New Englander
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Posts posted by New Englander
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1 hour ago, Alan Dinan said:
I’ve seen some shaped the same, but a bright red end and the rest of the body bright green. On tomato plants.
Nasty tomato horn worm - becomes a hawk moth. They eat incredibly fast.
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We had a mom bobcat with two kittens, if that's what they're called, last summer. This year we saw one again with no kids but last week a big male was walking the edge of the yard. I assume it was a male because of its size and it looked like it backed to a tree and sprayed like a tomcat does.
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I learned my lesson on propane tanks. When we bought the place 30 years ago I installed a gas cooking stove as i dislike cooking on electric. I called Amerigas and they installed two 100lb (I think) tanks and kept them full. It turned out that for that convenience we were paying almost $5.00/gallon! Flash forward to two years ago when we decided to stop burning wood and oil in our dual fuel ancient furnace and had an air source heat pump installed with a condensing gas furnace heat backup. After doing a little research on propane prices I realized how badly Amerigas was ripping us off. Owning your own tank lets you buy from whomever has the price.
Shopping around I found I could buy used, used refurbished, or new. One local company had a good price on new and would deliver and plumb it for the price and also would lock in a fixed price if we bought from them. I trenched for the line to the proper depth and put the required sand bed. They delivered, installed regulator, plumbed, pressure tested the whole system in time for the building inspector to see while he was signing off on the HVAC system and then filled it. It wasn't cheap at $3600. I could have beaten with used or refurb but time was of the essence and there was going to be an inspection as the HVAC guys had pulled a permit.
The locked in price was $2.19 for two years which jumped to $2.89 now. I haven't shopped around except a quick Google search that says NH average price is $3.77.
New England prices are high but nowhere near Alaska!
Got my favorite calamari at the Glacier Bay Brewpub last week in Anchorage. It was already down in the low 30s in the morning. I don't know how you Alaskans take the winters.
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Google replacement pins. They're only a few bucks if available for your application.
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I've used gaskets from this company. They use a material that is oil resistant and soft. They are reusable. The Continental rocker box gaskets reuse readily. The large and thin Norton primary cover gasket is reusable but a PITA as the gasket must be installed dry so it's hard to keep in place while getting the cover in place. They don't leak.
Anyway, maybe they will sell you a piece of the material to cut your own:
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Both my sister and her husband have gotten new hips. They just wore out. BIL's went without a hitch, my sister's was a bit of a slow healer but turned out ok. She got a new knee last night. Advances in medicine keeping us going! My new knee working well.
I hope yours is just something temporary but when the cortisone shots stop working it might be time for a replacement. One of our friends had a procedure where instead of cutting off the ball they ground it down and glued a new surface to it and drilled out the socket and glued a new one in. Recovery was fast. He had both done at the same time and was skiing a month later!
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A professional photographer has taken a couple of shots of our place from the road. Someone found them for sale and let us know. The kids bought them framed for us. Photo captures house and shop, barn is hidden by the house.
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Congratulations! My dad was addicted and never was able to quit and it finally killed him at 50. While not a problem for me I was addicted to nicotine and had a terrible time quitting smoking. I kicked it a couple of times and went back. One I remember clearly when a co-worker passed out baby cigars and I lit up. The bit I inhaled sent me to the cigarette machine shortly thereafter. That demonstrated to me the power of addiction. It's been at least 40 years but I know that the lung damage from that and other things is permanent.
As for drinking: I enjoy one IPA almost every night except when restricted by our 12 hour bottle to throttle rule. The FAA's rule is actually 8 hours but the company's is 12. At home my wife and I have a beer or glass of wine with dinner and a single malt nightcap. The Scotch is expensive but a small vice.
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We have one very large skillet that gets a fair amount of use.
What do you use the large pot for?
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14 hours ago, nomorejohndeere said:
A marine spark arrestor cover could give you something to keep an eye on for dust and stuff...
I used those on my boats, two on the Wellcraft. Two 10si that I built with, I think, 90 or 100 amp stators. I think the screens may block a lot of cooling but in the boat the engine room was pretty cool and with two on line the load was pretty light even running the inverter. The gen set took care of the heavy AC load when running the heat pump. Other boats I had just didn't have much of a load on the single except bringing the house battery back up but that was transient.
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The Tuk Tuk is about all that's in my range.
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A postmortem may indicate if you need to blow them out more often.
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Acem is spot on. The 10si cooling is marginal for a continuous high amp especially if not out in the breeze or getting clogged by debris. Originally they were 37 amps up to about 60 amps max but you can get 140 amp stators for them. The stator is the controlling component but the cooling and diodes are not up to it. 12si were up to 94 amps stock and will work with a higher capacity stator. If you're running the AC and a half dozen incandescent flood lights it's a considerable load.
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Lots of family plots all over New England. Some get maintained, others overgrown. I can think of a half dozen within a 5 mile radius. They were mostly on the farms around me that were abandoned when the Midwest opened up and subsequently subdivided.
The right thing to do would be to reset the markers that got displaced.
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2 minutes ago, Dirt_Floor_Poor said:
It’s the same reason I had to get a subscription based time clock app for employees to clock in. I did trust them until I started tracking the hours myself without their knowledge and found out how much they were stealing. Guys were 20 hours off on what I owed them for a two week pay period.
To quote my wife: "people suck!"
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The only union at Delta Airlines is the pilot union. Everyone else is non but the pay scale is higher. Delta is smart to keep it that way. Employees get good pay and don't have to pay dues. If someone is a slacker it's not impossible to terminate them. We all know what it's like to be holding up our end and having a co-worker who doesn't. I know at Eastern there were some mechanics that the rest of us would not have been sad to see go. Changing an engine on the ramp in freezing rain looking for help that is hiding somewhere while your mustache has icicles on it. Dedicated guys who want to get the plane back in service v the slackers who don't want to work.
There's an internal process run by employees to prevent someone from being railroaded due to personality conflicts.
Full disclosure: My wife is union. There are slackers in the school system that are hard to terminate due to it and I'm sure it bothers her as she's a hard worker. She often reveals that she's doing other's work because if it isn't done she can't do hers.
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Consider that any used cooler may have contaminates that could compromise the system if not professionally cleaned. Any time we had any contamination in the oil even if the source was found and corrected we'd send the cooler out. The thought being that there are too many places where junk can hide in an old cooler that may dislodge in service. It's money well spent.
Adapting new is a good idea too. What's the money difference?
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Torque seal. Used all over aircraft to indicate both that the fastener or hose fitting has been properly torqued and that is hasn't loosened.
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Where to start?
I’ve been both Union and non in my life. I sure did appreciate the wage increase over general aviation when I went to work for Eastern Airlines. I soon found out though that the very militant non-skilled guys smashing bags were making almost as much as we who were skilled and trained and signing off an airplane as airworthy. Park a plane and throw a set of chocks under it so the paying passengers could get off and make their connection while the smashers were busy or screwing off somewhere could get your tires slashed.
The shop steward, who thought he didn’t have to do much would bring in a list and say “these are who we’re voting for this year”. Jimmy Carter and the whole ticket? NO way. Anyway, most of us just did our jobs and were careful not to step on anyone’s toes. Unless a contract was up it was a pretty good place to work. Any local grievance would elicit a union directive to work to rule. I saw the shop steward actually damage airplanes to take them out of service in the union’s effort to “send a message” to management.
Later at another station I became a foreman. We had a lot of excellent mechanics who busted their butts to keep the aluminum in the air. We also had the union types who did the minimum or less and when asked to accomplish a task would respond “No, see my lead”. I maintained a pretty good relationship with most and could actually get work out of them.
Middle management wasn’t all that in tune. When I made foreman, the general foreman took me for a ride in his pickup on the perimeter road. He said “all those guys are a bunch of a-holes” I responded that I was one of them yesterday. He just had the wrong attitude. I remember during a job action when I was the only foreman on duty on the gates overnight with 15 planes. The general had 2 at the hangar. My planes all flew in the morning and his were dead. I had appealed to the crew with the logic that the passengers ultimately paid us. Write up everything you want but don’t kill the birds.
After deregulation and then PATCO I saw the writing on the wall and left for a better career. Eventually it was the machinist union, the IAM that killed the airline. Eastern was once the largest airline in terms of passengers flown.
PATCO was another example of my disdain. I dated a cute redhead controller. She had just completed probation when PATCO walked after Reagan said they’d be fired if they did. She was pressured by the union to walk, told she would be ostracized if she didn’t, and never worked ATC again.
I’ve made a damned good living in non-union jobs ever since. Yes, many of my friends, guys and girls I flew with went on to have good livings flying for the airlines, had schedules that I haven’t but I made the right choice for me, been all over the world and seen places that not many have. One of my friends had enough at the airlines and went back to corporate and has no regrets.
Unions seem to be both good and bad in my view but perhaps more bad. Your mileage may vary.
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An interesting observation I've made over the years is that anything that I take apart that has Locktite on it, well, comes apart! The Locktite protects the threads from rust so it is sort of a double fix. It keeps things from loosening but lets them get loose when wanted.
Yes, I've looked like the tin man more than once.
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These guys clean/flush all sorts of industrial oil coolers. Check the website for industrial:
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We had a two party line into the '60s when it finally went private.
The bookie in the pool room sat by the pay phone and did all his business on it. He must have fed it a lot of dimes during the day.
We had a trick to get a call with just a penny by sliding a strip of shirt cardboard in one slot then dropping a penny in another.
The trick to get a private line was to say you were an oil burner service man on call.
I had a drunk Scotsman approach me one night in JFK airport. He was barely able to stand, slurring his words and screaming at me that he wanted a phone box except it didn't sound anything like phone box. He screamed louder a phone box you daft 'ucker! I finally determined what he wanted and pointed to a bank of at least 20 payphones on the wall. It was a good laugh.
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New England and the Maritimes have had nothing but rain all summer. Too bad we can't shift some of that precip.
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Emma found these in the SoyBeans
in General Chat
Posted
One will strip a tomato plant bare in short order. Watch one eat before you kill it; they're voracious!