder, on the trailer. No title, no license plate, no brake lights. Besides, I wanted to cut the tank open, see what was inside, and clean it up with a wire brush.

I rolled out the cutting torch, scribed a cut line all the way around the tank with white chalk. Even though I knew that this was only a water tank, it still always makes me nervous when I apply the torch to the tank sides. There's that moment of apprehension when the torch melts through and the shower of sparks fills the dark tank interior. Round the tank I went--12 ft in all--saving the last 2 inches at the top so I could be out of harm's way when one 1000 lb hunk of metal became two halves.

Ugh. Looking inside, I found a bottom covered in muck and a dead rat. I climbed in armed with a garden hose and cleaned things up and out. I'll wire brush the rust and paint off and then figure out how to load the tank halves in my truck to take to Chuck's.

fuel tanks

Today I drug home a 1200 gallon tank. Using a chain winch, I was able to pull it up top of a 20 ft. trailer pretty easily. The trailer is an ugly looking thing that I picked up for a hundred bucks. In a former life it was a camper trailer--who knows where all it traveled to--but then spent lots of years sitting in an orchard as cheap housing for migrant workers over by Cashmere. A front-end loader crushed the camper and I got the trailer frame.

It worked great hauling the tank home despite the 1,000 lbs or so load. Some day I'll have to sandblast and paint the frame, wire it for lights and get a vehicle license for it.

So what I'll do is cut three feet off each end of the tank, put the finished end down (like a cup) weld baffles inside so the fuel doesn't slosh around and then weld a top on (like a lid). The factory seams will be down, where any leaks would be, and our new welds will be on the top, where leaking would be less likely. Still, even with this safe guard, I'm going to have someone else do the welding. I've got a friend, Chuck, who's been welding all his life, who said he'd be glad to help. He also has both a MIG welder as well as a plasma cutter.

The tank is perfect for this: it never had fuel in it, so explosions when cutting won't be an issue, and it is very heavy gauge at 3/16th of an inch.

Three feet of tank at 45" in dia. comes out to about 250 gallons. Minus 10% for air space and that makes it very close to the original Sea Mule tank size of 220 gallons. And, that's two tanks at 220 gallons, by the way, as there is one tank in each hull for each of the two engines.
I'm trying not to think about what it will cost to fuel up....

Smooth sailing

Some days feel like I get nowhere; others, like today, I gallop. Here's what all got accomplished:

I started out by getting the 80 amp breaker wired into the panel for the welder. Couldn't afford (or didn't want to afford) a price for a new breaker, so I found one on Ebay for 15 bucks. The welder, a behemouth of a thing, pulls 80 amps at 240 VAC. So, I'm that much closer to welding on the hull.

I got the wiring figured out and fixed on my big trailer air compressor. Since it's designed to be used by guys in the construction trade who, no offense, just wanna gettr done and won't be keeping an eye on engine gauges, this thing many fail safes. The engine will shut down if there's low oil pressure, or if the manifold temp gets too high or if the compressor pressure gets to high or if the engine overspeeds. When any of those things happen, it cuts of power to the coil AND shuts off fuel to the carb.

Fine. But what was throwing me was the fact that I couldn't get voltage thru the sensors and to the coil. Seems like the problem was in some missing circuitry...Turns out that they had installed a starter button that you hold in to bypass all the sensors and energize the system so you can start the engine. When everything is running, then you let go of the button.
Well. Yeah, now I know this! The button said "Push to start" so I just thought it was a starter button to crank the starter motor. Their lack of specificity and my assumptions added up to 4 hours of wire-tracing and head-scratchin'. But, it now runs great.

And, finally, I got a fuel system rigged up for the Wisconsin/Hobart gas welder. A friend gave me an Evinrude gas tank from his old outboard motor. Well, actually he gave me two and I told him I'd sell the other one on Ebay for him in return. I hooked the hose up to the fuel pump on the Wisconsin engine and that'll work just fine. I can even use the pressurizing pump on the tank to prime the system after it's sat for a prolonged period of time.

So I got the shop welder hooked up to do hull repairs, got the air compressor running to power my sandblaster, and got the fuel system running for my gas welder which I'll use to weld up the tracks on Millie the crane out in the field where she's far away from electricity and my shop. Millie is crucial to this project because she does all the heavy lifting of boat hulls and related equipment.

And all this after church and before supper. Yep, I'd call it a galloping day.

no reason to doubt

My friend Terry Sanderson asked if he could come up and help me work on some equipment. An unusual request since, as Holden Village's mechanic, all he does is work on equipment. Regardless, I wouldn't turn down the offer.



That's Terry on the right next to the 1948 Sterling Petrel engine we pulled out of an old mine pump house...but, that's a whole nuther story.


Terry is a great guy to have a round. When there's a problem that I can't figure out, I just let Terry at it. I know he's crunching the data when he's got his hand rubbing his chin and no words being spoken. He's from the farm lands of South Dakota, a place of few words. Finally the word that I wait to hear: "Huhmn." That's right, just a "Huhmn." And then he'll say something that I hadn't thought of and probably would never thing of. But it'll be elegant, creative, and get the job done.

Since he was the guest, I gave him the choice.
"Would you like to get the Sullair compressor woken up or breathe new life into the old Wisconsin engine/Hobart welder?"
He chose the compressor. Good, because since purchasing this thing 2 weeks ago and towing it home from Seattle, I had been having doubts about whether this was one of those too good to be true deals.

Well, with two seasoned mechanics set loose on it, it didn't take long at all to have tools and parts spread out like a garage sale. I drained about a half gallon of gasoline so old it looked like varnish. Terry got the points set and timed it by putting his thumb over spark plug hole number one until he felt the whoosh of air coming out. I fiddled with the carburator, an old up-draft zenith. Not trusting the governor, I disconnected the throttle. Terry couldn't get voltage to the coil, so he jumped from the starter terminal to the ballast resistor. We were ready to start it up. I controlled the starter, the throttle and choke; Terry had the hot ignition lead, and the starting fluid.
Gave it a try. A bunch of pops.
"Wait a minute, Martin...the spark plug wires are connected wrong. Alrighty, now try again!"
And that's all it took. Fired right up, ran smooth. Compressor built up pressure to the regulated 120 lbs. I opened the air line and the throttle kicked right back in. I closed the line and the unloader opened.
Everything as it should be. And, why not? True, most compressor's of this type go for 2 to 4 thousand dollars--not $550. And true, the successive stories I got from the folks that were selling it didn't always add up. But, bottom line: I trusted the guy. He looked me in the eye. My gut said "yes."
And now I have a good compressor that I can use to sand blast the Sea Mule. Well, accept for the fact that, when we shut it down a small geyser of pink, pepto-bismol looking compressor oil shot up and out the air intake. I'll have to figure that out next.

Still, a good day. The sun was out, meadow larks were singing and, for the first time since last fall, I felt the warmth of the sun on my back. Could be Spring is finally decided to come around after all.