Deliver me from John Deere

I am relaxing in a recliner today, and not by choice. TMI warning for those not interested in the medical issues of strangers. I had a hideous skin thing dug out of my back earlier today, so I am not allowed to bend over or do anything strenuous because of the stitches. I guess I won’t describe the skin thing, but I will say it was not cancer. And if you ever have the same problem and your skin thing opens up, afterward, you may never again be able to eat or be in the same room with Gruyere cheese.

I didn’t get a skin thing because I’m filthy. I scrub my back with soap every day.

As a Floridian, I am not very scared of skin cancer. People up north think it’s real cancer, but except for melanoma and maybe whatever it was that got Jimmy Buffett, it’s not. The vast majority of skin cancers are squamous and basal cell, and unless you let them go practically forever, they amount to nothing. You can actually cure little ones yourself with a can of computer keyboard spray. Freeze them, and they die and peel off.

If you get squamous and basal cell and you let it go until it burrows into your body, well, then you have real cancer.

Dave Portnoy is running around calling himself a cancer survivor because he had a superficial lesion cut out of his neck. Not impressed. That’s like saying you survived the Las Vegas massacre when you were blocks away at a crap table. He announced his survivor status in a pretty lighthearted way, so he is clearly no more impressed with his lesion than I am.

I’ve frozen quite a few things off in my bathroom. For all I know, I’m a cancer survivor.

I am not allowed to do anything, so suddenly I want to do all the things I’ve put off. I want to install a new pool filter. I want to burn a few tons of yard waste. No can do. I’ll be allowed to start doing things three days from now, but then I won’t want to do them.

I want to go look at a new lawnmower. I am considering dropping what I think is an enormous sum on a commercial zero-turn, because my geriatric John Deere tractor is ready for assisted living. I’ve already written about it.

I keep turning it around in my head. Do I want the mower because I’m a covetous, pampered spendthrift who hates working on machines he should be grateful to have, which is a proposition that could be defended with a colorable argument, or is it because it is legitimately stupid and cheap to keep relying on a machine that makes me miserable?

I could get a new but not-too-expensive machine, but their engines last a third as long, and they are not as sturdy as the better models. They’re only less expensive if you die before they wear out. If they die first, they’re actually more expensive than better machines.

Having no 3D flesh and blood people to teach me anything, I have joined a lot of forums in order to learn things. Recently, I’ve been engaging on a forum related to outdoor work. People were taking about heat stroke and safety, and I offered my always-coveted and respected two cents’ worth, which I will paraphrase here, because I’m sure you want to read it.

When I’m working outside, and I start to feel like the heat is getting to me, I put my tools indoors, go inside, take a shower, and hit the recliner. If the yard is full of tree branches, I don’t care. I don’t have an HOA. I answer only to God and Ron DeSantis.

I also try not to lift anything heavy. Sometimes I’m too immature to follow my own advice, but I do try to find help or use machinery to pick up things I could pick up if I exerted myself. When it comes to trees, I cut branches and logs up to make them lighter. I never carry brush or limbs more than maybe 25 feet. I move the tractor or cart to the mess.

Young men always want to impress other people with their strength, which is usually nothing impressive and not something other people care about. I have lifted things in order to impress people, and I’m sure I failed. When I got older, I got somewhat less stupid, so I developed my current policy.

The amazing thing is that when you look out for your body, other men make fun of you.

My sister dated a deaf bodybuilder much younger than herself. One day, they were present when I needed to move a boat propeller which weighed maybe 75 pounds. I had moved it many times before, but I was getting wiser, so I suggested dividing the load between myself and my sister’s escort. He sort of smirked and picked it up by himself. Like I was some sort of disgrace even to men unlike himself who were not products of illegal drugs combined with suboptimal priorities.

I didn’t care. God bless him. I didn’t have to exert myself, and I didn’t risk injury. He thought he was putting me in my place by doing my work for me, and of course, while I didn’t think much of his attitude, I was very happy to stand by and do nothing.

I used to be an armorbearer at Miami’s corrupt Trinity Church up on 2nd Avenue. One day, we had to come in for some pretty amateurish “training.” As one of our tasks, we were supposed to pick up another armorbearer and carry him across the stage, running.

I flat-out refused. My knees were good, but not perfect. I didn’t see any reason to risk screwing them up. I didn’t care about the inappropriate, manipulative, and mindless appeals to teamwork, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. I hate manipulation more than, probably, anyone else on Earth. I don’t even like being manipulated to do things I already want to do.

If you paralyze yourself at Trinity Church, jumping in front of a bullet for Pastor Rich Wilkerson, all you will get from the church is a warm thank-you followed by stonewalling from its attorneys. They weren’t going to pay for knee surgery or back surgery, which often doesn’t work anyway.

My best friend at the church had a back problem that day. He was not supposed to lift things. I told him this in front of the other guys: “These guys won’t be around to help you if you hurt yourself.” That was a major no-no, but I said it anyway. He had kids to support, and he had to be able to move and carry things.

They kept hooting at him to do the exercise, so he picked a guy up and ran. Thanks to God alone, he was okay, but I thought he was nuts, and he probably agrees today.

You can do things faster and sometimes better and easier if you forget about safety. No doubt about it. I don’t care. You only get one body, and once you have a permanent disability, you won’t get relief until you die.

I’m writing about safety because I’m thinking about my mower. The deck under the mower weighs around 340 pounds, and it’s very difficult to remove and replace. You have to remove it in order to sharpen the blades, which should be done at least once a year. You also have to remove it to change the oil, although it is possible to suck oil out with a pump if you’re satisfied with an imperfect job, and you can install a long tube that moves the oil plug out from above the deck.

I have removed the deck several times, and I have lifted it up onto its side and removed and replaced the blades. If I keep the mower, I’ll have to keep doing this until one of us is too far gone.

This is a real problem, and the older I get, the scarier the possible consequences are. A back injury from lifting can put you on a walker and leave you peeing in a bag for the rest of your life. Or you can have both types of incontinence and end up wearing diapers.

Remember the Butterbean? He is a fierce stump of a man who overpowered opponents in mixed martial arts and the WWE. A very scary guy. Today, I could beat the daylights out of him, and so could you. He’s in a wheelchair, not because he had a disease or accident he could not avoid, but because he did not take basic measures to look after himself, like finding a better way to make a living. His problem? Back and hip injuries. Needlessly self-inflicted.

He did impress a lot of strangers who don’t care about him, though.

My best friend is a very big guy, and he has always been proud of it. He lifted things he shouldn’t have. He hurt his back throwing a jockey. He had to have two disks fused, and it didn’t work.

In no time, you can go from being a superior and intimidating physical specimen to being someone who can be bullied by average guys and who is down at the bottom of the list as a potential mate.

I feel impressed with myself when I manage to get the mower apart and lift the deck onto its side. I won’t lie. But just about any guy could do it, and it’s a stupid thing to do without a machine.

Pulling the deck out from under the tractor has to be done by hand. There is no machine that can do it. Shoving the reluctant deck driveshaft onto the PTO shaft is a recipe for back spasms and disk injuries.

The more I think about it, the more I think the best choices are to hire a lawn service or buy a new mower. But if I get a lawn service, I have no idea how high their rates will go as inflation continues. Buying a mower is a simple matter of swiping a card and paying once at the end of my cycle. The freedom and relief would be immense.

I am thinking about the mower I need. It has to be very tough, because this property is the Bermuda Triangle of mowing. New rocks seem to create themselves and pop out of the ground, and there are always sticks falling from the trees. It has to be reliable, because repairs are high on the list of reasons for ditching the old mower. It has to be very easy to work on, because when I work on the old mower, I have black thoughts about the engineers who designed it. It has to have good parts support from the manufacturer. Finally, the local dealer who services it can’t be a complete idiot. That’s a tough one.

It doesn’t have to be extremely fast. My time is roughly as valuable as that of a goldfish. I would love a diesel, but I will not live on Earth long enough to take advantage of the longevity, and if I treat a 4-stroke gas engine well, it should be willing to start when I need it.

A new diesel garden tractor is a possibility, and they cost about as much as good zero-turns. They are more versatile. On the other hand, a zero-turn will be more maneuverable, and while I don’t need light speed, I would like to move faster than I do now. I mow at a snail’s pace. I think zero-turns move faster.

The new fuel lines for the John Deere have arrived, and the other little parts should be here shortly. Maybe I’ll be able to get it put together on Sunday. After that, will my motivation to buy new stand fast, or will I, once more, cave in to a possibly misguided desire to be financially responsible?

Or I could go the Miami Cuban route, pave my yard, and coat it with pink house paint.

Ask me next week.

Patience With John Deere Wearing Thin

I’m trying to figure out what to do about my lawnmower.

I am really tired of fighting with my John Deere 430. It’s supposedly a very tough machine. It cost about $9000 new, 34 years ago. That makes it, roughly, a $20,000 item today. Okay, let’s assume it’s extremely well-made. It still needs repairs all the time. Was it like this in 1995, or is it just age? No idea. Doesn’t matter, because I can’t snap my fingers and make it new.

I could send it to the local dealer and spend maybe $1500 on it to get it fixed. Towing both ways. New fuel lines. Fluids. Fix a small hydraulic leak.

That would probably take a month, during which my grass would grow to thigh height, leave me with an old tractor that could get me through 5 more years. The parts supply is drying up, so I can’t keep fixing it forever at the dealership.

I got frustrated and started thinking about buying a new commercial-grade zero-radius-turn mower, or “zero-turn.” But a good one with a reasonably wide deck would cost over ten grand. Is it worth it, or am I letting fatigue and extreme annoyance cloud my judgment?

The web says a gas mower goes 500-700 hours before dying. I assume this means an amateur-grade mower, because I can’t imagine a lawn service replacing mowers, what, every 125 workdays at 4 hours per day? That’s maybe $17,000-$26,000 per year.

If people are saying they run 500-700 hours, that means they run 500 hours. For me, that ought to be about 8.5 years, assuming the yard doesn’t expand too much. It does expand as trees fall over or have to be cut.

Various people discussing commercial gas mowers on the web cite figures of 1500-2000 hours before problems pop up, and the 1500-hour problem I see mentioned is burning oil, which is not fatal right away. If these figures are based in reality, a commercial mower’s engine should be good for 2000 hours. I see people guessing at much higher figures for the other parts. It ought to be possible to get 3500 hours with one repower job. I may be raptured or reduced to bone by 1000.

So if this information is correct, a commercial mower will go about three times as long as a Lowe’s mower, for roughly twice the price, with, presumably, less aggravation. Surely there have to be perks other than longevity.

I don’t like the idea of buying a cheaper mower and putting up with a flimsy chassis. This yard is crazy, and I also mow weeds in my pasture. Even now, I occasionally hit a rock or a piece of wood.

What about buying a used commercial mower? I think that’s what I already did. The John Deere 430 is not a homeowner machine. When my tractor was new, a homeowner model cost a lot less. Zero-turns were just getting popular when my mower was made, so I suppose tractors with belly mowers, like the 430, were still mainstream at that time.

This means I bought a used commercial mower, and it has been an instrument of torture. If Kafka had worked on one, he would have written several more short stories. I lose several months a year because it comes up with new ways to break down. I could send it to the dealership and spend a grand a year, but based on my experiences with dealerships, they would keep it for at least a month at a time, so it wouldn’t help much.

I think buying used is stupid. The choices are: fix the 430 again myself and hope for the best, pay the dealer to fix it and hope for the best, and blow a huge wad on a new commercial mower. And be substantially less delusional when hoping for the best.

I don’t want to give up the tractor features, but what do I do with them? Let’s see. I pull a cheap harrow. I think I used it two years ago.

I have a real tractor. It runs a bush hog. It will hold over half a ton on its fork. It has a big bucket. It will rip stumps up and dig trenches with a subsoiler. The Deere will not do any of that. It’s a little tractor for pixies. The Kubota has 37 horsepower, and the Deere has 20. You would think the Deere would still be a pretty respectable machine, but it’s in a different universe.

I think they’re good for plowing snow in small driveways. I recall seeing them rigged up for snow on the web.

It would be good to have the 430 if the Kubota refused to start and had to be moved. That’s about it. I could do that with the car, though.

The Deere’s muffler fell off. The alternator died. The alternator belt broke, and replacing it was a horror job. Removing the belly mower to fix the blades is a ticket to back surgery. The PTO switch died. The rear hydraulic cylinder had to be replaced. The grill fell off, and I ran over it because I couldn’t see it.

I could probably get $2000 for it, because people with no common sense love the John Deere 430.

If I get a new commercial mower, I’ll be paying, realistically, about $950 per year to use it during the 5-year warranty, all-inclusive. Afterward, ignoring inflation because I can’t predict it, that figure could be maybe $1100 per year. Call it $90 per month over 15 years. I’m assuming I’ll still be able to mow when I’m that old. What does a landscaper charge here? More than $90, but how much more?

That may not be much more than keeping the John Deere going, now that I think about it. Or maybe I could get several years out of it with no big repairs. It’s a crapshoot.

I could go for a cheaper commercial zero-turn and reduce my monthly figure to maybe $60 per month.

I am sick of this tractor. I would love to sit down, turn a key, back out of the shop, mow the yard, pull back in, and go have a beer. Every time. These days, I sit down, turn a key, back out, mow for an hour, have a problem, limp to the shop, sit down at the PC, and order parts while my yard grows.

The Kubota has only had two problems I didn’t cause. The shutoff solenoid needed a zip tie to line things up so it worked, and a safety switch on the forward/reverse pedal needs to be fixed, which is a small job once you find out what the problem is. The Kubota is great. It’s everything the John Deere is not.

The dealer here is very slow to fix Kubotas, but I’m not sure there is such a thing as a dealer who will fix a homeowner machine in under three weeks. And when your machine rarely needs help, slow dealership shops cause limited pain.

I’ll pray about it and decide what to do. One thing is certain: I am about to have a mower I can rely on, whether it’s a repaired John Deere or something else.

My Blood Runs Anything but Green

Every time I think I’m done fixing my outdoor power tools, they pull me back in.

Now it’s my John Deere garden tractor, again.

When I bought this thing used, I read up on it, and I found that odd people who made landscaping a kind of sick hobby thought it was wonderful. They said this tractor was coveted and would last forever. I saw nasty old ones selling for over $3000.

Since then, the rear hydraulic cylinder has failed, a big spring on the belly mower has snapped, and the PTO clutch has refused to work. All this, under very light use. If this is what a great, dependable old mower is like, what are the bad ones like?

The cylinder is what turned me off John Deere forever. Even buying a John Deere hat would make me nervous.

The rear seal failed, and oil gushed out. This is the same oil that runs the transmission and steering.

A normal hydraulic cylinder has a removable cap on one or both ends. When your seals fail, you unscrew a cap, pull the rod out, pull the old seals off, put new ones on, seal everything up, and go back to work. Back when my cylinder’s seal failed, a similar cylinder from a different company might have cost $100. My cylinder was around $180, I believe, and now they are discontinued.

The John Deere cylinder was welded shut on both ends. Welded. Seals are expected to fail. It’s not a sign something is defective. A seal is like a spark plug or shock absorber. They have to be replaced every so often. And John Deere gave me two cylinders that were welded shut. This is like selling you a car with the lug nuts welded on.

I managed to install a new cylinder. I could have used the lathe to cut the old one open, and I could have done a lot of welding and threading to turn it into a new cylinder, but it was May, it was hot, and my yard was a mess.

Installing the new cylinder was a nightmare because John Deere made the tractor as hard as possible to work on.

When the next cylinder fails, I will have to find a way to rebuild an old one or replace it with something different. Even if the replacement is Chinese, it will be better than the original.

Right now, my fuel lines are leaking. If I had written this two days ago, I would be able to say my fuel LINE was leaking, but I screwed up another line when I tried to fix it.

The injector pump has three rigid plastic lines going into the top. They have 17 mm hex fittings, and the fittings are so close together, there is no kind of wrench that can be applied to the center fitting without removing one of the others. Guess which fitting was leaking?

When I turned the front fitting, instead of getting easier to turn, it got harder. I found out this was because the fitting and line were stuck together. The fitting should have turned around the line, but it twisted it instead.

After a lot of fruitless work, I started the tractor and limped it into the workshop so it would be sheltered while I looked for answers.

Finding answers was hard. I started yesterday, it’s about noon, and I finished about half an hour ago.

John Deere’s shop manual is useless. John Deere’s site is useless. The site showed me fuel lines, and I bought two, but it did not mention the crush washers and O-rings that also have to be replaced. I got that information elsewhere.

These parts are not shown on Deere’s online diagrams. I finally found a fuel injection manual published by Yanmar, the maker of the engine, and that gave me Yanmar part numbers. For parts legitimately worth about $10, I just spent about $50. That doesn’t include the lines. The local Deere dealer doesn’t stock any of these things, so I ordered everything online.

Someone else out there will have this problem and need help, so I will cut and paste some information including part numbers.

Fuel lines:
Front – AM100753, replaced by AM876210
Middle – AM100754, replaced by AM876211
Rear – AM100755, replaced by AM876212

O-ring (Yanmar): 124550-51370
Packing (Yanmar plunger barrel 28): 174307-52170
Packing (Yanmar delivery valve seat 19): 124550-51350

***CORRECTION: someone who asked me not to reveal the correct numbers for the Yanmar parts says my numbers are wrong. I already used these numbers to order, so I am going to order the other parts and see how they compare. I guess I’ll have to eat some shipping costs.***

The delivery valve seat packing goes under the O-ring and a couple of other things. The other one (plunger barrel) goes farther down. See Yanmar manual.

I may not have parts for a week, and my yard has been growing ever since the tree crew massacred a bunch of dangerous oaks. They wiped out a lot of the yard, and then we had very hot, dry weather, so I had to let the grass rest. Yesterday would have been a great time to start mowing again. Now I’ll have to deal with deep grass and seed heads.

Should I complain about the failure of these 34-year-old parts? No, but John Deere could make some effort to help people get new ones. The site doesn’t list them or provide diagrams, and when you use the tool that tells the site to list parts appropriate for your product, it won’t let you.

My plan for this tractor is to keep it going until it blows up or until I can no longer stand fixing it. Then I’m getting a gas zero-turn, or, if Jeff Bezos gets high on mushrooms and sends me a hundred million dollars, a diesel zero-turn, which would last longer and be less trouble.

My real tractor is also acting up.

Modern tractors have a bunch of irritating parts designed by lawyers, not engineers. They have all sorts of switches that turn them off when you really need them. For example, I had to bypass a switch on the John Deere that shut the engine down whenever I got off.

The other day, I got my newly-revived and modified Echo chainsaw out to cut a big oak that fell unexpectedly, and it would not run. For the 3000th time. I finally guessed it might be the fuel filter, but none of the new ones I had were the right size. I rinsed the old one with brake cleaner, and now the saw runs.

This took up a lot of my time. When it was over, I got back to work, and my Kubota tractor, which I needed to move wood, refused to start.

After a lot of who shot John, I realized it would start if I jiggled the forward/reverse pedal. I got some wood moved.

I went on the web asking people if they had any idea where the safety switch on the pedal was. I could not find it. They said there was no safety switch. That was last week. Finally, today, someone told me where it was and how to fix it.

The tractor works, but I have to fiddle with the pedal, so I am going to have to creep under it in the summer heat and handle the problem, which will turn out to be harder to fix than I now expect.

I don’t know what other obscure problems the John Deere will have in the future. Another failed hydraulic cylinder is a certainty. Maybe I should buy a used one now and modify it. I hope the next bad cylinder will be the one on the steering, because that one is easy to get to.

I understand when products have unavoidable problems due to their nature and the natures of their jobs. Stupidity is another thing. Deliberately sabotaging customers, which John Deere did, is yet another. They could have used the same kind of cylinder everyone else uses. They went out of their way to make things hard and expensive. Would I buy more John Deere products? No. The whole business makes me hope they go bankrupt. A John Deere bankruptcy would benefit the consumer by allowing better companies to fill the void, just as the huge defeats the Big Three experienced gave us access to Toyota and Honda.

It would help. Or would it? The other companies may be just as bad. I tend to doubt it, based on the scuttlebutt about John Deere’s attitude toward hosts. I mean customers.

You poison Kim Jong Un, his sister steps in, and she’s even worse. That’s how the world often works.

I spend a fair amount of time on tractor forums, and my understanding is this: all small tractors (below 100 horsepower) are equal in quality. Except Mahindras, which are worse. They’re all made overseas. They all last about the same number of hours. The key to a good tractor experience is picking a good dealer, not a good tractor. You need someone who will be helpful when you need repairs.

The local Kubota place is pretty good. I’m afraid to enter the Deere dealership.

Buying a John Deere will not guarantee you a superior tractor made by American hands. It will get you a foreign tractor just like every other company’s tractor, but the service and parts picture may be much, much worse.

If you absolutely have to have green, there is always Krylon.

Just for fun, I’ll price zero-turns.

And Here I Thought $20 Hamburgers Were Bad

So my Ford Explorer is in the shop getting a $2500 water pump.

That’s best-case. It’s possible the water pump is bad because the timing chain system that drives it is bad. There is no sign the rest of the engine has problems other than being a Ford.

I will surely repeat a lot of things here, but off I go anyway.

Cars don’t really have water pumps. They have coolant pumps. No car uses plain water to cool its engine. But coolant pumps are called water pumps.

In the past, a water pump was a cheap part, and you could expect it to be on the front of your engine where it could be swapped by turning a few bolts and removing a couple of things. Even if you were a fool, you could do it in an afternoon.

There are good reasons for putting water pumps outside of engines. It makes them easy to replace. It also makes it impossible for them to shoot coolant into your engine where it will mix with oil and destroy the engine very quickly.

Ford and a couple of other companies, much like the ignorant children in every generation who reject time-tested wisdom and decide socialism is a smart new idea, have decided it’s best to put water pumps inside engines. This is like changing melanoma, which starts on the skin where you can see it quickly and have it treated relatively cheaply, so it appears first in the center of your brain.

Famous Youtube mechanic Scotty Kilmer says Ford had a very good reason for making their engines this way. It saves Ford money.

Well, that makes it okay, then.

Ford did some other brilliant things.

Ford made the water pumps inside Ford engines poorly so they were likely to fail early. It also designed them to be driven by timing chains. When timing chains go funny, they rattle around. This can make the water pumps fail even earlier.

My understanding is that when a pump fails, it means water is going out through the bearings, which should be sealed forever.

Ford came up with a genius solution to the problem. It did a recall, replaced all the affected motors, and redesigned the water pumps so they were harder to ruin.

No, it didn’t! Are you crazy?

Ford refused to recall anything, even after being sued in a class action. It chose not to change the pump design so new pumps that replaced ruined pumps would not fail. When you pay to have your old pump replaced, you’re buying a pump just like it. You might get 150,000 miles out of it. Or 10,000.

Ford also put two gaskets around the water pump cover. When the coolant breaks through the first gasket, it starts going out through a tiny hole between the gaskets. This hole is called a weep hole, because when coolant comes out, owners weep.

If you don’t know coolant is coming out of the weep hole, you keep driving, and soon the coolant wrecks the second gasket. Then coolant goes into your engine, and your engine falls apart. Scrap metal. Hence the phrase “Ford Exploder.”

In order to help owners find out when their coolant was leaking, Ford put the weep hole about three feet down a crack between the engine and the fender, in an area where it is impossible to see it.

If a lot of coolant comes out, you will see it under the car. If only a little comes out, you will have no idea unless you’re that 1% driver who opens the hood every day and checks his coolant level. Your engine can be totalled by a leak that never makes it to the garage floor.

You should be able to replace your own water pump on a Saturday for maybe $200. Dealerships quote figures more like $4500. That’s assuming the timing chain isn’t bad. Add maybe $500. Independent shops are cheaper because their customers are more intelligent.

There is, literally, no conceivable excuse for making a car this way. They can’t blame mileage or emission standards. They can’t blame safety standards. Ford is just incompetent.

If Ford is not incompetent, then Ford is evil, because it decided this plan was a good idea: create cars that need extremely expensive repairs other cars do not need. Then make money on the parts and repairs later.

The big problem with this plan is that people who have to have this repair stop buying Fords, because they can’t believe Ford is that dumb.

So if this is the plan, Ford is incompetent after all, but also evil.

I’m not too happy with this problem. Even if the timing chain is fine, I’m looking at about $3,000 in repairs and related expenses. That leaves me with the same setup that failed already.

Once the repair is done, I have to go and get multiple safety recalls fixed. On one car.

When I was a kid, I hated Fords. I had a great reason. My grandfather had a GM dealership. Later on, I realized that was silly, and I became open-minded. Since then, my family has bought a few Fords and GMS.

Let’s check their histories. To save space, I’ll just say that we had more than 10 GM cars, and not one major repair.

Let’s look at some Fords.

1985 Lincoln Town Car: trunk filled with rain
1991 Lincoln Town Car: caught on fire
1994 Ford Explorer: tranny failed, 4WD refused to engage, heating system failed very expensively, two wheel bearings failed
2003 Ford Thunderbird: ignition coil failed because all 8 were put in depressions that filled with rain, AC failed and started blowing very hot air, took nearly a second to respond to the throttle (normal behavior for the model)
2016 Ford Explorer: AC failed, water pump failed, timing chain may be gone

I had the idea that Fords were okay even when I told my dad he should get the second Explorer. I hadn’t considered making a list like this. Had I done so, I think I would have pushed for something else.

Dementia had set in, but he was still in need of a vehicle. We had reached the point where I had to take him to doctors, getting in my truck was hard for him, and his other cars were in such bad shape they were not good enough to keep using. And he was still sharp enough for short errands. Or so I thought. He had to quit driving a few months after we got the new Explorer. He only drove it once.

He loved his first Explorer in spite of the problems, so I thought the car-buying process would go easier if we got another one. I should have pushed for a Toyota.

I think I’ll end up buying a new timing chain, because you know how it is with expensive repairs. “As long as you have it apart…”

Some time this week, I’ll have a running Ford with a warrantied repair. Do I want to keep it?

Tough call.

The car is really nice apart from the fact that it could blow up at any time. It’s comfortable. It has creature comforts even luxury cars didn’t have when I was in college. It holds a lot of junk. It has zero rust.

On the down side, other than the horrific engine, it has a very harsh ride. The road noise and wind noise are bad. The GPS is 100% useless. It can’t compare to the GPS from a 2005 Toyota.

We are using a rented Nissan Rogue right now because my Dodge has an electrical issue. This is a cheaper SUV, and it shows. Nonetheless, the ride is way better than the Explorer’s ride. It goes over the dips in our private road with no problems. When you hit small bumps in the Ford, it’s “BAM! BAM! BAM!”

It’s those stupid rapper rims. I think. Tires used to have nice, high sidewalls that absorbed bumps and protected rims. Not any more. Now the tires are an inch high. Everybody’s ride has been pimped. Ridiculous.

I have been thinking about ditching the Ford and getting a Toyota 4Runner. It’s an old design. It’s a real SUV, which means it’s a truck station wagon. A Toyota Tacoma with a hatch. The Ford is just a tall car. The 4Runner has a full frame. The Ford is unibody. Like most trucks, 4Runners have real tires and grown-up-style rims.

People say the 4Runner is not hard to work on. Also, repairs are less frequent and cheaper. It’s a little bigger than the Ford, so maybe the engine area is not so jammed up. The water pump is not inside the engine.

Toyota is a much better company than Ford, which is why Toyota is the world’s largest carmaker and Ford, the company that invented the assembly line and the once-ubiquitous Model T, is third in its home country. Behind Toyota. Toyota obsesses on quality. It’s a sickness. They constantly improve things. Because the 4Runner is old, they have had a lot of time to improve it. There are no surprises left.

My wife wants a Land Cruiser. This is a big SUV. In the past, it was kind of like an Expedition, except it was a good vehicle. It was absent from the US market for a couple of years. They just brought it back. It has a 4-cylinder engine with two turbos, and it’s a hybrid.

Good luck getting me to buy that. Sell it to Buck Rogers. It’s exactly what I’m trying to get away from, except made by a good company instead of Ford.

Also, it would probably cost $90,000, so no. And you can’t buy one used yet.

The complaints people make about the 4Runner actually make me want it more.

“It’s dated.” YESSSS. MORE!

“The interior is old-fashioned.” What does that even mean? To me, a 2000 interior seems just fine. I love the interior in my ’07 Ram. I was madly in love with the interiors of my dad’s ’80 Cadillac and ’85 Lincoln. Does it mean there’s no big screen TV next to the driver’s seat? Does it mean each kid can’t watch a separate godless Disney movie with a homosexual POC protagonist? Where is the problem?

Maybe women complain about the interior. Surely it’s not men.

“It gets bad mileage.” So does the Explorer. The 4Runner is about 2 mpg worse, but we don’t drive much. If, may God forbid it, one of us has to get a job, we’ll get a Prius or something.

If we get a used 4Runner, we’ll take a net hit of maybe $25,000, which is a lot. It will be about 7 years newer than the Toyota, though, and we should expect to get 230,000 miles out of it without any major surgeries. For me, that’s nearly 30 years of driving. That’s 250,000 minus the 20,000 I will accept from a used car. Cars will probably be banned before then, and I may be with Jesus.

The 4Runner is what men buy when they have had it. When they want the most bulletproof gasoline-powered modern car known to man. Also, Toyota supports old models with parts for a very long time.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just drive the Explorer into the dirt. It will probably be cheaper in the long run. I know I’ll be mad the next time I have to buy a water pump. With leftists on the rise, it will probably cost $10,000.

I believe my family’s involvement with Ford is coming to an end. It’s unfortunate that Americans can’t run a car company.

Life is Never Childproof

My wife and I have been talking about raising children.

One issue that came up was the nature of the property where we live. It’s mostly pasture and forest. I have a house and a workshop, and the rest of the property is full of things like nettles, poison ivy, blackberry briars, holes, and snakes. The house itself has no bedrooms for children on the first floor. We live on a private road that opens onto a two-lane highway with a 55-mph speed limit, so opportunities for riding a bike are not good, and the nearest house is probably 250 yards away.

I’m not sure what to do about the house.

We have two stairways. One is carpeted. The other is hard oak. If the kids live upstairs, what are we supposed to do to protect them?

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a two-story house. They moved into another two-story house when I was about 5. The second house had a set of steep concrete steps covered in thin, hard vinyl.

I never saw a baby gate until I was an adult. I don’t know if they existed. My grandparents had 8 grandchildren, and none of us ever fell down the steps or came close to it. Neither did my grandparents. Nobody did.

The cabinets had no childproofing. I used to play inside them. Whatever chemicals were in the house were available to all. The guns were not locked up.

I have never known anyone except me who had a poison scare as a child. I sampled some rat poison once, and nothing happened. They sent me home from the ER without doing anything for me.

I have never lived in a modern baby-safe house. I don’t even know what the rules are.

I have never known anyone who fell down the stairs as a child (or adult) and had an injury of any kind. Does that mean the concerns are overblown?

I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I was three. My dad bought a house when I was that age. It was one house over from a corner, and the street intersecting our street was somewhat busy. A block to the east, there was a big lot which was often flooded, and there were snakes.

My friends and I used to walk out the door early in the day and spend our time running around like wild Indians. We didn’t cross the busy street, but we could walk a block or two in the other direction, all by ourselves. No one cared. No one was afraid grown men would grab us and have sex with us.

We didn’t know what homosexuality was, and we didn’t know what sex was.

We built forts in the swamp area. We used to have wars. We would chase each other around and hit each other with sticks and branches. Houses went up sometimes, and we played on the construction sites. It was understood that the big sand piles were there for our amusement. I was probably in junior high before I realized people weren’t supposed to go onto other people’s property and play in their unfinished houses.

We played with what are now known as war toys. My parents got me a plastic machine gun and a plastic battleship. We always had cap pistols. I had boots and a cowboy hat. We played cowboys and Indians, and no one ever questioned the notion that the Indians were bad and had to be shot. Sorry about that. We learned from Hollywood, which is always a stupid idea.

No one I grew up with ever committed a gun crime. I did throw a knife at my sister when I was a kid, but most people would have done the same thing eventually. She was special. My gentle 103-pound mother went at her with both fists.

When I used to visit my grandparents, my grandfather would put his grandchildren in the back of a pickup and drive us around on mountain roads at up to 80 mph. We loved it. We never died. I was his favorite, and he used to let me “help” him on his farms. He would sit me on the fender of his tractor while he raked or mowed, and he would also let me steer. If I had fallen off the front of the fender, I would have gone under the rear tire.

We used to shoot together. I never had a lesson in gun safety. I think I was expected to be smart enough not to shoot anyone.

He taught my aunt to swim by throwing her in a river.

Kids were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted in cars. My father used to put me on his lap and let me steer. I sat in the front seat like other human beings. We had a station wagon, and I liked riding in “the very back,” next to the rear window. In sedans and coupes, there were “parcel shelves” against the rear windows. Flat places big enough for kids to lie down in. And we did. Sometimes we had to move the little air-freshener dogs with the bobbing heads.

There were no such things as baby seats.

When we got bicycles, we rode on the streets. There were no helmets. I knew one person who got hurt. He was a teenager who decided to ride down from the peak of Miami’s 79th Street Causeway bridge at top speed. He rode on a narrow sidewalk, and he lost control and hit a sign with his face. He ended up with dentures. A helmet wouldn’t have helped.

We didn’t wear knee or elbow pads. Sometimes we rode barefoot, which was really dumb. I tore half the nail off my big toe that way.

My elementary school was a mile from my house, and my junior high was half a mile farther away. I used to walk and ride to school. Not always, but sometimes. So did my friends. The whole time I lived in that area, I heard about one kid getting hit by a car.

It was bad. A teenaged girl with no license spread him out on the asphalt like chicken salad. There were big stains. We were told his brains were splattered. But the rest of us got by without school zones.

At phys. ed. class, we were told to climb ropes to the top, or maybe 15 feet, above hard-packed ground. I was the kid who could never figure out how to climb the rope, but others made it. At playgrounds, we had merry-go-rounds, and naturally, we got them going at top speed and jumped off. We had see-saws, and we used to do things like jumping off while the other kid was up in the air.

I was probably 10 when I got my first pocket knife, and I got my first rifle at 12. No one thought it was weird to let me have these things. My best friend was a year older, and he was shooting deer and antelope.

My parents thought it was okay to buy me slingshots. Two neighboring kids had bows.

On Halloween, we went out without adult supervision, even though our mothers worried about us and believed legends about razors and drugs in apples and candy.

We always threw the apples out anyway. It was so unfair; giving us fruit. We got really angry at people who gave us things they knew we didn’t like.

Today, it seems like very few kids participate in Halloween. It seems like it’s more of an adult holiday. Adults go to parties and get high and drunk, and as a female comedian said, the women only have one costume: “It’s a slut.”

“Sexy vampire.” “Sexy nurse.” “Sexy witch.” “Sexy Disney character.” “Sexy nun.” Plain old whore. That about covers it.

When kids go out now, they form little squads behind adults with flashlights, they go to a few houses on prearranged routes, where they only see the same parents they see all the time, and they go home. Halloween was never really dangerous, but this is where we are.

Halloween is a Satanic holiday. It’s huge with the witches. That’s the reason to stay home and dress normally. The razor blades and drugs are mythical.

If your parents let you did things leftists from up north thought were unsafe, or they slapped or spanked you, leftists could not do anything about it. There were no powerful agencies roaming around taking children away from old-fashioned parents. If your parents took you to the emergency room with bruises, the doctors never called anyone to interrogate you and have your kids carted off to scary facilities where bullying and sodomy took place.

It must be true that kids used to have more accidents. Surely modern practices have made some difference. I’m sure government intervention saves more kids from abuse than it used to. I guess kids are safer if they can’t leave their yards. But I think some of our measures are overprotective. The truth is that a healthy upbringing in which kids face some risks is valuable. Probably so valuable that it’s better to lose some kids than to turn the rest into helpless basket cases.

Some kids have no common sense. Some kids are smart but make stupid mistakes. These things will always be true. Bad things will always happen.

Here’s a problem: now that we have all these safety policies, even if they’re overreactions, if your child has a very rare accident because you didn’t adhere to modern nanny standards, you will be considered a bad parent. Your spouse may agree. Society is destroying fathers’ ability to do a very important job: toughening kids up. It’s siding with destructive female neuroses.

Disempowering fathers and enabling neurotic women are almost always disastrous.

When I think of the terrible ways in which my parents failed me, I never think about not having a bike helmet. I think about my dad choking my mother. I remember my parents making no effort to teach me good habits or help me succeed. They didn’t teach me to do homework. They didn’t make me do chores. They didn’t show me how to defend myself. They taught me nothing about investing. My mother didn’t teach me proper hygiene. I was not introduced to the Holy Spirit, who is the only source of safety and success. The guns, skateboards, knives, fireworks…not issues.

What do we do about the house? Do we sell it? Do we seal off the upstairs, hoping there won’t be a fire? Do we put cameras up there?

The yard is both good and bad. It’s a world of adventure for kids. On the other hand, the grass in this area is thin and awful, so you wouldn’t want to lie down on it or do much of anything not involving being upright. It has a fence and gate, and that’s good for safety, but getting to other kids will be impossible without vehicles.

The workshop might as well have been designed intentionally to put kids in the hospital. Table saw, band saw, tractor, lawnmower, sharp things, pointy things, hammers, chemicals, torches…send them in there when you get tired of feeding them, and you might get lucky. I guess locks can solve the problem.

What about cars? My Explorer is turning out to be a lemon by design, and it’s a horror to work on. Ford designed it so stupidly it is likely to need thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs even if I take care of it, so I’m thinking of getting a Toyota 4Runner. But the 4Runner isn’t THE safest car on the road. What if my kids get in an accident, and I didn’t buy them THE safest car?

The guns can be locked in a storage room, and of course, the key will have to be hidden, and not in a place the kids will find it, unlike most things parents hide. Every dad who ever hid a dirty magazine, and every mother who ever hid a device or outfit from a dirty boutique, should be aware that their kids found them. It happens.

What are we supposed to do about schooling? DeSantis has done a lot to help, but Florida schools are still dominated by leftist morons and affirmative action cases. They didn’t disappear when he was elected. They are burrowing and hiding, waiting for him to leave.

They will still try to groom our kids and, yes, turn them into homosexuals and phony, mutilated “transgenders.” They will still teach them that socialism is a great idea. It worked out so well in Cuba and Cambodia. They will teach them that rebellion is brilliant and that their elders, with all their wisdom, are silly imbeciles. They will still see our children–God’s children–as theirs.

Some day, this blog post may be seen as proof my children should be taken from me.

Homeschooling is a must. That or private schooling. What are the odds we’ll be able to find a good private school that acknowledges the Holy Spirit?

The kids won’t be able to walk past our private road. They won’t be able to ride bikes much of anywhere. The geography won’t permit a lot of wandering.

What do we do about phones? Thanks to Disney, Florida is a pedophile’s dream, so they flock here. You can’t turn a kid loose without some means of calling for help. But if you give them smartphones, they send each other naked pictures and videos, and they watch adult pornography. If you give them cheap phones, the other kids torment them.

We can’t protect them from society, which is now extremely filthy. They have to live on this planet. It’s not like it used to be. By the time they get to high school, they will know about sodomy, VD, pornography, and seductive causes that give them excuses to cultivate sadism, bigotry, and arrogance.

What do we do about the Internet?

It’s like we’ll be raising children in a building with walls, floors, fixtures, and furnishings smeared with excrement from diseased people, hoping they won’t get sick.

With regard to the physical dangers, we’ll have to make decisions about risk and accept the consequences. That’s all we can do. We can’t raise kids, especially effeminate boys, who can’t do anything but cry and operate phones and tablets with their stick arms and muscular thumbs.

I told my wife to expect our children to get cut, scraped, burned, and bruised. It’s not preventable. They will get sick sometimes. They will get scars. We live in a cursed world. If you don’t want your kids to suffer, have yourself sterilized. If you don’t want to risk losing children, don’t have them in the first place.

God risks it, and loses, every day. He loses most of the people he creates.

I have been concerned that I might love my children so much I smother them and stunt them. It will be hard, handing a kid a new pocket knife or even letting him ride a bicycle in public. It will be hard to let him associate with other kids without me, knowing about bullying and peer pressure, which is the voice of the antichrist. I have to remind myself that human beings like me ruined the world and made it an unsafe place, and now we have to live in it without hiding from it.

Regarding the spiritual dangers–the temptation and corruption–we will just have to stay close to God and do what we know to do. After that, we have to accept what happens. Short of joining a cult and moving to an isolated compound, I see no way to raise kids in anything resembling an acceptable environment.

This world is a rotten place, and it’s our fault. It’s disgusting and dangerous. Not really fit to live in. It’s getting worse rapidly. I wish we had somewhere else to go. But it’s either have kids here or die childless.

I hate this world. Having children will make me hate it more.

God created the world so he could reproduce, and he expects people to have children. We will play the ball as it lies, and we will rely on God, thanking him and never blaming him.

Goodbye, Shade

When I moved here, one of the things I liked best was the woodsy location. The area of the property where the house is located had a lot of big oaks close to both buildings.

Since then, I have reconsidered.

The oaks drop leaves that are like little pieces of leather. They drop tons of them, literally, on the lawn. They kill the grass, but they seem to let weeds through just fine.

The trees rot. Here, whenever you cut an oak more than 10″ thick, you can expect to find a big brown spot in the center of the trunk, if not a hollow area full of giant cockroaches. The trees rot from the inside out, and they die from the tops down. Eventually, big rotten logs start to fall straight down. When a tree gets sufficiently rotten, it snaps and falls over.

The roots of these oaks are amazing, because they don’t hold the trees in place very well, but they are nearly impossible to dislodge after the trees are gone. The trees rot fast when standing, but the stumps seem to last for eternity.

Because the roots aren’t great, you never know when a strong wind will push a tree over.

The people who built this house thought the trees were cute, and they were, but a house with a tree on the roof is less cute, so today a bunch of guys who looked sort of like Vikings came and murdered most of the trees that menaced my house. The rest have a date with the saw tomorrow.

Where I used to live, arborists climbed trees. I used to work for an arborist from time to time, and he would put spikes on his feet and go right up an 80-foot Australian pine and start cutting. It was terrifying to watch. When you’re way up on a tree, and a piece of the trunk weighing 500 pounds falls off, the tree swings back and forth like a spring, and there you are with the trunk a foot from your face.

Also, when the tree snaps as you cut it, you have to be sure you did it right, because when you’re right next to a tree in the process of snapping, lots of bad things can happen. This is especially true if you’re tied to the tree.

Here, I have not seen anyone in a tree. They go up on lifts.

I think it may be because the trees are so treacherous here. The tops are full of rotten wood. If you were to climb one, the motion of your body could make the top snap off and hit you on the way to the ground. You might also anchor yourself to something rotten without knowing it.

The tree guys surprised me. I didn’t see ear protection on any of them, and they were running very big Stihls. None of them wore chainsaw chaps. The only guy who had a helmet was up on the crane, and he was the one dropping logs, not one of the ones dodging them.

I don’t know how they can hear anything after running saws every day for years.

I now have two really large piles of dead oak to burn. They’re not far from the house. I would ordinarily have the wood put in the pasture, but because the machine that moves wood is slow, it would have slowed down the work and cost me money. I’m going to go out and see if I can move one of the piles myself tonight.

The yard looks like someone fought a war in it. The grass here is feeble. If you walk across it three times, it starts to look bad. If there is no rain for 5 days, it turns brown. We have had several dry days. The grass was not ready for a crane, a grapple, and a lift.

I’m going to miss the shade, but it was an unaffordable luxury. We have an insurance crisis here, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a policy next year. I am not going to sit through hurricane season wondering if I’m going to have to build a new house at my own expense.

From now on, I’ll have fewer leaves, the grass will look better, and my house will be in no danger whatsoever from hurricanes. Well worth losing some shade.

The people who built the house should have removed the trash oaks and planted better stuff that would stand up to wind. Now I have to plant that stuff, and I will be dead before it looks good.

I’ll have to poison my new stumps, and later I’ll think about ways to remove them. A rented track loader with a stump bucket sounds good. Or an excavator.

If you build or buy a house, don’t be stupid. Don’t doom it with inappropriate vegetation. It will rob you of peace, and it could squoosh your investment.

Fox’s site says Trump has been found guilty in Alvin Bragg’s kangaroo court. Another big oak nibbled by bugs.

You are Smarter Than all of Ford’s Engineers

All sorts of nagging problems seem to be getting solved here. God’s grace in action.

My car has been annoying me. It’s a Ford Explorer. These cars have some really stupid–I mean seriously stupid–engineering.

1. They put a foam rubber cover on the engine. It has a very high R-value, so it’s like putting several inches of attic insulation on the motor. The general rule throughout the automobile age has been that you want your car to run hot enough to do its thing well, but no hotter. You don’t want to roast everything under your hood, like your expensive battery and all the weak modern plastic parts that eventually crumble after a lot of heat cycles. You don’t want to have to strain your cooling system to get rid of heat that would happily leave on its own if permitted. My car was designed so a rubber blanket would keep it hot while a complicated cooling system tried to get rid of the same heat. I have placed the engine cover where it can keep the garage floor warm.

2. They put the water pump–a cheap part that fails often because Ford makes junk on purpose–inside the engine. That sounds like something out of Dilbert, but it’s completely true. In about 1985, the water pump on my gorgeous 1970 Buick deuce-and-a-quarter convertible died, and with almost no mechanical skills, I replaced it by myself in an afternoon. The cost was probably around $30. The cost of replacing a Ford Explorer water pump can be as high as $4500 if you’re stupid enough to go to a dealer, and even private mechanics sometimes charge half that much.

Explorer engine pumps fail very, very often. So do their gaskets. The design is amazing. There are two gaskets, one inside the other. When your inner gasket fails, coolant goes out of the car through a hole between the gaskets. You’re supposed to see this even though it happens under the car. When the outer gasket fails, coolant goes into your oil pan.

Hey, I’m no engineer, but let me spitball here a minute. My car has about 8,000,000 sensors, most of which were a bad idea to install. Why not have a coolant level sensor instead of using ME as a sensor?

Why not use three gaskets? Why not 4? If you’re determined to go stupid, go big. Maybe a lot of Explorer engines with three bad gaskets and one good one would still be running.

You read the stuff about the oil pan right. Ford designed its water pumps to shoot coolant into the oil pans of running engines. Guess what you have to buy when that happens? Starts with an “E.” For “Edsel.”

My car is probably worth $18000. Cost of a new “E”? Call it $8000 if you’re really lucky. Then you have the same kind of engine that committed suicide once already.

3. The car has shutters on the radiator. What can you say about a feature that dumb? At highway speeds, they close. That means you also paid for a shutter motor and a bunch of electronics and programming. When they close, the drag coefficient of the car drops by about 0.01%, and you gain half a mile per gallon. Look it up. I’m not lying. This is Ford’s way of trying to cope with ridiculous mileage mandates which, ultimately, come from allowing women to vote. Don’t get me started. Although I already am.

What happens if the shutters close at the wrong time, which they obviously will, because there are trillions of Explorers, and that’s how probability works? The radiator won’t get air. Personally, I would rather lose the half-mile per gallon, since this car gets bad mileage anyway, and not bake everything in my engine compartment.

My car has been sending me false overheating signals. This is disturbing, because when it happens, all you can think is, “IF I DON’T PULL OVER IN THE NEXT MINUTE, IT WILL COST ME TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.”

Lots of bad things can happen when a car overheats. You can lose an engine. You can get hidden damage that causes you to lose the engine later, long after you congratulated yourself on dodging a bullet.

The car started beeping on a very hot day while I was in a Burger King drive-through. I went in and ate, and when I came out maybe 15 minutes later, the car was miraculously cool. That’s not long enough for a car to cool down.

I started out of the parking lot, and the temperature gauge shot up. Too fast to make sense. I got out of the lot, and it dropped within maybe 15 seconds.

I checked the coolant level, it was low. I topped it off. The car behaved for a while. Then it beeped again while the wife and I were running errands.

I started Googling. I interrogated people on a forum. I thought I might be looking at a second thermostat replacement, and I considered using a cooler thermostat than the super-hot job Ford installed.

The coolant level dropped again, after one day, so I bought some fluorescent dye and a UV flashlight. If there was a leak, I would be able to find it under the hood.

I added dye. I drove around. I saw a lot of coolant spillage lighting up under the hood. It occurred to me that I might have spilled dye myself, so I hosed everything off, topped off the coolant, and ran errands on a blistering-hot day.

Nothing happened. The coolant level stayed high. I saw no leaks.

I can’t figure it out, but it looks like I don’t have a problem after all. Maybe the people who replaced the first thermostat left the coolant low, and over time, it got so low it messed with the temperature sensor. Maybe the coolant level dropped after I added the first dose because it was being sucked into the system.

I don’t know. I do know I was planning to take the car to a shop tomorrow, and now that’s off. I bought a third thermostat and some coolant and distilled water, so I plan to flush the system. I’m hoping the car doesn’t really have a problem.

I was actually starting to look at Toyota Highlanders on the web. The Highlander is supposed to be a better car. Every car has weak points, and the Highlander is no exception, but not every car has a water pump inside the engine. A water pump which is known to go bad frequently. Along with a timing chain which has a predicted service life of 100,000 miles.

A modern car should go 300,000 miles without major problems if maintained well, so what kind of fool makes a car with a 100,000-mile timing chain that costs thousands to replace?

A Highlander timing chain is very expensive to replace, but on the other hand, Toyota says there is no recommended interval, so that means they don’t expect it to fail at 100,000 miles. I don’t know what Ford says. I don’t feel like checking. I do know that people all over the web say it’s a maintenance part, like a spark plug or air filter, as contrasted with a lifetime part, like a rear differential.

A maintenance part. Deep inside your engine. It’s like doing a tonsillectomy through your butt.

I think I got my Makita cordless chainsaw fixed.

The saw was running dry. It has an oil tank like a gas saw, and it has the same sort of pump, sending oil to the bar and chain through a hole in the saw body.

I was afraid the $22 oil pump had failed.I took the bar off and cleaned a lot of crud out, hoping crud was blocking the oil. Better than waiting for a pump.

I ran the saw with the bar off to see if the pump worked, and oil dripped out of the saw body, as expected. It seemed like less oil than a gas saw would drip, but that is supposedly normal. I closed the saw up and used it to move an oak I felled by the driveway.

Today I looked at the saw and noticed that the bar was blue around the edges, which some people say is a sign the saw ran hot and toasted the steel. Others say bars are blue from the factory because they harden the edges where the chains run. I don’t know what the truth is.

I opened the saw up again and saw something amazing.

When cleaning saw oil passages up in the past, I have thought mainly about the saw bodies. Wood dust jams into the little slots the oil comes out of, so you knock it out with something and go on. Exactly what I did the first time I checked the Makita.

What I did not know was that fine dust and bar oil could harden and turn into something like wood filler or just plain concrete.

On the bar itself, I found little accumulations of hardened dust shaped just like the oil slot. When the saw was closed up, these accumulations pressed into the slot and sealed it up like a gasket.

I had to scrape the bar itself. It took a while. That stuff was hard.

I learned something. When you run a saw, before you do anything, floor it with the bar pointed at something. If oil doesn’t spray onto whatever you’re aiming at, fix the saw, because the chain is dry. You can have oil dripping from the bottom of a saw without getting any on the chain.

I have 5 saws on the premises right now. I have had so many saw problems, my former biggest saw has an old bar that has been run so little, it’s practically new. Another saw is actually new. The rest needed to be sharpened. I knocked that off.

I generally use files, but I decided to try Pferd sharpeners because they file not just the teeth, but the depth gauges, which are the pointy things between teeth. Gauges tell your teeth how deep to cut, and if you keep filing the teeth and not the gauges, you end up cutting with the gauges alone, and that’s not very fast.

Pferd sharpeners are almost exactly the same as Stihl sharpeners, but when I got mine, they cost way less.

Sharpening your saw is very important. A dull chain can make a 70-cc saw cut like a 30-cc saw, and if you don’t know it’s dull, you may think a bigger saw is the answer. You may spend money needlessly. Also, a dull saw can make a saw overheat, destroying the piston, cylinder, and maybe some other stuff. A small saw with a sharp chain is better than a big saw with the kind of chain most people use.

Speaking of things that are better than a big saw, I have a phenomenal tip for you, born of experience. Buy a cordless pole saw, not a chainsaw. You probably don’t even need a chainsaw. They’re only appropriate for firewood and thick trees. No one says this, but it’s 100% true, and it should be considered canon by now.

With a 10″ pole saw, you can cut trees 12″ thick. Not gracefully, but safely and effectively. You don’t need a 16″ chainsaw, the homeowner’s preferred size, unless you’re cutting bigger stuff.

With a chainsaw, you have to stand right next to what you’re cutting, and believe me, you will make mistakes when you try to guess which way things will go when you cut them. The farther away you are, the safer you are. With a pole saw, you can be 6 feet or more away from your stupid mistakes.

Most chainsaw tree-whacking injuries occur within a couple of steps of the cut, and if you have a pole saw, you’re already two steps away when you need to run. This is a very, very big deal no one talks about.

If you have a pole saw, you can cut things higher than your shoulders. “I’m already doing that.” Yes, I know. You’re an idiot. You never raise a chainsaw above your shoulders. What do chainsaws do when operators have problems? They fall. They don’t levitate and fly away. The lower a saw is when you use it, the better off you are, because less of you is where it may fall.

When you cut your leg off with a chainsaw, why does it happen? It happens because the saw was higher than your leg when you had your problem, and because a chainsaw is so short, you were able to keep your finger on the trigger while the bar was cutting you.

If you drop a pole saw, it’s pretty unlikely the bar will come near you on the way down. Cutting your leg with a pole saw is virtually impossible.

You’re supposed to wear safety chaps when you use a chainsaw. They really work, and no one uses them. They’re hot, and they look kind of gay. If you’re using a tool that can’t cut your leg, the fact that you refuse to wear chaps won’t be a problem.

Even safety experts have no issues with operating pole saws overhead. It’s what they’re for. You can even use one from a ladder. You never, ever use a chainsaw from a ladder.

A pole saw will always turn off when you let go of the handle, and you have to let go of the handle in order to get near the bar. It’s brilliant.

You also get less sawdust on you when you use a pole saw because it’s not ejecting things directly at you from one foot away.

If you go cordless, you will never need ear protection. That’s a huge bonus. Earmuffs cause painful headaches, they’re hot, they may eventually smell, and they’re disgusting because they’re filthy. And they don’t really protect your hearing well. With a big saw, you also need plugs.

Unless you’re cutting things over 12″ thick regularly, or you’re cutting firewood, you don’t need a chainsaw, even though they’re cool and you want one. You should get a 10″ Kobalt battery pole saw from Lowe’s for less than the price of a homeowner-grade Husky 16″ gas saw that plugs up with ethanol gas at least once a year. Get an extra battery. Do it, and you will almost never need to reach for a chainsaw.

It’s so much safer, it’s in a different safety universe. It’s cheaper. It works better. It’s easier on your back. It can do lots of things a chainsaw can’t do. It can do nearly anything a chainsaw can do.

You won’t even have to adjust the chain. The saw does it for you.

You want it.

I have a tree crew coming this week to do major cutting and moving so I will never need hurricane insurance again. They need places to dump wood for burning, and they need to be able to get to the back of my shop, where some of the worst trees are.

I had two big piles of trash wood waiting to be burned, so yesterday, I called for a permit. They told me I could not have one. They said dispersion was too low. What?

I found out this meant there was not enough wind to disperse the smoke, and they were worried that soy people might get a widdle cough.

They said I could take a $50 course and become a second-level burn pile guru, and then they would give me permits when other people could not get them. I checked online. No courses were available. NICE.

Help me understand why being a burning expert should entitle you to burn more wood than other people. It produces the same amount of smoke. It must be a gimmick to direct money to the government or some contractors who bought the government some escorts.

Look how smart old people are. A young person would still be wondering.

Being old means you know how the world really works. This is one of the best parts of being old. And one of the worst.

I called today before 7 a.m., thinking they were more likely to be nice to me if I showed I was serious. They told me it was too early, so I called again at 7. I got a different person. Not the masculine-sounding lady who had been so terse and authoritative in the past and probably wears plaid shirts. Yes, I’m insinuating something. Just a guess.

The lady I got could not have been nicer. Same weather, but I got my burn permit anyway.

Now I have two smoldering circles of ash, and I won’t have to sacrifice pasture needlessly for extra piles.

I took the tractor out and moved all sorts of junk from behind the shop. My bush hog. Two rolls of fence wire. A bunch of treated lumber. A hay bale spike. A subsoiler. My debris fork. My tractor bucket. A harrow. Now there’s lots of acreage back there so they can get their machines in.

I was afraid I would need my truck because of the car’s problems, and it has refused to turn over. I finally decided to address it. I am charging the batteries up, and I checked the wiring. Yes, the horrible squirrels have nibbled a bit, but not enough to prevent the truck from running.

I think I have a ground issue, so I’m going to clean and grease every ground that looks relevant, and I’m hoping to get the truck going by Wednesday.

I also decided to check out a problem I had been dreading dealing with. My truck’s 4WD shift has been swinging freely as though it were not connected to anything. I got under the truck, and guess what? It’s not connected to anything.

Remember what I said about stupid engineering? Dodge makes these trucks so the transfer linkages fall out with no warning. A linkage is a funny-looking rod, and it has two weak bushings at the ends. The bushings WILL fail even if you don’t use the transfer case, and when they do, the linkage goes away without telling you, perhaps hitting the car behind you as it tinkles and bounces down the interstate.

I have parts ordered. I’m thinking of finding a way to make sure the linkage can’t fall out again. Dodge’s engineers couldn’t do it, but I can, because IT’S REALLY SIMPLE.

Dodge wants something like $60 for the parts, but the Chinese sell basically the same thing for $15. They’re all over Amazon because THEY FALL OUT ALL THE TIME AND DODGE CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP IT.

I looked up my Harley’s value, and I plan to put it on Craigslist so I can get the truck indoors away from squirrels. The title is around here somewhere, and as soon as I find it, goodbye, Softail.

I also found myself and my wife better car insurance. By going from GEICO to State Farm, we can cut over 50% from our bill and get nearly the same coverage. Insurance rates are insane. One company wants x. Another company wants 0.5x. Another company wants 3x. A 4th company will not insure anyone in Florida, for no clear reason. Rates bear no relationship to reality that I can perceive. I guess we’ll switch tomorrow.

Things are coming together. With God’s help, the car won’t blow up, the tree job will go smoothly, the truck will roar again, and my chainsaws will again be useful as well as ornamental.

Has Anyone Seen my 56 Million?

The other day, I was confused about some things somewhat-conservative actor Tom Selleck said, and I wrote about it. He lives on a 63-acre avocado farm in California, and at the age of 79, after a very successful acting career (for a conservative), he says he may have to sell his farm in order to finance a pleasant old age.

Thomas Magnum, the eighties pinup man, is 79. About as old as Biden. Can you believe it? He’s not in the same boat, though. Biden looks like his father or even grandfather. I wonder how old Higgins is. I’ll check. The actor who played him would be 91 today. Zeus and Apollo have been dead since no later than 1995.

I looked up his taxes, and I found out he pays about a thousand dollars per acre per year, which is bad, but not shocking. My dad’s home near Miami had a tax bill not far from half that high one year, and it’s a merely somewhat above average home on half an acre. Thank God that place is gone. What a horrible area. Living in that miserable place is bad enough, but then they force you to pay an amount equal to a living wage in exchange for the privilege of suffering. I can’t understand the people who bought that house.

I wondered how Selleck could be worried about his finances given the money he has made, the value of his property (about $12 million), and the fact that he will almost certainly die within 15 years. His kids are grown. Even a reverse mortgage should keep him up in fine style, and surely he has assets other than his home.

Well, someone in Hollywood got mad at Selleck and criticized him for complaining. This person says he was paid $56 million over the last 14 years for his work on a CBS series. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but that seems like a lot of money to me.

Unless he has a drug addiction or a gambling problem, he should have been able to pocket over $20 million, even in California, even after paying his agent. That’s just the last 14 years. Doesn’t include Magnum, P.I., his movies, or his ad work.

I don’t know, man. I’m starting to wonder about this guy.

Maybe he doesn’t realize he will be dead by 2040. He has already exceeded the average American life expectancy, and he is about 7″ above average height. Tall people don’t live as long as short people. If he can support himself for 15 years, he’s okay.

I remember telling my dad he needed to get professional help with his weight, and he would always say his grandfather lived to be 100. That was true, but his grandfather didn’t drink and weighed about 140 pounds. My dad started to lose it noticeably at about 82, and he died in assisted living when he was not far into his 88th year, at the age of 87. His older sister had the same grandfather, and she died at 84. She was huge.

My mother’s father didn’t think realistically about age, either. He rented a farm to a 68-year-old man with the provision that the man could stay as long as he lived. When he was questioned about this, he said, “That old man can’t live long.” My grandfather was 72.

I think I’m pretty realistic about being old. When I think about taking up a new pastime, I think, “I’ll be dead before I get anywhere with it.” I have thought about planting trees here, but barring the rapture, they will still be small and useless when I die. When I work in the yard and I get tired, I go in the house, leaving branches and leaves and whatever on the ground if I have to. I’m not going to die for yard work. Heat exhaustion is something old people can’t play with.

When I put heavy things on high shelves, I wonder if I’ll be strong enough to take them down if I ever need them. I take that into account.

Regarding Selleck, maybe he has spent a lot of money enjoying life. Maybe he has put millions in trust for his two grown kids, where he and his wife can’t get it. I certainly hope he has arranged for his kids to be rich without work. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to stuff yourself like a turkey and then die poor.

If every generation in a family has to start with nothing, it’s a stupid family. Inheritance is supposed to help people not to have to have the same problems their ancestors did.

We don’t force new generations to come up with their own languages, writing, and science. We don’t burn all the books every 20 years. We treasure and protect these things and do our best to pass them on. No one ever says, proudly, “No one gave me electrical engineering and medicine. I figured it out for myself!” But fools love to say, “I’m a self-made man!” Like it’s great that their parents and ancestors were also fools.

Money is no different from other good things. It should be passed along, and so should the ability to make and handle money.

Inheritance is one of the big differences between advanced cultures and backward cultures that amounted to nothing. Africans and American Indians didn’t preserve knowledge through writing. They didn’t build things that lasted so their descendants could use them. They didn’t amass wealth and pass it on. They managed to go millennia without developing technology. As a result, they ended up living like cave men while people in other places had running water and calculus. They died from diseases that can be prevented by wearing shoes and boiling water. When advanced people showed up where they were, they were running around just about naked, and they didn’t have things like chairs. They were worse than children.

The wealthy people who didn’t have to work to get wealth make up a tiny percentage of Americans. That’s disgraceful. The grandchildren of most wealthy people have to build their own wealth, and many of them have nothing. If your grandchildren end up worse off than you, what was the purpose of making yourself rich? Was it just to make your own life better?

Americans are hypocrites. They really hate heirs, but nearly all of them want their children to be heirs. We love making fun of wealthy people who have problems, but we all want to be wealthy.

Wealth is good. It is completely good. It has no bad qualities. Christians have given it a bad name, and that’s ridiculous. Saying wealth is bad is like saying health is bad. Good looks are bad. Nice weather is bad. It’s idiotic. God himself says wealth is good. In the Bible, he promises it to people who please him. Would he reward people he likes with a curse? Of course not. Wealth is only a curse when you make it a curse. Your nature is the problem.

Giving heirs things is very good. Spoiling them is not. Two different things. Wealth can’t spoil anyone. We all know or know of rich heirs who are not spoiled, and prisons and poor ghettos are full of the most spoiled people in America.

I certainly hope the Sellecks have set their kids up.

What if he gave most of his earnings to charity, and he hasn’t said anything? That would be better than wasting it on yachting vacations, Hermes, and Balenciaga.

Looking around, I see the web says Selleck has had other homes. In 2016, he was featured in Architectural Digest, a magazine devoted to showcasing homes owned by extremely self-indulgent people with sick fringe values. The article says he had an 1800-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles, and he covered the walls with expensive paneling. He and his wife brought in very, very expensive professionals to fix the place up. They spared no expense.

They will never get that money back. Most of it is not an investment. Spending tons of money decorating a house generally will not pay off. The furniture will be removed, and the kind of people who buy fancy homes will want to remove a lot of what was done and replace it.

I fixed up a house and sold it, and it was a terrible idea. If I had sold it as-is, I would be a lot better off today. I sold another one with problems, and it was a much smarter decision. House flippers only make good money when they get good renovation work, cheap. Most of us aren’t in their shoes. Contractors generally treat their clients badly, costing them huge sums of money and wasting valuable months. If you want to live in a torn-up house and be your own general contractor, it’s different, but Tom Selleck wouldn’t do that.

In the article, he speaks lovingly of a table in the apartment, saying it used to be used for slaughtering pigs. If your grandfather made a table, I can understand why you would love it, but the pig story sounds exactly like what a designer would say in order to get you to make a sucker purchase.

“In this very chair, Vin Diesel read the script for Fast & Furious 6.”

Selleck lived in Hawaii for a long time. That’s expensive. Everything except pineapples and sand has to be brought in on boats or planes. I don’t know how many homes he had there, but one is pretty nice. The address is 4161 Akulikuli Terrace, in Honolulu. You can see a video of it below.

Does he still have the L.A. place? If so, he is paying the state serious money.

Even if, by some unforeseen fluke, I become extremely wealthy, I will never have a home in Architectural Digest, nor will I ever pay a decorator. I made a decision. I decided my home would be usable. We expect to have kids. We will have guests. I have a parrot. We can’t have really, really nice things, and I don’t want them anyway. Things have to serve me. I can’t stand serving things. If I can’t sit on a couch without taking a shower first, I don’t want it.

We will have pretty good furniture. We will make a pretty good effort to make the downstairs look pretty good. Upstairs, I have a fairly cheap couch and a recliner no woman would own, and only one of the beds has a headboard.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. Both were bought used. The newest one is 9 years old. I may replace the Ford with a Toyota because the Ford I have has a reputation for turning into a money pit after a certain number of miles, but if I buy a Toyota, it will be at least a year old.

I think we will continue to live very well by global standards, even without Selleck’s earning potential, and I don’t think we will have to move. If you have a nice house, good food, good medical care, and somewhat nice stuff, you are rich as far as I’m concerned.

It looks like Tom Selleck has spending problems, not money problems.

My grandfather may have been worth what Selleck is now, in terms of buying power, and he lived in a nice, comfortable house that was kept up perfectly. He drove Buicks from his car dealership, bought at cost. He wore his pickup trucks out. He got his clothes from department stores in Lexington, Kentucky. He didn’t have a wine cellar or a tennis court. I would guess he never flew first class in his life.

He didn’t worry that he might have to move out of his house. When his television went out, my grandmother told the people at the store to bring another one, dismissing their concerns about her ability to pay, saying, “We’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.”

He was generous with other people. He helped his children when they didn’t deserve it or show him gratitude. He didn’t spend his money on decorators so he wouldn’t feel bad when shallow rich people showed up for expensive parties he never threw. He left some money and land behind when he died, and so did his wife.

I think he handled his money very well. He was probably the only person in Eastern Kentucky who subscribed to The Value Line, and read and understood it, in the 1950’s.

My dad bought a lot of real estate, and he did some investing. He could not match my grandfather, but he wasn’t like some of his partners, who had to spend every dime they got before they got it. He never talked about having to move out of his house, and he eventually became very concerned about making sure what he had went to me smoothly. He could have had a new Mercedes every year, but he chose to fund his future, and that of his descendants, instead.

Any couple that can’t find a way to live well until they die, on what must amount to at least $30 million, is doing something wrong. With that kind of wealth, you can take two very expensive vacations per year, wear excellent clothing, drive very nice cars, and live on an avocado farm. You should be able to get excellent help when you become feeble. I’m sure of it. Maybe you can’t have three or four mansions, and you might have to shop at normal malls sometimes, but lots of movie stars shop at malls that don’t have Neiman-Marcus or Bulgari.

Selleck will be dead by 2040. His wife will be dead by 2055, tops. They’ll both be fine if they show even below-average restraint.

Ostentation is sinful. Spending to be accepted by trashy rich people is wrong. It stirs up resentment among people who have less. It makes you think you’re better than you are. It lands you among empty, disgusting people. It sucks money away from better causes. You can have an incredibly cushy life without making a spectacle of yourself and spending in order to obey your insecurity.

Ostentation is partly aggression. It’s a way of insulting others. The Bible says that if you mock the poor, you insult God himself.

I just happened to run into an article about Antonio Brown, who was apparently an NFL player. The article says his career earnings were about $80 million. Wikipedia says he signed contracts amounting to well over $100 million, and that doesn’t include earnings off the field. Now his net worth is negative, and his earning potential is not much better.

He’s not a smart guy, so he can’t run out and get another high-paying job. Football was all he could do, at least for more than $20 an hour. It’s a horrific story. Imagine making $80 million in about 12 years, losing all of it, and then having to think about how long it would take to make that much money with your other abilities. In his case, it’s about 2000 years. That is the actual figure.

He’s a friend of Kanye West. West has a very shaky sports agency firm called Donda Sports, and Brown is the nominal president. Brown appears to be nearly illiterate, though, so it’s not clear whether he can actually perform any duties. Maybe West will pay him a lot anyway. But if he does, Brown will lose it. It won’t help.

I understand the desire to spend money on fun things, and I have certainly wasted money, but you have to have some sense of proportion. If your net worth is two million dollars, and the Lamborghini you want costs $1.5 million, it doesn’t mean you can afford it.

I can waste money, but I don’t understand insane spending.

Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll get my pickup truck fixed up really well, I’ll move to a nice rural property in Tennessee, and I’ll probably get some better heavy equipment, used. A bigger tractor and an excavator. I’ll have trouble-free appliances. If I travel long distances, I’ll definitely go business class, because long flights in coach are very unpleasant. I’ll get survival supplies and a generator. Nice stuff for the wife, but not too nice. Can’t think of much else.

Prime steaks more often. I would do that. Beef is a luxury in Biden’s world. I would probably get a lawn service. I would want an air-conditioned workshop for sure. That’s like $45,000. I’d quit buying all forms of insurance not required by law.

I really like the shoes and shorts I wear. I like Hanes T-shirts for about $3 each. I could see getting a good horsehide jacket not designed for motorcycling.

No boats. Been there. No planes. No vacation homes. Absolutely no club memberships. No jewelry for me. Jewelry on men is effeminate. No servants except maybe a maid to come in weekly. No ridiculous assistants to stand between me and commoners. No bodyguards. No entourage. No public giving of any kind. It’s ostentation.

I’ll tell you what. A comfortable home in Tennessee, all my bills paid, good food, good vehicles, zero concerns when buying things like tires and refrigerators…what else could you want?

Then I could invite Architectural Digest in to photograph my synthetic area rug from Lowe’s and the good downstairs recliner.

I’m not great with money, but I don’t see myself auctioning off private planes and gold chains to pay my creditors. I should be able to avoid getting a real job. I hope so. If I ever have to sell this farm, it will most likely be because I am too old to maintain it personally.

I hope I continue to improve, increasing my income and net worth while having the privilege of giving effectively to people who need help.

Tremble at my Mastery of Unimpressive Low-Paying Tasks

I am now a master chainsaw mechanic.

When I moved here, I managed three weeks before a hurricane came, and although we didn’t get the actual storm, a lot of trees fell. I was desperate for forestry tools, but they were not to be had. I managed to scrounge up a small Jonsered (Husqvarna) saw and a bigger Echo CS-590.

I have been lazy, and I didn’t know much about saws, and I could not find anyone around here who could fix one, so I had all sorts of trouble. I made dogged efforts to get good information so I could help myself, but I got misled over and over. Seemed like I never had a running saw when I needed one.

I just broke down and bought a pro-grade saw with a little computer in it. People call cheap saws “homeowner” saws, but the truth, I think, is that homeowners need the best saws, because we need tough equipment that can stand poor management.

I bought the new saw because I was really tired of trying to fix the others. Then once I had the Husky to rely on, naturally, I wanted to make the Echo run. I have turned it into a project saw.

Last year, I believe, I put a bigger carb in it. The carb comes from a 620P, which is a stronger saw with the same displacement. A week or two ago, I put a partial rebuild kit in the carb, which had been sitting since at least last year. That made it run, which was a huge improvement.

Today I added two other things: a better exhaust deflector to get heat out of the saw, and a little doodad that bumps the ignition timing 6 degrees forward to make the saw run more like Echo’s true pro saws.

I also tuned the carb myself, using a cheap Ebay tachometer and directions I stole from the Youtube Channel Steve’s Small Engine Saloon.

Echo says the saw should run at between 12,000 and 13,000 RPM. Web denizens say the ignition limits it to 13,000. Not true. Today I fired my saw up, and I got 14,000. It sounded really, really nice. Too nice. I didn’t want to blow it up. But I could not get the top speed to drop.

I finally realized I was turning the saw’s high-speed jet the wrong way. With that in mind, I started turning it the right way, and I settled on 13,300 RPM, roughly. Another Youtube saw guy runs his modded saws a little faster than that, and everyone thinks he’s a genius, so I guess my saw can take it.

Now the saw starts within about 6 pulls. Three with the choke in, and another two or three with it off. To me, that is astounding performance. Some people say their saws start on the first pull. Not sure how that’s possible with a choked carb, but they say that. After what I’ve been through, 6 is wonderful.

The little things I’ve done so far are supposed to bump the saw’s cutting speed up considerably, like maybe 15%. If I open the muffler up, I may see nearly 25%. That would be pretty nice. In truth, choosing the right chain and keeping it sharp make more of a difference than anything, but power is good.

Now what do I do? Use my big Husky because it’s almost guaranteed to work, or use the Echo in order to keep my nice new saw from getting dirty?

My plan is to put both in my cart when I cut big stuff. I’ll use whichever one works.

I feel almost competent.

Even Better Than a Butt Lift and Taylor Swift Tickets

When I moved here, and I was looking after my dad, I was too careful with money sometimes, because most of his cash was tied up in unneeded properties that weren’t selling. I didn’t want to start dipping into my own money to deal with his problems, not knowing for sure that I would be the sole heir. What if I never got the money back? What if he proposed to an assisted living attendant?

I could have gotten rid of some dangerous trees on the property–trees I didn’t think I should cut on my own–but I was concerned about his liquidity. Every time hurricane season rolled around, instead of relaxing in safety, I counted on the odds to keep trees off my buildings. I couldn’t be completely calm. I lived for the day hurricane season ended, meaning I went through six months of rolling the dice.

I continued doing this until today. I just fixed the problem. I was going to get on it a year ago, but with all my wife’s immigration issues, I let a lot of things go.

Next week should be very, very interesting. I am paying for one and a half days of work from a crew with some very intimidating machinery. The guy who owns the company just came by, and we made a deal. He is going to do things like lifting full-grown oaks out of the ground. He is removing so much stuff, he wants to put it in three burn piles.

One burn pile will hold tons and tons of debris, so any job that fills three has to be big.

This is going to be very nice. We never, ever get hurricane-force winds here, but we do get tropical-storm-force winds sometimes, and they can knock trees down. If a tree hits your house, it’s a disaster at best, and because hurricanes damage so many houses, it can take forever to get repairs.

Insurance here is going nuts under Biden, and DeSantis hasn’t been able to fix it. I may not be able to insure my house at any price next time around. If I can insure, it will not be cheap. People with inferior properties are paying between $20,000 and $30,000 per year in some places. Suze Orman, the money guru, has a little high rise condo that can’t possibly be damaged by storms, and she says she refused to pay the $28,000 she was quoted. I’m not paying anything like that, but insurance costs me almost as much as property taxes.

Insurers blame storms for most of it. When I think about possible losses, I think a fair amount about theft, a little bit about fire, and a whole lot about storms. If the trees are removed, and the house doesn’t burn down, I can insure against theft on my own. I will not need storm insurance at all.

I might be able to retrofit a sprinkler system to make fire less of a problem, and I’m already doing a lot to keep burglars away. The political spirit of the area and the normality of the non-feminized males keep the relatively bright ones in terror, and the local cops openly say they like it when homeowners kill undocumented guests, so things could be worse.

When my dad bought this place, the appraiser raved about it. Underpriced, he said. That may have been true, but the driveway was looking shabby, the roof only had a couple of years of life in it, and the trees, he ignored. I now have a new driveway and roof. That should hold me for 20 years. The trees are the last major concern that has to be addressed. The rest is all piddly stuff.

When you buy a house, look at the trees around it, because in all likelihood, no one else will. How close are they to the foundation and the roof? How fast do they grow? How long do they live? How strong are they? Do the analysis before you buy so you won’t be sandbagged later. That’s my advice.

Man, I can’t wait. I arranged the work at the last minute. The first named storm will be here this month, barring a statistical anomaly. All the people who procrastinated worse than I did will be looking for tree surgeons, and they’ll be busy. I took too long, but I took care of business just in time, and I’m not paying the mid-season price.

I’m paying less than the cost of a year’s property insurance.

I am going to hate losing the shade, and the trees looked very nice. It’s worth it to know my wife and I will not even have to think about seeing our house crushed.

Removing some trees will help with the leaf problem here. Our oaks produce thick, heavy leaves that feel like leather. They sink in water. When you shoot a leaf blower at them, they actually seem to grip the ground harder. They resist mulching and raking. When you burn them, they burn for days and can’t be put out. They kill grass but somehow allow weeds to grow freely. I hate them. Destroying a dozen or so major leaf droppers should improve things a great deal. I’ve managed to make great progress with a mower mulching kit and the world’s most powerful backpack blower, but having fewer leaves would be better.

Maybe I could plant some decent trees to take their places. Mulberries. Bushy magnolias. Pecans. I’ll be ancient before they grow tall, but at least they’ll get a start.

As a person who loves tools, I am eager to see what kind of tree can lift a grown oak up out of the ground. Whatever it is, I want one.

Stop Being a Fruit and Buy Man Tools Before It’s Too Late

Cutting up fallen trees is maybe 95% of my tree work. On this property, they fell themselves due to rot, so I don’t have to do it. And I’m afraid to fell them, because a lot of them are rotten and could drop logs on me if disturbed.

Nonetheless, I decided to fell a water oak today.

When this house was built, someone who didn’t know what he or she was doing allowed several oaks to remain right beside the driveway. I mean RIGHT beside it. Within two feet or even one foot.

This was stupid. Pavement and tree roots don’t get along, and oaks grow silly horizontal branches from their trunks whenever they feel like it. On a tree close to a road, these branches block cars. Pushing a tree over is the safest and cheapest way to get rid of it, but if you push over a tree next to a road or sidewalk, the roots may lift the pavement or concrete. The trunk acts like a prybar. This means you have to cut the trees the hard, slow, unsafe way.

It’s also a pain to make it up a curved driveway with oaks up against it. Your guests are likely to ding their cars.

Today I was mowing, and I decided to try to cut the tree, even though the top was rotten and could conceivably drop wood on me.

The tree was about 12″ thick at knee level, and I would say it was 50 feet tall. It was in a place where it couldn’t hit anything expensive when it fell, except for me. I looked at it carefully, and it seemed to be leaning slightly over the driveway.

I got out my 18″ Makita cordless saw, because it’s strong and handy, and I made a homeowner-grade notch on the side to which I thought the tree would fall. Then I started the back cut.

The saw got pinched. How? If a tree is leaning away from a back cut, the cut should get bigger, if anything, as the cut progresses.

I had to pound a wedge in to get the saw out. Then I got a 10″ EGO cordless pole saw and continued working, thinking a few feet of pole length would make me less likely to be crushed.

The tree started to move, and I fled like Biden from an unscripted interview, only the soles of my footwear actually left the ground. It fell exactly where I thought it would. So why did the saw get pinched?

The wood was very wet, and wet wood likes to swell. I don’t know if that explains it.

Getting rid of the tree was real work, but it wasn’t unpleasant. A tractor, a great brush fork, a timberjack, gloves, and some good saws made everything go smoothly. I am old, but I can get rid of a pretty big oak in about two hours.

The stump was a problem. When I used the Makita to cut it close to the ground, it didn’t want to finish. I fired up the new Husqvanra 562XP with its 24″ bar, and it slid right through the stump. That saw is perfect for this property. It has enough grunt to make a 24″ bar work, and it’s not too heavy.

Where I cut the stump close to the ground, it was around 20″ across.

I poured pure Roundup concentrate on it, like I did some other stumps. Is it legal? Don’t really care. Come arrest me. If I had any used motor oil, I would have used that, too. “Here’s one for my homies at Exxon Mobil. Deepwater Horizon style, y’all.”

This is all fun, but I will probably still have to pay to get some things moved. I have big trees too close to the shop and house, and I can’t make them all fall where I want with the tools and skills I have. Tomorrow a guy is coming to give me an estimate.

I’ll miss the shade very badly, but you would have to be an idiot to keep trees like these. The guy who built the house was not thinking. Maybe his wife put her foot down, thinking trees were more important than shelter and their life savings. I want the problem trees gone before the hurricane season really gets going. If my buildings are safe, I will be at peace all season long instead of hoping trees fall the right way.

So how much money have I saved this weekend? Based on previous estimates from arborists with unrealistic conceptions of my unwillingness to handle my own problems, I would say at least $2500.

That is offset by the grand or so I spent on a new saw and some parts for other machines. Maybe I should have made my old Echo function instead of springing for a second big saw, but based on my horrible experiences with shops and trying to do my own repairs, I think I did the right thing. From now on, I will ALWAYS have one big saw ready to cut. I will never again have to wait three months and put up with downed trees while shop nincompoops keep my only big saw.

I’m not counting the other stuff I’ve done for myself when I figure what I’ve saved. I had to go to a neighboring property to cut trees rooted on my side of the fence, and that had to save me another $2500. I must have done $15,000 worth of work since I’ve lived here, not including this year.

Arborists charge too much. If you’re an uneducated tradesman, and you can’t make a very good living charging $500 for an hour’s work, you are incompetent. If you insist on getting over twice that much, go ahead and lose your business and find a job shoveling manure. I was willing to work with you. I’m not your sugar daddy.

An arborist here should be able to gross three grand a day without pushing it or overcharging. He should be able to keep half of that. That’s $7500 per week, assuming he doesn’t have a subordinate who can use his equipment to handle Saturday jobs and bring in another $750.

Keep $2000 to live on, and invest the rest in your business. Get a second lift truck. Find a guy to run a second crew. There’s another $6500 per week.

Am I wrong? I doubt it. I think an arborist who charged reasonable prices would be booked up solid, all the time. The volume would pay off much better than sitting idle while trying to talk people into giving you their IRA’s for quick, easy jobs.

Quick nickels make people richer than slow dollars. Sam Walmart died a billionaire because he got that.

If they mess with me tomorrow, I am completely capable of renting a cherry picker and removing most of the problem trees. It’s not that hard if you take things slowly and minimize the risk. The smaller the pieces you cut, the safer you are. It’s hard to hurt yourself if you’re willing to spend hours cutting three feet at a time.

I should rent one anyway, just to get over the intimidation.

Moving the pieces is easy. It’s a joke. It’s safe. The fork I created for my tractor is nothing short of amazing. It does nearly everything a grapple will do, much, much better. The other things a grapple will do, I generally don’t need, or I can easily work around them.

I was told I could get this place cleaned up by a crew for $4500. If that’s true, consider the check signed. If not, I’ll be renting, doing most of the work by myself, and then paying a much lower figure for the rest. The $4500 figure I heard was unreasonable, but not so high I would refuse to pay it in order to avoid a huge hassle. Let’s see what happens.

I have 4 new wedges coming tomorrow, because I cut up and/or lost the ones I already had. One vanished into thin air while I was cutting a leaning tree. The parts I ordered for hot-rodding the Echo will arrive tomorrow, too. I finally got a decent helmet with a mesh mask and ear covers.

I need to start killing more small trees before they cause problems. Letting small trees grow in bad places is like encouraging small amounts of immigration from Muslim countries. Decades later, you will pay a large price.

It’s Working

Here’s to traditional marriage. I think my wife will agree.

Today I decided to make a big step on making this property my own. Sometimes I’m intimidated because I can’t help thinking the original owners knew what they were doing when they made bad landscaping decisions. I am getting over that. Today I killed a magnolia and two bottlebrush trees.

It seems like I fix just about everything these days. My tractor’s poorly-situated steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I took it out, modified the frame (drilled and painted a big hole) to make it easier to remove next time, and took it to a hydraulic place for a rebuild. I would have rebuilt it myself, but there were problems identifying the parts. Now I have the numbers, because they were on the receipt.

I managed to bust the engine’s front cover while putting the cylinder back in, necessitating an expensive visit to the dealer, but at least I know how to deal with the cylinder in the future. And I painted up the new cover I bought, so it looks a lot better than the old one.

The house’s original owner had some horrible brush tines that were held on with chains and chunks of wood. I cut them in pieces and turned them into a quick-attach fork which is a thousand times as good. Welding, cutting, painting. Got it all done without help. No one else has a fork like this one. It’s fantastic.

I put a Pat’s quick attach set on my 3-point hitch, and it made it easy to switch attachments. Totally superior to the heavy, overpriced adaptors other people still, for unknown reasons, buy. I stuck a ballast box on the hitch, so now I have a compact ballast and a great brush fork to work together.

Today I went out and ripped my bottlebrush trees out because they were sick and planted two feet from my workshop. You never plant anything two feet from a building. Not even shrubs. The trees threatened to beat up the eaves during storms, and if they had been big trees, their roots would have threatened the foundation. They were in the way. Planting them was a bad choice. I pulled one out pretty easily with a chain and strap. The other one took more work, but now it’s on the burn pile. I plan to replace them with this: dirt. Or maybe two small shrubs with roots at least three feet out.

The magnolia was maybe 15 feet from the workshop and 10 feet from a water oak. It had to go. It had no future. It could have fallen on the shop. Every tree that poses a falling hazard is on the way out.

I am terrible at felling trees because I rarely have to do it. To gain practice, I tried to lean the magnolia away from the shop. When it started to move, I ran away like Sir Robin facing the Mad Chicken of Bristol, and the tree decided to stop falling. I decided brute force was the answer, as it so often is, so I chained it to the tractor and pulled it over.

I cut it in pieces and got rid of it, and now the cattle are snacking on magnolia leaves. I put glyphosate concentrate on the stumps.

When I came back in the house for breaks and to shower, my wife stared at me. I think she was starting to appreciate what I do around here. I was soaked in sweat. I had a mashed fingernail from a farm jack. I had a stick in my hair.

I had done maybe $1000 worth of work in around 3 hours. I base that on absurd quotes I’ve received for tree work. It was definitely work, but I enjoyed it. I have good tools, and my skills are adequate.

When I started taking off my work clothes, I was going to put them in the laundry room, but she told me to leave them where they were and let her know when I wanted food.

I showered, drew myself a Yard Boss Lager, put on my new glasses, sat in my new recliner, and relaxed.

My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.

I got up yesterday, prayed, ate, dealt with a business lease for a rental property, fixed a cabinet door my wife had leaned on…I did all sorts of stuff. I can handle things that would leave metrosexual modern husbands in tears. I can drive a manual transmission. I can shoot, and it doesn’t bother me to kill cute animals that cause problems. I can make ammunition. I own taps and dies.

In return, my wife looks after wife stuff. She doesn’t compete with me and try to find an edge every day. She leaves the toilet seat up.

Satan has turned modern marriage into an endless competition. A series of selfish negotiations. It was never supposed to be like that. We were supposed to know and love our roles.

When you drive a car, the engine doesn’t decide it wants to be an air conditioner. The battery doesn’t decide it wants to be a transmission. The parts of a family should work together the same way.

Interestingly, in news related to old guys with rural properties, I have read that Tom Selleck is afraid he will have to sell his farm.

Tom Selleck must surely have a lot of money. He was in a very successful TV series 40 years ago, and he made a number of okay movies. He did a bunch of Hallmark movies. He has been in a CBS series for the last 14 years.

He lives on an avocado farm in Ventura County, California. Reports about the size of the farm vary, but it’s around 60 acres. He says he may have to sell if his series is cancelled, in order to have a good lifestyle until he dies.

How can that be true?

I looked it up. You can find the address on the web. He pays about $65,000 per year in property taxes. He may live another 15 years, so let’s say $1.5 million yet to pay, with numerical increases for inflation. Shouldn’t he be able to pay that?

His home is an avocado farm. Aren’t avocados expensive? Shouldn’t there be at least six figures of net income from that?

I decided to find out what John Travolta pays in my county. It’s about $27,000 per year. He has a smaller property, but on the other hand, the improvements are nuts. An incredible mansion that connects to a system of runways. He has carports with jets in them, at his house! One jet is a commercial airliner QANTAS used to own.

Travolta pays no state income tax, unless he has property in other states. He pays no county or city income tax. His property tax, during the same period during which Selleck will pay $1.5 million plus increases, will be about $400,000 with increases.

He can have all the guns he wants. He can keep an AK-47 in his car. If he shoots a criminal, our sheriff, Billy Woods, will probably take him to Dairy Queen.

He doesn’t have rolling blackouts. The power is always on.

I wonder what Tom Selleck is paying California, his county, and his municipality. And why is he there? He’s supposed to be conservative. My guess is that his wife won’t let him move. Or maybe he’s a RINO.

He could be in Tennessee or Florida right now. Or Idaho. Or Wyoming.

Zillow says his property is worth about $12 million, and Zillow is usually pretty accurate. Zillow thinks Travolta’s house is worth $3.5 million, which is very modest considering his wealth. The acreage is about a third of Selleck’s, which is still pretty good for a non-agricultural property.

If you don’t need runways, I guarantee you, you can get 60 acres here for what Travolta’s house is worth. With an agricultural exemption, your taxes will be around $16,000 per year.

You can have horses, cattle, goats, sheep, ostriches, emus, donkeys, or just about anything else you want. What you can’t have is California.

Selleck should not have a mortgage right now. Unless something is wrong, his home is paid for. He should be able to sell his ranch, pocket maybe $9,000,000 after capital gains, move to a better state, buy a better farm, and have well over $5,000,000 in additional retirement funds. He should have something saved up from his work. He should have the maximum Social Security benefit.

Maybe he just spends too much. When you’re 79, and you’re worried about your future, you ought to be able to rein in your spending and survive on a net worth of over $12 million. Even if all he has is a reverse mortgage, he should be able to fly business class to nice places every year and eat anything he wants.

If he moves in next door, I’ll be happy to help him and his wife find the best local barbecue.

Consider Your Chains Broken

I’m starting to feel like my mission in life is to shame manufacturers who make it hard to get parts and information.

Today I’m going after Textron/EZ-GO. This annoying company makes good carts, but finding parts on their antiquated site is impossible, and their customer service is bad. On top of that, they charge like crazy.

Right now, I have a request for information waiting, and I am not sure they’ll ever respond.

I did something stupid, causing a wheel to fall off my ST350, and I messed up some lug studs. I fixed them with a die, but I don’t trust them, so I need new studs. Problem: it’s very hard to find them.

If you look for EZGO studs on the web, you will see endless ads that say “except ST350.” Sites that sell all kinds of EZGO parts generally don’t sell these studs. You can get a new rear hub with studs in it, but expect to pay at least $85.

Some kind person found a site that sells the studs. It’s called Country Cat, probably because all us cats in the country have carts. I’ve used it before. I bought a $250 OEM carb for about $125. I have a China carb that works, but I wanted insurance for the future because of the difficulty of getting EZGO parts, and the price was impossible to turn down.

In case anyone else out there wants these studs, here is a link:

LINK

You can try a car parts place, hoping a similar stud will work, but only one place near me had a book listing studs by measurements. Generally, they are sold by car model. The studs I found would have required precision boring, which I did not want to do.

If you have an EZGO Workhorse, you should buy these studs and set them aside, and you might consider buying a carb, because the Subaru Robin engines in these “old” (two short decades) carts get very bad support.

I’m compiling info on my power equipment, and I just got my Husqvarna 125B blower figured out. This is a very small, light gas blower which is very handy for things like blowing crud off a porch or out of a garage. If you’re very old, it’s good for birthday cakes and discouraging old women who want to kiss you.

The carburetor in the 125 series is a Zama C1Q-W37. The Husky part number is 5904601-02. Unfortunately, Husky makes it hard to find the carb partial rebuild kit, which is what is needed in nearly all cases when a 125 blower won’t run. The Zama carb kit’s part number is RB-47. It’s very cheap. This is a total rebuild kit. The diaphragm kit is GND-18.

I have a Chinese carb in the blower, and it runs nearly perfectly, so I have little motivation to change it, but I probably have the Zama in a box somewhere, so I ordered the kit, and I’m going to try to repair it.

The OEM carb is cheap, so don’t pay the highest price you find. You can get it for something like $35.

I looked into my new Husqvarna 562XP saw so I would have a rebuild kit on hand. The carb is from Zama. The entire carb designation is C1M-EL48, and the diaphragm kit from Zama is the GND-105, which is cheap. The total rebuild kit is the RB-181.

This is only for saws from number 20121401173 forward. Before that, the saw came with an EL44 or EL46 carb, and they are not as highly regarded.

Excuse me if any of this stuff has already been published here. It’s hard to keep it all straight.

Not Even the Kragle Can Ruin Small Engine Thursday

Today is Small Engine Thursday. The first of its kind.

I’ve been struggling to pull myself out of the sludge of years of small engine problems, and it’s starting to come together. I bought a new Husqvarna 562XP chainsaw. I got my Echo CS590 running. I took my small Husky saw and my Echo polesaw to the shop.

I decided every Thursday would be Small Engine Thursday. Start every small engine on the property, let it warm up, and make sure all is well.

Today I ran the CS590, the 562XP, my Husqvarna 125B miniature blower, my Echo SRM-3020T trimmer which has a circular saw blade on it instead of string, and my huge Echo backpack blower. The 125B could probably use a carb rebuild and a return to the original non-Chinese carb, but it moves dirt and leaves and doesn’t quit.

I have several parts on the way to make things better. I’ll be modding the Echo saw and stashing carb rebuild kits away for later. I bought some more tools, of course.

Yesterday I put a new oil cap on my Makita cordless chainsaw and cleaned it up to confirm it was pumping oil.

The EZGO ran a couple of days ago, so I’m not worried about it. I don’t want to fool with it until tomorrow because I did something dumb. I removed a wheel to fix a tire, and I must not have torqued the nuts correctly when I put it back on, because the wheel fell off just outside my gate. I had to jack it up, put it back on with the one nut I was able to find, and limp it to the garage. I had to order new lug nuts and a die to clean up the lug studs. The die arrives tomorrow, but if I can find new lug studs, I’ll just buy them.

Both tractors run now.

Things are good. Now if I can just find out why my car is throwing false overheating alarms.

Maybe Some Day Manufacturers Will do This

I am doing something I should have done long ago. I am studying my yard tools and writing down useful things.

I’m writing stuff down here because I know other people have pulled their hair out trying to get this information.

My Echo chainsaw is a CS590 Timberwolf. It uses the same carb rebuild kit as Echo’s other 60cc saws. The part number is P033000000. The carb is made by an extremely annoying company, Walbro, which has horrible customer service. The Walbro part number is K22-HDA.

My Echo pole saw is a PPT-280. The carb part number is A021001340. It’s a Walbro WYK-233A. The rebuild kit’s part number is P003001120. The Walbro kit number appears to be K13-WYK. It replaced other kits with other numbers. The kit is hard to find due to poor support from Echo, which (apparently) is also Shindaiwa and Yamabiko.

My Echo weed trimmer is an SRM-3020T. It’s a monster. The carb is a Walbro WYG-11A, which you can get for about $80. Echo part A021004831. There are two repair kits. One is a tune-up kit which doesn’t include carb parts. It contains an air cleaner and spark plug and so on. The part number is 90181Y, and it costs over $30. The ECHO number for the carb kit is P003005940.

Check your weed trimmer’s serial number to make sure the carb kit fits. There were multiple versions.

Echo’s website is useless. It doesn’t function.

My Jonsered CS2240 (Husqvarna 435) saw has a Zama C1T-El41 carb. Easier to find than Walbro carbs. The rebuild kit has two part numbers. RB-149 and Z000-001-K035. Don’t ask me why. You can get one for around $12.