Only Took 7 Years to Get it Working

I got my Echo Timberwolf chainsaw running, finally. I did two things. I did a half-rebuild on the Walbro HDA-327 carb (same rebuild kit for all 60cc Echo saws), and I finally got straight information on the starting procedure. I learned some simple things which, oddly, are not widely known.

If you have an Echo CS590 saw, I can help you start it.

First, you need to know about the choke. It’s not just a choke. It also holds the throttle open. It does this when it’s engaged, and it also does it after you disengage it, so if you pull the choke and then push it back in, the throttle will stay open.

With that in mind…

1. Lift the on/off toggle switch that controls the spark. Without this, you have no chance of starting it.

2. Engage the choke. Leave it engaged. This chokes the engine and opens the throttle so the saw will get a lot of gas when it tries to start.

3. Depress the compression release. Some people claim it keeps saws from starting because you need compression to start, but my saw starts with it depressed, so that can’t be true. It makes it easier to yank the cord.

4. Engage the brake. No one listens to this advice, but it’s bad to have a saw start at high speed with the chain spinning like crazy.

5. Put the saw on the ground and put your foot through the handle to hold it down. No one does this either, but it’s safer than the showoff way. One problem: it’s not actually possible to put your foot in the handle unless you have tiny feet. Put a piece of wood through the handle and step on it.

6. Pull the cord out a couple of inches and then yank as hard as you can. After a few pulls, the saw should make some kind of noise. When you hear that, disengage the choke. It doesn’t matter how feeble the noise is. If you keep yanking, you will flood the engine.

7. The saw should start within a few pulls. When it does, tap the throttle to release the detent that holds it open. The extra gas is only to make the saw start. If you run it fast with the brake on, you’re going to fry your clutch.

8. Release the brake.

That’s about it. If it doesn’t work, your saw is badly tuned or has some other problem. Fix it.

Other tips:

1. Avoid canned fuel. This one surprised me, but there is a very sharp saw mechanic on Youtube who says she has repeatedly “fixed” dead saws by pouring out Trufuel and other canned gas. Get yourself some ethanol-free gas if possible. If you can’t find it, get ordinary gas. Treat it with Echo Red Armor oil and Biobor EB to make it last longer. Don’t use Sta-Bil red. The blue stuff might work. Supposedly, you can get 6 months out of regular gas treated with the right things. Biobor EB promises “up to” 18 months, but it doesn’t mention “down to.”

2. If your saw won’t start, dump the fuel and replace it before doing anything else. Just find a quiet corner of your yard and dump it on the ground. No one will get cancer.

3. If you’re storing your saw for a while, dump the fuel, put canned fuel in it, and run it dry, pulling the choke to get all the gas out. The big problem with this is that a dry saw may have problems with dry seals later, but you can’t have everything.

4. When you treat your fuel, take a Sharpie and write the date on the jug. Never use a jug you also use for gas that has no oil in it, because you will get confused and ruin your engine. If you know how old your fuel is, you can make intelligent decisions later.

5. Start your small engines every week. Pick a day and start them all. If you avoid letting your saws sit idle, you should be able to avoid the business of running them dry.

6. If you flood your saw, make sure the throttle is open and try again. Engage the choke and disengage it. You can also put a velcro strap around the trigger to keep it depressed. This sometimes works.

To start your Echo warm:

1. Make sure the switch is on.

2. Engage the choke.

3. Disengage the choke. Now the throttle is open.

4. Engage the brake.

5. Put saw on ground and immobilize it.

6. Yank until it starts.

7. Tap throttle.

8. Disengage brake.

Here’s something really important: whenever you see the saw when it’s not running, turn the switch on. It won’t hurt anything to have the ignition on when the saw is not running, but if you leave it off, you will forget to turn it on before starting the saw, and you will flood it.

Here’s some more interesting info. Heat ruins saws. How do you get rid of it? A few ways.

1. Keep your blade as sharp as possible. Believe it or not, pulling a dull blade will overheat your saw. You will ruin the cylinder, piston, and possibly other things inside the engine. When that happens, you have a parts saw.

2. Ask around and see what knowledgeable people think about your saw’s factory exhaust. Some saws have pretty restrictive exhausts, and they contribute to heat. There are known ways to fix this, and they are simple.

3. If you have an old-fashioned bar with a lube port, lube it.

My saw runs like an F1 car now.

Echo CS590’s come with plastic caps on the carb screws to keep people from adjusting them too far. You will eventually want to get rid of these caps and adjust the saw correctly, but this will probably violate your warranty, which is generally regarded as worthless anyway. It doesn’t even apply to carbs.

The carb has a main jet with a hole in it to prevent it from running too lean, and this causes problems. You can buy a better main jet, pound the old one out, and pound the new one in.

I put a bigger carb (from the 620P) in my saw because it allows for upgrades later on. I’m also getting a new exhaust deflector to reduce back pressure and heat, and I will be putting two small holes in the muffler for the same purpose. I’m going to install a new key on the flywheel to advance the timing and give the saw more power.

Once all this is done, I’ll have a saw about as capable as my new twice-as-expensive Husky 562XP, which is not modified. I might put a 24″ bar on the Echo, because it’s the perfect size for this farm. A 20″ bar is a bit handier, though.

I’m going to take the Echo to the shop to have a pro tune it before I use it. If the carb isn’t right, I could damage the saw, and I would rather pay than see that happen. As I learn more about carbs, I’ll be more confident about fixing it.

I found out that 2-stroke carbs usually don’t need full rebuilds. I watched a Steve’s Small Engine Saloon video, and all he did was replace the diaphragms, internal fuel screen, and needle. I did the same things, and my saw started running. I squirted some carb cleaner into appropriate places while I worked on it.

My carb will start if the H and L screws are out 1-3/4 turns, so yours should too, if it has the same carb. Doesn’t mean these settings are optimal, but if you can get the saw to run, you can adjust the screws.

This is a good saw, and for the price, it’s fantastic, but it has a reputation for flooding very easily, and the advice you will get on the web and in the manual will generally make things worse. If you don’t know the secrets, this saw will make you wish you were dead. It’s worse than having no saw at all.

I would advise people to avoid the 60cc Echo saws and get saws that are less troublesome. If you’re a pro, you will not notice any problems with these saws, but an uninformed amateur with dubious tools and skills can make better choices, in my opinion. Any saw that works is better than a garage princess.

A bargain saw that ends up costing you hundreds in parts and labor, in addition to preventing you from clearing your land, is no bargain.

I’ve been relying on new Chinese carbs for a long time, but if I can fix up my OEM carbs with rebuild kits and get good results, I’ll continue doing it. I can’t keep supporting my local shop as though I had two X chromosomes and a dresser full of skinny jeans and yoga pants.

God Hates Displays of Wealth

It’s impossible to trust the government (shocking) when it comes to reports about the prosperity of the American people. For example, it’s possible to have a low official unemployment number when an unusually large number of people are unemployed.

A few years ago, I came up with the Baldor Bench Grinder Index. You go to Ebay and search for used Baldor bench grinders.

When times are hard, people sell their tools. Back during the Clinton forced-minority loan housing crisis, I got a barely-used 19″ Shop Fox band saw for way less than it ordinarily cost. I got a Powermatic 66 table saw with a big extension, Biesemeyer fence, and a punch of pricey blades for $500. Both tools came from cabinetry shops.

When things improve, you don’t see a lot of used Baldor bench grinders on Ebay.

Yesterday, I drove by an auction site. They sell trucks and heavy equipment. I visited a couple of years ago, and the lot was full of junk no intelligent person would buy. Yesterday, there was a lot more stuff. I saw two very nice-looking track loaders (similar to skid steers) right out front.

Today I checked the Baldor Bench Grinder Index. There are a lot of grinders on the market. Maybe 60% more than there were a couple of years ago.

Is the index reliable? I don’t know. The business of selling things online has changed. Craigslist punched Ebay in the gut, and Facebook Marketplace is stomping Craigslist. Seems to me that even if the grinder index had a somewhat low number, it would mean things were not going well. The other sites are taking sales away from Ebay.

Today I saw Charlie Kirk say that 4 years ago, a person needed an income of $59000 to buy a house, and now it’s $106000, meaning you might be excluded even if you have a high-paying profession, such as working at Burger King for $25 per hour.

He said big companies are swallowing up houses and renting them out, driving the purchase prices up. He said lowering interest rates makes things worse by making it easier for corporations to buy homes, decreasing the supply and jacking up prices. I don’t know if that makes any sense, because it also makes it easier for the rest of us to buy homes. Anyway, a lot of young people think they will never own homes.

The difficulty of buying homes and food under Biden, which is indisputable, is a phenomenon we used to call “poverty.” If you had a hard time buying things, we said you were “poor.” Affluence is becoming less common, and poverty is on the rise.

Americans are becoming poor. That’s the short version.

When I was a kid, I heard the term “rich Americans” all the time. When my family visited Europe, the people seemed poor and also short and spindly. Now Americans are descending the ladder of wealth, in terms of net worth. We passed Switzerland, which is number one, per capita. Our GDP per capita is far below Ireland’s, if you can believe it.

I think we are hiding the pain through denial and credit. I sometimes go to fast food joints, where I can expect to pay $13-$25 for a low-quality meal, and I often see a lot of cars in front of them. My county is not wealthy, and I know the people who keep spending on fast food generally can’t afford it. They must be pumping up their credit card balances because they can’t make themselves accept the lower standard of living their incomes now support.

I checked, and credit card debt is now at an all-time high. Adjusted for inflation, the only higher figure was reached in 2008, and we all remember what that was like. Deflation. Prime beef for $7 per pound, because no one could afford it. Shuttered businesses.

I am terrified of debt, so I stay away from it. If I die tomorrow, some credit card companies get a few grand, and that’s it. I don’t know how people can stand lying in bed at night thinking about debt mountains that will kill their estates and leave their heirs with nothing.

On rare occasions, my wife thinks I’m cheap because I won’t pay for something I think is ridiculous, like a Vuitton purse. She always comes to her senses later. She has visited 6 countries with me over 4 years. I don’t expect her to get a job. I try to supply her with more than she needs. She knows this. She has moments when she loses perspective, but she snaps out of it fast.

Lately, God has been teaching me about the evils of ostentation. I believe it’s sinful. I think it turns God against people.

Since purses have already been mentioned, I’ll use them to illustrate the point. A good, durable, classic purse that will last 20 years starts at maybe $300. A $500 purse can be a very good investment. A $2000 purse with little Vuitton symbols all over it is different. It won’t last any longer, and the only thing the extra $1500 gets you is the ability to impress shallow people and hurt the feelings of the poor, who are already humiliated enough.

When I buy boots, I don’t buy $65 Chinese disposables from Rural King. They will hurt my feet, let water in, and fail in less than a year. On the other hand, I don’t spend $1500 on custom-made boots from Oregon. I don’t need them, and I don’t get a good return on the investment. I’ll spend $140-$250 to get something that will last years and do a great job. Very often, $250 boots sell for over a hundred dollars less on Amazon. I have boots I bought over 20 years ago.

Often, buying good, expensive things ends up costing less than buying cheap things. I understand that. And trying to save money has caused me a huge amount of unnecessary pain. But you will never see me in a $500 Gucci baseball cap unless someone puts it on my corpse.

A friend of mine has a diesel Mercedes SUV. I thought he got it because he liked diesels, but now I think he drives it partly for status.

The car has been a nightmare to own. I hate it. It had a persistent limp mode problem for maybe two years. To replace the battery, you have to cut the carpeting or remove the passenger seat. It has cheaply-made engine parts that fail routinely, and they are very expensive to buy. Working on it is pure hell.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. I think they’re both fantastic. Reliable, comfortable, and common, so everyone knows how to fix them, and parts are everywhere. I never asked myself whether my wife would be impressed when she saw it. She was supposed to be impressed with me and the way I treated her, not a machine. But a big percentage of American women–this is incomprehensible to me–are put off by great men in ordinary cars. Incredibly, there are millions of women in American who will have sex with you just because you have a high-end car. That’s worse than being a whore. A whore gets paid.

My friend has an Iphone, which he hates. I asked him why he got it. He said he got it because women like them. I can’t figure out how it feels to think that way. If women started saying they were insanely excited by men in a certain $3 shirt from Tractor Supply, I wouldn’t buy one.

My wife likes Land Rovers. She will never have one if I have to pay for it. They’re unreliable. They cost a fortune. The insurance is high. They only exist to impress people who don’t matter.

My car is now 9 years old. It has fewer than 75,000 miles on it. It has no rust. The interior is good. I may drive it until I die. It has antilock brakes, a bunch of airbags, climate control, and comfortable seats. It was made before spy technology made it possible for the government to shut cars down and helped insurance companies find out how people drove.

What else do I need?

I’m building up her jewelry collection. A woman has to have jewelry. I get her tasteful pieces that look great, but I will never jeopardize our future by buying a ruby the size of a lima bean. Apart from the cost, over-the-top jewelry makes women look shallow. A lot of it makes them look ghetto.

God has given us extraordinary blessings. We have a nice house in a secluded area far from the Satanic lefist and Islamist mobs. Away from the constant parade of murderous, entitled sexual perverts. We have enough wealth. We have good food and clothing. We don’t have to go to work and bend the knee to a system designed to crush Christians.

He didn’t give us these things because we were good people who deserved it. He let himself be tortured to death so he could show his love by giving us all this in spite of the fact that we are failures. If we show off and make other people feel bad, and if we want them to admire us for receiving charity in return for our histories of vileness, then we are provoking God to take it all away and give us what we deserve.

There are tens of millions of Americans out there spending money they have not earned, along with crippling interest, in order to make other people (sincere Kardashian fans and influence-worshipers) think they’re bigger deals than they are. These are the same people who go on Facebook and post photos of their cars and dream vacations. They are the same people who post glowing remarks about their perfect families while they are having screaming fights in front of their kids or losing children to homosexuality and drugs.

I don’t understand the social media liars. Everyone who knows them knows about their failures, and they talk.

I used to go to church with a deacon named Manny. He called himself an architect, and he called his business and architecture and engineering firm. He has never been to college. He’s committing crimes by pretending to be a licensed professional. If he ever tries to design anything, he could get someone killed.

His wife used to post family photos and say how wonderful their lives were. Meanwhile, she texted a friend of mine and said her life was a living hell and she had to get away from Manny.

My wife knows a model from Zambia. She lives in the USA. She posts photos of her expensive things, like $30,000 purses. This is a common thing in Africa, as it is among ghetto people here. Bragging is considered acceptable, and people who do it also make fun of the poor people who comment.

My wife says she just found out this woman is a whore. Are the purses real? Well, she lied about herself, so she’ll lie about a purse. What about the cars? Anyone can stand next to someone else’s car in a picture. Ghetto people do it all the time. Same people who get a hundred singles and one hundred-dollar bill, put the big bill on the top, and fan the whole stack out in pictures so it looks like they have $10,000.

I don’t think it’s evil to drive a nice mid-priced car through a slum. It’s not evil to have a big house as long as it’s not a nouveau-riche status symbol tarted up with things like a helipad. I think it’s fine to go on vacation and use a good camera to take pictures in a poor country. But God surely hates showing off, which is gratuitous. You have to watch it.

I hope that if we really are looking at a permanently lowered American standard of living, God spares his children and helps us to be generous and quiet. With all the other spirits, nations, and people out there trying to destroy our prosperity, the last thing we need is to join them.

I’m going to make a special effort to toe the line and get my wife to do the same.

When the Desire Cometh, it is a Tree of Life

I had an extraordinary experience today. A very good one.

I have lots of trees. They fall down a lot. I have to keep saws in order to deal with them.

When I first got here, a hurricane passed by at a distance, and even though we were not hit, we got winds high enough to knock over lots of large trees. This was about 23 days after my arrival. The previous owners left the property in great shape, and I only got to enjoy it for three weeks before Satan blew his nose all over it.

I had no saw, and after the storm, getting a saw was impossible. Not only were local stores cleaned out; because people had gotten used to Internet shopping, online retailers all over the US were cleaned out. One state did that. It’s a good lesson to remember.

One day not long after the storm, I had a near-miraculous experience. I was stubbornly Googling to find saws, and I found a Jonsered (red Husqvarna) 16″ 40cc saw advertised on Tractor Supply’s site, and it was at a store only 20 or so miles off. I bought it, thinking there was no way I would actually get it. I thought it had to be a website error, or maybe an employee would hide the saw and sell it to a friend or relative. Incredibly, when I went to the store the next day, the saw was there.

I managed to find a 20″ 60cc Echo CS590 online at Acme Tools, and I pounced. Once it arrived, I had two fairly good amateur-grade saws to get me through the job of fixing the property.

I didn’t know much about small engines. I didn’t know:

1. Modern gas is garbage, and that goes quadruple for ethanol gas. If you let ethanol gas sit in a small engine for even two months, you may clog your carburetor so badly it has to be disassembled and cleaned.

2. Sta-bil gas treatment, which is what most people use, is also garbage. It forms a thin protective layer atop gas in your tank, but if your tank ever moves, the layer breaks, and the protection stops until it forms again. Not knowing this, I used Sta-bil.

3. The most important thing to think of when you buy a small engine is the quality of the local repair apparatus. If you don’t have a good repair shop nearby to fix your gold-plated Stihl, you are much better off buying and scrapping three Poulans in a row.

I clogged up both my saws. More accurately, Democrats clogged them up, because they’re the idiots who force the ethanol scam on us, and they’re probably somehow responsible for the fact that even ethanol-free gas is not as stable as it used to be. I have no evidence to back that up, but I’ll bet it’s true, because the whole thing has that Democrat smell about it.

I fiddled with various solutions to the problem. I bought cheap Chinese replacement carburetors to get around cleaning the factory carbs. This sometimes worked well. I kept having problems, though, and around 16 months after I bought the saws, I took the Echo to authorized repair centers, and while they did manage to get it going, they took about three months. When I started using it, screws fell out of the case because they had not been tightened enough, and that cost me more time while I waited for new ones to arrive.

The saws have continued to have issues, and I am part of the problem. I let them sit more than I should have. The more problems I had, the more discouraged I was, so the less I tried to use them, and then I let them sit longer.

I bought an 18″ Makita cordless saw to fill in the gap. I have to say it’s wonderful. It has incredible torque, and it always, always, always runs. With 4 batteries, you can do the kind of job that would take you about two hours with a gas saw, as well or better than a gas saw. After that, you’re stuck with a dead saw, but that’s not so bad, because maybe 95% of cutting jobs involve less than two hours of work.

I’m not saying the saw will run for two hours on 4 batteries. It won’t. I’m saying it will do a job you can do in two hours with a gas saw. Most of the time, when you’re doing a job with a chainsaw, the saw isn’t running. You’re driving wedges or moving around or doing other things.

I have some trees that need work right now. Two oaks are hanging out over a neighboring property, and I have to get together with the people over there and move them. I haven’t been able to get either of my gas saws to work right. The Jonsered surges while idling, making the chain move and making the saw dangerous, and the Echo can’t be started no matter how many tricks I try. I got all sorts of expert advice which does no good.

I have really suffered with these saws. I’ve had jobs pile up on me. I have wrestled with these saws over and over in my shop, exhausting myself and getting filthy, never knowing when the next adjustment or change in procedure might make them work. It’s very unpleasant, walking out to the shop for the fifth time, after four failures to get results, not knowing whether this day will be any better.

I was willing to spend money. I was willing to work on the saws myself. It didn’t matter. I could not get anywhere. I felt that any American with a good net worth should be able to get a saw fixed easily and quickly, but it was an obstacle I could find no way around.

Every time I thought about the problem, I felt frustration. I felt hopeless. I marveled at the difficulty, and even though I was willing to pay for help, I marveled at the cost.

Mechanics now charge about a hundred bucks an hour, which is obscene, but they’re no better than they were when they charged 10 dollars. If you keep taking a $300 saw in, it can turn into a $900 saw before long. What if you buy a $900 saw to begin with, and it has fewer problems, so you save hundreds on mechanics? It starts to make sense after a few years of suffering.

I used to say I would never buy an expensive saw, but over the last week, I have had a change of heart. Getting my Echo saw repaired seemed impossible in this county, and I as getting nowhere fixing it myself. I didn’t want to take it back to the people who held it hostage in the past. I started to think it might be better to get a more powerful new saw, which I needed anyway, and treat it right from the outset. I could buy a brand with a good local repair shop and put my Echo problems behind me.

I tried to get advice on the web. I got some great advice and some stupid advice. People told me this Echo model is a dream saw which always starts reliably. Go Google it and see if you believe that. There are multiple videos of people who have struggled with this saw; they publish their solutions. Other people I communicated with offered solutions I already knew about, which did not work. Others, more helpfully, recommended certain saws to me.

I learned some stuff which may possibly be true.

There are two types of chainsaw: professional (logger and arborist) and bad (homeowner and farmer). An average homeowner can get years of satisfying use from a bad saw, but pros do not like them. They’re less durable, and they tend to be heavier for their size. Drop one from a tree, and you may have to scrap it. They have other shortcomings too.

There are three good brands of chainsaw in America, or maybe I should say manufacturers, since a manufacturer can have more than one brand. The manufacturers are Stihl, Husqvarna, and Shindaiwa (parent of Echo). Stihl and Husqvarna make the best pro saws. Shindaiwa/Echo makes some pro saws, and it also makes the CS590, which has pro guts in a homeowner-saw body. If you shop, you can get a CS590 for around $400. Add over $300 to that for a comparable Stihl or Husky with all-pro construction.

The CS590 is probably a fantastic bargain for people who use saws frequently, know how to prevent them from clogging, and have good repair shops close to them. For me, it was an orange plastic torture device most of the time. I did a lot of things wrong when I got my saw, making it worse, and I had no help.

Yesterday, I finally decided I should get a pro saw and then keep looking for places that could fix the Echo and the Jonsered. A new Echo place had opened up, so maybe there was hope for that saw. I would work it out so I had two big saws, at least one of which would most likely run on any given day.

Based on advice, I decided I wanted a saw with modern electronics in it to make it run better. Husqvarna and Stihl have saws that adjust themselves to deal with things like temperature and humidity. Pros tell me they work better than old-fashioned saws. Husqvarna’s system is called Autotune, and Stihl’s is called M-tronic.

There is a Stihl/Husqvarna dealer 5 minutes from me. I thought that would be a great choice. I would pick a model on the web, go in, ask them how quicky they did mechanical service, and get a price. If they made me happy, I would buy a saw.

I figured I wanted a Husqvarna 562XP or a Stihl MS362 C-M. Big enough to move a 25″ chain, which is exactly what I need.

I went to the nearby place. They were very nice, and they assured me they could turn small repair and maintenance problems around in a week or so, barring the need for hard-to-find parts.

On the other hand…

1. There were three guys there, and none of them knew much about chainsaws. They were not very familiar with the Stihl line. I had to Google and confirm stuff they said. One of them said I needed to visit when the “two-stroke guy” was there.

2. I’m pretty sure they represented a non-M-tronic MS362 as an M-tronic saw. I don’t think they knew it.

3. I asked what they could do regarding price, and they said “nothing.” Stihl sets the price, and you pay it. Over $900.

4. I mentioned Echo, and they said they wouldn’t let an Echo product come through the door. So much for getting my old saw worked on.

5. They’re a Husqvarna dealer, but they don’t sell Husqvarna saws.

In the parking lot, I looked up the next-nearest Husqvarna dealer, and I drove over. Same kind of place. Tractors, saws, zero-turns, and so on. There was one guy there, in a dirty shirt. Young. He worked on machinery, himself. He was the owner.

1. He knew everything about Husqvarna saws as well as Echos. He used to work in an Echo shop. I asked him all sorts of stuff about the 562XP on the wall, and he knew all about it. He knew all the known issues. He knew the best way to cope with the ethanol crisis. He told me stuff no one else had, and I have researched for years.

2. He said he could fix Echo products. No problem. He also does Jonsered, of course. He had a Husvarna 435 there, which is just like my ailing Jonsered. He can fix my bogging Echo trimmer.

3. I asked about the price, and he gave me a 15% discount which wasn’t officially supposed to kick in until later in the month. I asked about the warranty, and he said Husqvarna would add three years if I bought their gas.

4. He told me about the yearly stuff the new saw would need and about what it would cost.

When he told me about the discount, I was sold. He said I only needed to spend $28 on the gas, so I jumped on it. He registered me with Husqvarna. He took the saw, filled it, and checked it out.

I was looking at around $970 for the Stihl without M-tronic. I got the Husky, Autotune, the gas, and a 5-year warranty for about $840, and I finally had a place to get things repaired.

I’m going to bring my sick tools in and get them fixed. Then I’ll have three gas saws and one cordless, so it’s not likely I’ll end up with no saws that work.

When I left the store, I felt like I was high on heroin. The stress left my body completely. The misery of dealing with this saw with no help for 7 years was over. I can deal with the two trees I have to help move this week, and I can expect to have working saws from now on. I can get yard tools fixed.

I’m not doing the sensation justice. A stronghold was broken. It was a very big deal to me. I felt ecstatic. Euphoric. Peace enveloped me. I thought I could feel my blood pressure dropping.

This story shows how to sell saws, both for your own store and for the one your competitors run. The guys at the first saw did as much to sell me this Husqvarna as the guy who got the money. They tried, but I don’t think they’re all that good at sales. They seem like nice people, but the other guy completely outclassed them, like Tyson Fury boxing Kevin Hart.

I may be able to deduct this expense because I rent out my pasture. Sure hope so. I plan to start running every small engine I have, every Thursday, from now on. Once everything is working, I’m going to keep it going without a lot of down time.

That’s the end of my tale of struggle and frustration. Even now, I deflate, breathe out, and sink into my recliner when I think about how relieved I am.

It’s going to be amazing to see everything on the property working.

Bad Advice as Common as Horse Manure

It’s so hard to know whom to trust in this world. Dunning and Kruger have done great damage.

I own a gas-powered EZGO dump cart. I refuse to spell “E-Z-GO” correctly because it’s a pain. It has a 350-cc Subaru Robin motor. The cart is a 2000 model. I got it over 6 years ago, when I moved to this house. I’m not sure what I paid for it, because I got the cart and two tractors for a combined sum. I know I got a deal, because if I had only gotten the bigger of the two tractors for the same amount, I would still have been getting a tremendous bargain.

I first used the cart before I moved here. My dad and I were looking at properties, and we visited this one. The owner told the realtor to turn us loose with the cart so we could see everything.

I drove all over the farm. Slowly. The cart had no pickup, and it moved at a walking pace.

After I bought the cart, it continued to disappoint. I fiddled with it and got it to go somewhat faster, but it was slow to start, it didn’t always make good speed, and sometimes it died after it got hot. I found out it used a lot of oil. One day I checked the dipstick, and the crankcase was nearly dry.

I was afraid I had ruined the piston rings. I also wondered if the previous owner had ruined them and kept it to himself.

The cart produced blue smoke. I can’t say for sure whether it started doing this before or after I ran it with low oil, but I thought maybe I had run it long enough to cause damage.

I went to a forum and asked for help, and I got some good advice and a lot of really bad advice.

A guy who was regarded as a major guru on the forum told me the only way to be sure what was wrong was to tear the motor down. People said I should rebuild it myself. You can do this with a $400 Chinese kit or an EZGO kit that costs way more and can only be bought at a dealership.

Rebuilding requires removing a 100-pound engine and lifting it onto some kind of workbench. Then, of course, you have to reinstall it. The space it goes into is cramped and low to the ground.

While all this was going on, I tried to fix the OEM carb, assuming it, like every other OEM small engine carb on Earth, couldn’t handle low-grade gas with ethanol. I also stopped putting ethanol in the cart. I bought ethanol-free gas. I treated my gas with Biobor EB, which is supposedly the best additive for gas that sits around.

While I was playing with the carb, I broke a little pot metal post that held the pin that held the float. Having nothing to lose, I used JB Weld to put it back together, and it lasted over a year. Finally, I bought a Chinese carb. The forum people said it would never work, and it wasn’t perfect, until I put the jet from the old carb in it. After that, the carb was not an issue.

The cart has been very useful to me. Over the years, in spite of a lot of down time, I’ve done a great deal with it. It’s great for collecting and dumping weeds. I load saws in it and cut up problem trees. I use it to spray the yard. If it had been more dependable, I would have gotten a lot more done with it.

At some point, the cart became useless. I could not trust it to get me around the yard, let alone the farm. I had to find out what was wrong and make a decision: rebuild or repower.

I found a Youtube video by a young black man. He said it was rare for these engines to put out blue smoke because of bad rings. He said the cause was nearly always bad valve seals.

Valve seals are little ring-shaped things that sit on top of cylinder heads. The valve shafts go through them. As the valves to up and down, the seals keep oil from going into the cylinders around the shafts. They wipe the oil off. The seals should be tight.

Unlike a quality engine, the Subaru Robin uses cheap seals that wear out fast. The openings enlarge and can become egg-shaped. Then oil goes into the cylinders and out into the muffler. It can actually accumulate in the muffler so you get burning oil every time the exhaust heats up. I have read it can block the muffler, but I wonder if that’s really true.

In the video, the mechanic said you rotate your cam until the pistons are at top dead center. This holds the pistons up against the valves so the valves can’t fall into the cylinder. Then you take off the valve cover, remove the cam, remove the valve springs (he uses a trick involving a 3/4″ wrench), pull out the seals, put new ones in, and do everything in reverse.

You also have to loosen a couple of covers on the sides of the engine to do all this. It’s a pain, but it’s way easier than removing the engine, which others say is the right way to do it.

I did all these things. I also did some stupid things that didn’t work, but I’ll focus on the things I did right.

The forum guys said to jam rope into the cylinders to keep the valves from falling. I saw someone providing a ridiculously difficult method to get the valve springs out.

When I put the valve train back together, I had to adjust the valve clearance. If your valve clearance is too small, your valves will never close all the way. I didn’t know that, but I knew the clearance had to be adjusted. Ordinarily, you measure the clearance with a feeler gauge.

I found another Youtube guy, and he said to forget the feeler gauge. He said to bottom out the valves and the back off a quarter of a turn.

Screws can be used to make very precise adjustments, so it sounded reasonable. I tried his method.

While this was going on, I received a compression gauge I had ordered. I checked my compression and got 35 psi. You want at least 130. I figured the engine was done, so I started gathering information about repowering.

The best option I found was an Amazon Duromax 440-cc engine with a kit from a company called Vegas Carts. Total cost around $1600.

I thought this was better than buying a rebuilt engine of mysterious origin for over $800. The original engine, at its best, is underpowered, and with no factory support, it’s not easy to keep them running.

You can get a 670-cc V-twin from Honda or Harbor Freight, and it will give you 22 horsepower and a dangerous top speed, but it’s way more than the cart needs, and it’s expensive. A 440-cc engine will spin the rear wheels in dirt.

I learned about repowering before I got the compression gauge. I mentioned the bad result on the forum, and someone said I should make sure my valve clearance was right. This was the first time I became aware that valve clearance could affect compression.

I had already used the quarter-turn folk wisdom method to ajust the valves, but I figured I should do it right, so that’s what I did. I put the gauge on a cylinder, expecting 35 psi, and I got 150.

Leaving the bad old gas in the tank, I got in the driver’s seat and tried to start the cart. It fired right up. I took it out and drove it all over the farm. I gave it plenty of time to heat up. No blue smoke. It didn’t stall. It was still wimpy off the line, but that was normal.

My cart was fixed.

I didn’t have to remove the motor. I didn’t have to shove rope in the cylinders. No rebuild. No new engine. If I had fixed the seals in 2017, I would never have thought I needed a new carb.

Finally, I have a cart that actually works.

With the compression I’m getting and the amount of time I put in driving the cart, I should be able to go 20 years without any more problems.

So how did the forum gurus turn out to be so wrong? How did they manage to be outsmarted completely by a young man with an obscure Youtube video? He knows more about the cart’s problems than they do, even though some of them have worked on many, many carts. He knows how to repair them better than they do.

There must have been a million EZGO carts made over the years. A lot of them must have had Robin engines. My engine hit the market at least 30 years ago. How can it be that people who should know how to fix them still give incredibly bad advice?

I used to treat the cart with indifference, because I thought it wasn’t worth much, and it seemed to be in bad shape. Now I feel like sprucing it up and spending money on it. As it sits, it may be worth $5000. It’s hard to find good information about the value. The forum people say the value doubles when the original engine is included. I would like LED lighting to replace the feeble headlights, and I could use some kind of hooks to hold my pole saw.

I wonder how many engines have been discarded or rebuilt needlessly because of bad advice from mechanics and people on forums.

It’s amazing how little a person’s reputation means. So often, people with lofty reputations turn out to be useless and chronically wrong.

I appreciate the effort to help. I truly do. I don’t want to be an ingrate. But I am still puzzled by the difficulty I had, getting the right information.

If you have a Robin engine that doesn’t work right, change your seals before you do anything else.

Greta Thunberg Should Have to Literally Eat This

I expect a new victory over Social Justice Warriors.

Being dirty is a big part of being a Social Justice Warrior. A lot of their vacuous Hollywood icons (generally white) brag about rarely or never bathing. The SJW’s got our shower heads restricted. They absolutely ruined clothes washers so all new front-loaders make clothes stink of mildew.

Cleanliness is part of white supremacy, even though American black people are generally cleaner than whites. They must be Uncle Toms.

The green goofs have gone after our toilets, too, making sure they flush poorly so we get to spend more time dealing with poo.

When I moved here, this house had three Briggs Vacuity toilets. You would not believe how complex they are. I can’t describe it because I don’t understand it. I can give a couple of details. A Vacuity has an upside-down plastic jug in the tank, with a weird plastic pipe sticking up into it.

A Vacuity uses very little water, which is meaningless to me, because I have a well and a septic tank. Whatever water the toilet uses goes back into my yard and eventually into the water table. I like to think something magical happens to it before it finds its way back to the well, but let’s not discuss that.

The Vacuity toilet is a lot like Al Gore’s curly fluorescent bulbs. It does not work. It makes things worse, not better.

The design is built to fail because there are so many fiddly parts. On top of that, and I just learned this, a Vacuity toilet chokes easily and cannot be plunged. Or snaked. Not kidding here.

If your Vacuity chokes, you’re expected to remove it from the floor and plunge or snake the drain line itself. One guy came up with a plan involving two people, an air compressor, and a towel, and he claims you can plunge the toilet that way, but I’m not going out like that.

Contractors recommend using flimsy toilet paper, and not much of it, when pooping in Vacuity toilets. That’s their solution. It wouldn’t bother me, because I’m a man, and I think Scott toilet paper rocks, but now I have a wife who adores Charmin, so the toilet has COPD.

Oh, I can try the towel trick. I can haul my compressor into the garage and hope for the best. Or I can pay a plumber $350 to fix the can. Or I can get rid of it and put a new one in, for about $260. I’ll never have to deal with it again.

Briggs does not support Vacuity toilets. Not the important, proprietary parts that go bad. That tells you what they think of their own engineering. Briggs is a disgrace to the bowel-movement-movement industry.

Guess what I decided to do.

I ordered a Toto Entrada two-piece john, and the top half arrived yesterday. The bottom half supposedly arrives today.

I replaced my master Vacuity (I make a point of using the word “master” these days) last year. I put in a one-piece Toto Drake. A masterful design, made by slaves to excellence.

Toto makes the best toilets imaginable. They’re Japanese, and the Japanese have a sick fetish about toilet design. They make singing toilets that look like recliners. You can spend Toyota money on a Japanese toilet. Their lower-end sane toilets are great, too. They never break down, and even though they don’t suck much water, they can flush nearly anything. Odd, given the size of the average Japanese.

Some types of green technology eventually work, after two decades or so of horror stories about rushed garbage the government forced on the public before it was ready. Like the current horror stories about washing machines and flaming, subsidized, actually coal-powered Teslas that don’t work in the winter.

I don’t care about the environment, but I don’t mind helping it out when it benefits yours truly. A low-flow toilet takes a shorter time to refill, so you spend less time getting that second round off, when needed.

I’ve had Kohler toilets, which many people recommend. Mine were junk, which is why I know about Toto. The Kohlers failed, and they were designed so stupidly, fixing them was a bad idea.

My Drake cost over $600, which is pretty awful, but that’s because it’s a glamorous one-piece can. They’re cleaner, but they’re more expensive to make and ship, I think. A two-piece has a gap between the tank and bowl, and all kinds of filth and critters can get in there. But you save $400.

I don’t care about the filth and critters. It’s for the guest bath. They’re lucky I don’t make them go outside.

I learned something interesting. Toilets have poo-consumption ratings. They’re called MAX ratings. My new toilet uses very little water, but it has a 1000-gram rating. They measure it using shredded toilet paper mixed with cold peanut butter. Just kidding. They mix some other thing with the paper, but I forget what it is.

If you can manage a kilo, or 2.2 pounds, you’re doing something wrong. That’s Steven Seagal territory. Oprah before drugs.

The old pot is now very clean and virtually empty. Bleached inside out and treated with poo- and urine-eating enzymes. Some of the parts are in the garage. The seat and bidet thing are off. I have to run out and get a foam ring so I can install the new one.

I hope the flange and pipe are lined up better than the last one. I had a wonderful time trying to make the Drake work. I also had to scrape hardened grout off the tiles because that’s what the installer used to shim the bowl. That was stupid. If I have to shim this one, I’ll use pressure-treated wood.

Now my biggest problem is getting the nearest dump to take the toilet. I’m supposed to drive a lot farther. It’s considered construction waste. I’m thinking I’ll bust it with a sledge and put the fragments in boxes. The dump attendants generally don’t care, but I might get a wise guy. I’ve seen them let people throw lawnmower batteries in with regular garbage. Even I felt a hint of disapproval.

Mingled with admiration.

I feel bad about all the dead bodies I’ve run through the band saw and disposed of in bags, but what are you going to do? Leave them in the yard where coyotes can grab them and eat them in front of the neighbors, ruining parties and scaring kids away from their still-intact pinatas?

It’s not like I have a crawlspace.

It’s not my fault. My gate has a sign, and it clearly states, “NO PEDDLERS.”

I’m really hoping I can get rid of this green abomination by dinner time. I don’t want to fight with it for two days, and besides, we all know what happens right after dinner.

No Way to Greet an Angel

Night before last, I slept around 10 hours. That was strange. When I was young, I could sleep just about forever, but these days, I usually wake up after 7 hours. I don’t use an alarm clock because they’re hateful.

I dreamed I was in my house, and I looked out through some glass doors and saw a young black man in my yard. He had parked a silver Tesla near my house. I was extremely angry to see someone trespassing.

He was walking toward my right, and he passed out of view. I went to another set of doors so I could see him again, and I gave him the finger with both hands.

I may never understand why I do things in dreams that I wouldn’t do in real life.

He gave me a tired look as though he were used to getting this treatment. As though he dealt with idiots every day. People he couldn’t reason with.

I went out to confront him, and I found a bunch of strangers in my workshop. They were some sort of workers. They had a bunch of diesel-powered machines with them. They had brought them so they could do something or other on my land.

I cursed at them and told them to get out. I didn’t want them around my tools. I thought they would steal things. In the dream, my shop had roll-up doors on two adjoining sides, and these people had opened them. I didn’t want my tools exposed to the weather.

One of the guys I yelled at had a huge head, and his teeth were about the size of Scrabble tiles. He just smiled at me like I was a fool. He didn’t make any effort to leave. He apparently took his orders from someone else.

I looked out over the pasture, and I saw a big spaceship coming down. It was dark grey, with a lot of windows and lights. It was wide but not very tall. It was about as wide as the pasture, so maybe 500 feet, and it was not quite as tall as a two-story house. It had an antenna on it.

The first thing that occurred to me was that I was going to make a lot of money. I felt I had to run out and keep people off my property, because a giant spaceship had chosen my farm to land on, and if people wanted to see it, they were going to have to pay. I didn’t want entitled characters from CNN and Fox jumping my fence and shooting video without permission.

I don’t think this would have been on my mind had an actual spaceship landed. Not right away, anyhow.

I must have run too far, because I found myself in town, on the side farthest from my property. It was as though God had transported me to keep me from causing trouble. I wanted to get back. I started looking for transportation, and I got in a cab.

I told my wife about it, and she thought it was a rapture dream. She thought the people on my land were angels.

Why I would give an angel the finger is a mystery to me. In another recent dream, I called someone a really filthy compound word that began with the letter “C.” Something I have never heard anyone call another person.

That was my dream. Take it as you will.

Threefold Cord in Action

Even if you know leftism is just a collection of Satanic brainwashing myths, it makes an impact when you see your beliefs proven right. This is normal when things God tells you are demonstrated right in front of you.

Leftism is rebellion against divine authority. That includes every form of leftism, including feminism.

Christians are supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and communicate with him throughout the day, submitting to him and listening to him. A man is supposed to be the anointed authority over his household, backed up by the authority of God. A wife is supposed to submit to both God and her husband.

A man and his wife are supposed to have different jobs. A man has the primary obligation to guide, provide, and protect. It’s a position of self-sacrifice. He provides a stable environment in which the wife and kids can thrive in safety. A woman is obligated to look after the house, and she is supposed to handle the bulk of childcare. The childen are supposed to submit to both parents as well as God. The dog submits to everyone. Satan and his fatherless imps are somewhere below the dog and the rats and roaches.

Before my wife got here, I had to do everything. Manage the business. Bring in the money. Look after bills and taxes. Look after the buildings and grounds. Shop. Cook. Clean. I had to buy a back scratcher.

Leftists hate it when you say this, but it’s true: men are not that great at homemaking. Our standards are completely different. Even if we are clean and orderly, the homes of unaccompanied men lack the peaceful, warm atmosphere of homes ordered by women.

I was reasonably clean, but I had a plastic folding table from Home Depot in my kitchen. I had plastic chairs around it. I had an ammunition press and a large cache of cartridges in the dining room, along with two benches and a lot of tools.

The garage was chaotic. I sprayed it with pesticide, I kept the garbage from backing up, and once in a while, I opened the doors and ran the leaf blower. That was good enough for me.

There was a lot of junk on the kitchen table, because I ate in the living room. Left to their own devices, men will eat in three places: the couch, the patio, and standing over the kitchen sink.

Walking in my master closet was very difficult because I had left a lot of guns and other junk in there.

I was tired of cooking, not because cooking was a lot of work, but because I also had to clean and shop. Sometimes I made good food, but often, I made things that were simple, that I could choke down in order to prolong survival. It saved me work.

I had $20 white sheets from IKEA. I got hooked on them while caring for my dad. Cheap and easy to bleach. On top of the sheets, I used either a quilt I found among my sister’s abandoned belongings when she moved to rehab, or a cheap Chinese electric blanket.

Things were good. Men are not like women, so I was okay with my standards. Things are better now, however.

My wife nearly freaked out when she got here, saying she could not be happy unless things were in order.

All junk was removed from the master suite. We went through things I had been ignoring, and we threw out stuff I should have dumped long ago. I was relieved to have the motivation and help. We laundered the pillows. We made several shopping trips for real bedding.

My wife emptied and cleaned my dresser and end tables, and she put things back in, in ways that made somewhat more sense. She vacuumed. She dusted. She organized the closet. There is so much room in there now, you could have home church in the closet. She goes in there to pray for long periods.

We emptied the kitchen cupboards and pantry. My wife cleaned, we threw stuff out, and things went back in. We got a rack that hangs on the pantry door, and we filled it with things like condiments and cookies. We like it so much, we have a second one on the way for the other door. The pantry seems three times as big now.

My friend Mike stayed here last year, and he left a household’s worth of junk and food-related things. We threw out a lot of expired Mike items.

She organized my laundry room, where I keep my paranoia shelves full of nonperishable food. They seemed full when she arrived. Now they seem empty. Simply moving stuff around made a big difference.

She attacked the garage. Mike had left a huge box of seasonings, oil, condiments, and other food items in there. Unbeknownst to me, he had left a box of starch and a box of confectioner’s sugar open, which explained why I had a roach problem in a garage where the garbage was always sealed up and dumped regularly. The box containing all the food items was full of roach poop and irate live roaches. I had to blast it with Raid and leave it alone for hours before I could put it in the car to take it to the dump. Roaches will colonize a car if you let them.

I sent Mike photos, and he said he wanted to save some things. Mike is a man, too. Everything went to the landfill.

Mike had left a couple of hundred pounds of random items in the room where I keep the piano. My wife moved it all into a smallish space in the garage.

I sold Mike my Moto Guzzi motorcycle a long time ago, in order to get it out of the garage. This plan backfired, because he left it where it was. Inspired by my wife, I put it outside under a tarp. We now have so much room, we can bring the pickup inside.

Mike keeps saying he’s going to fly down and haul his things off. I don’t know how long I can protect them from my wife.

My bathrooms were pretty clean, but now the cabinets are ordered. I redid the sink P traps, so now we are safe from leaks. My wife bought post-poop spray for use after people drop a deuce.

We plan meals together. We shop together. Generally, I cook. When I cook, I get to go sit down afterward. My wife cleans up the kitchen. That’s totally new. I can’t get used to it.

While I sit and she cleans, I can almost hear shrill, high-pitched voices with New York accents, telling me women aren’t supposed to do that.

Yesterday, she cooked a neat African meal. It was the first time she cooked an entire meal here. It was really good. I didn’t know she could cook. I got up to do the dishes afterward, and she sent me to the living room and cleaned the kitchen herself.

When I work on things like the tractors and the grounds, I don’t have to think about things I’ll have to do in the house later. I don’t concern myself with vacuuming or cleaning toilets. It’s all done for me.

I’m having problems with my old gate opener, so I have to keep opening it up and working on it. I have a kitchen cart I’m building, and there is still some welding and painting to do. While I work on things like that, my wife is in the house, imposing order.

I haven’t done a load of laundry in weeks. Clean clothing magically appears in the dresser. If I spill something on my shirt, my wife insists I give it to her and go get a fresh one.

I showed my wife how I clean toilets when she got here. Since then, I haven’t cleaned a single one. They’re always shiny and fresh-smelling, like only the angels used them. I’m not positive, but I think she keeps leaving the seats up. I’m afraid to ask. What kind of woman does that in feminist-ruined America?

We got on the living room. We looked at a zillion couches and chairs. We bought a really nice vintage rocker at a consignment store, which we visit frequently. I learned about Howard Restor-A-Finish, a product that works wonders on used furniture. I picked out a traditional wool rug like the ones my grandparents had, and we’ll get one after the turn of the year.

I’ve been on Ebay, buying traditional kitchen stuff. I got some old copper Jell-O molds for the walls. I bought some Griswold cast iron trivets to replace my mother’s trivets, which were looted and lost. I may pick up a few more century-old cast iron items.

We bought a bunch of picture frames, and we are putting family photos on the walls and coffee table. We have dedicated a hallway wall to future photos of friends and relations.

When my grandparents died, my relations took things that were ostentatious or valuable. I got my grandmother’s kerosene lamps. They’re worth around $30 each, but I remember seeing them on the mantel in her basement. We took them out and cleaned them up, and now they’re on our mantel, along with a couple of clay whiskey jugs I inherited. I’m considering putting an old butter churn on the hearth.

We go to the flea market and look for other vintage junk. Not something a man does when he lives alone, unless he has hopes of attracting another man.

I bought some vintage postcards of scenes I remember from Kentucky. I got a frame for them, and we’ll put it on a wall somewhere. I have a 1950 stamped postcard from the post office at the kibbutz where I worked. It commemorates the opening of the post office. We’ll frame that, too.

Furniture stores have sales in January and February. We plan to take advantage. We couldn’t find an old bedroom set we liked, so we chose one, and we will buy it next year.

Men create quarters. Women create homes. I would never have done any of these things had I not gotten married.

The difference is tremendous. The house seems bigger. It’s more peaceful. It’s a good place for prayer. I’m much more on top of business obligations, because now I have more time as well as a person who depends on me.

My wife doesn’t have to think about food, clothing, housing, protection, car problems, anything related to tools, or medical care. I don’t have to occupy myself with wife duties. It’s tremendous. It’s traditional. It’s correct. It works.

Of course it works. It was God’s idea.

Meanwhile, the US is full of 35+ career women–feminists–who live with cats, worry about their eggs, and put out because they think it’s the way to find husbands. They learned this from feminist leaders…who didn’t marry.

They’re miserable. They have no one to look after them. They have no one to look after. They have to compete with girls who are younger and therefore much more attractive. They think about buying ideal semen from tall, high-IQ, handsome strangers they will never meet and who are probably mostly transients and fast food workers. Women who bought the lie try to buy sperm from the kind of men who won’t marry them. They know most of their kind will die single.

Single men are better off than single women. Harsh fact of life. My life was very good before I met my wife. She was poor. She lived in a hovel with two other women. She had no reason to think kids were on the way any time soon, and she had no way to provide for them. I was sitting in a big house on a farm, enjoying my hobbies and my relationship with God, lacking for nothing except someone to pray with and make sacrifices for.

Our relationship is unusual in that she was in another country, but American single women are also worse off than single men. They are not as capable of looking after themselves as men. No one ever says, “It must be tough, being a man, living alone.”

They crave kids most men don’t crave. They have biological clocks, but it’s possible for a 100-year-old man to have kids.

My great-grandfather had 11 kids by his second wife, my great-grandmother. She was 15 when he married her, and he was already old. He and her father arranged his second marriage without consulting her. He married her on her 15th birthday, and they were married when he died at the age of 78.

He was about 55 when my grandfather was born. He ended up with 21 children. He was about 70 when his last child was born. Women can’t do that.

My great-grandmother was probably saved from additional children by menopause, not any deterioration on her husband’s part. Meanwhile, American women in their twenties are freezing eggs.

We pray together at least twice every day. We share testimony and revelation. We discuss the Bible. We help motivate each other.

This is a good system, but because I was raised in Satan’s world of sick relationships, somehow there is a part of me that feels I have to defend it. Like the part of me that used to feel like I was walking into porn theaters when I walked into gun ranges.

God’s system is right. It works. It’s for everyone.

I feel as though I am working harder than expected to make this home feel homey, and I think this is because the world is washed up. It’s a hard, cold place now, full of perversion and outright insanity. A traditional home is insulation from, and a counterbalance to, the filth of the persecuting, trans-worshiping, phone-addicted world, and it’s a reminder that we will eventually live in a world filled with God’s light and warmth.

I’m writing this not long after Jill Biden put out a stomach-twisting video of the left’s vision of a proper Christmas. You must have seen it by now. Christmas is supposed to be a sort of second Thanksgiving, in which we celebrate the gifts of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. It’s about the love of families. We celebrate these things in our homes, where we try to rekindle our warmth and love for each other. A home is never so much a home as it is on Christmas.

Ms. Biden’s video is a sickening parade of sexual oddities in bizarre costumes, with fake grins of the sort you would expect to see on kids high on molly, prancing among creepy decorations as though recreating the kind of thing an unsaved person might see while descending into hell after a Christmas Day overdose.

It’s terrible when the left tries to destroy Christmas, but it’s even more nauseating when they try to take it over. The Biden video has nothing in it to remind us of Yeshua. It’s full of dancers who are about as charming as horror movie clowns. Their insincere grins are supposed to be cheery, but they come off as threatening, like the grins of demons awaiting the arrival of the dead.

It reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for years: the distaste homosexuals feel for Christmas.

Young people may not remember it, but we used to hear a lot about the misery homosexuals endured over Christmas. Other people were celebrating with their husbands, wives, kids, and other relations. Homosexuals had nobody and no relationship with the God they knew detested their behavior. Christmas was a yearly reminder that a lifestyle of alcohol, drugs, selfishness, sex with feces-smeared anuses instead of vaginas, and too many sexual partners to remember was vastly inferior to normal heterosexual life.

I don’t know if it’s true, because self-pitying mythology was common, but they used to say many homosexuals committed suicide over Christmas, recognizing the emptiness of depravity and not knowing any way to be delivered.

The church has done an extremely poor job of delivering people from sexual perversion and compulsive fornication, but to be fair, not many people are interested in deliverance.

There is no way homosexual families will ever be “right.” It’s a hopeless quest, like putting a wig on Bruce Jenner, giving him a girl’s name, slicing his penis off, and expecting normal men to ask him out. It’s terrible when people give up everything to chase toxic mirages.

Jenner has actually complained that men don’t want him. It is astonishing that he didn’t expect that. You can put icing and candles on a cow pie and tell people it’s a birthday cake, but no one in his right mind will want to eat it.

There is a HUGE difference between a woman and a castrated man full of wrong hormones. Huge. Ask any man. The flesh feels different. The mannerisms are feminine, not effeminate. The mind is different. The skin has a different scent. Women don’t make noise when they walk. And women don’t have big man hands built for swinging swords and axes.

I think Biden’s video is motivated in hostility toward the “haves,” like all of leftism. Other people have decorations with crosses. They read the Bible to their kids. They look at manger displays. They hold hands and thank Yeshua, knowing he has prepared a perfect future for them. Leftists are out in the cold, so they try to make Christmas about nonexistent elves, a maladjusted fat man obsessed with other people’s kids, reindeer, trees, drunkenness, fornication, and gifts bought on credit, which assure a miserable New Year full of bills and interest.

I see Biden’s video as an act of aggression. It’s an effort to replace Yeshua and Christians with sexually ambiguous weirdos in costumes straight out of a child’s nightmares. Maybe it’s a deliberate effort to mock Christmas and Christianity. “It’s our White House now, and THIS is your White House Christmas.”

And the choreography and music are horrible.

All in all, I think a Christmas tree lighting ceremony ruined by perverts and angry Muslims is easier to watch.

How could “Dr. Jill” look at this video and not realize it was a belly-churning abomination?

“Dr. Jill.” The doctor of education. Like Bill Cosby.

I’m a doctor, too. I’m a doctor of law, like every lawyer under a certain age. I don’t go around making people call me “Dr. Steve.” Ridiculous. If you want people to call you a doctor, get a real doctorate. Become a physician or a mathematician. Learning how to teach kids to clap erasers isn’t the same as mastering neurosurgery or real analysis.

Shaquille O’Neal has a doctorate, and he insists the world is flat. He says he has seen it through airplane windows.

Dr. Shaq.

Great guy. An inspiration in many ways. Not a real doctor.

We need to stop questioning God’s guidelines. The person who created them is God, after all. He knows what works. His ways work. There are millions of normal families all over the world who do things God’s way, and they get results. They’re not buying sperm and cutting themselves.

I am extremely grateful for the change in my life. I wanted this even when I was a kid. I wanted it even after hormones kicked in, and other boys were only thinking about nailing up as many pelts as possible. I knew it was right, even though I was a terrible Christian.

I pity the people who won’t listen. It doesn’t matter how hard and long you suck on a poisoned pacifier. You will never get any milk.

Plus the End of Candace Owens

In case anyone is wondering how my life is going now that my wife is a resident of the United States, I am here to let you know. Exactly what you would expect is happening. She is in the process of throwing out everything I hold dear.

Slight exaggeration.

Today, she pulled all the drawers out of my awful dresser, and she has been using a HEPA-filter vacuum to suck the dust out of the dresser itself. The contents of the dresser are all over the room. Hope there was nothing incriminating in there.

We went to a ritzy restaurant as soon as we got away from the airport. Of course, I am referring to White Castle. I thought she might be too tired after around 40 hours of traveling, but she insisted. Sadly, it turned out she didn’t like it as much Shake Shack, so we failed to knock off our bag of 10 cheese sliders.

I did my part.

A friend of mine needed a place to stop on a trip to Miami with his kids. His grandmother raised him, and he was on the way to her funeral. They met my wife on the way back. I made pizza both times.

The kids cleaned up my downstairs. I have no idea why they enjoy doing that, but I don’t exactly discourage it.

My wife is finally caught up on sleep, and this is why she is going over the house. I am trying to look involved. I changed the P-traps under two sinks. They were leaking. The character who installed them used something that looked like a combination of plumber’s putty and pipe dope. Here’s what you’re supposed to apply: nothing. I put a little Teflon grease on the threads, though.

I believe he used a pipe wrench to tighten the joints. They’re supposed to be hand-tight. They were torn up, and I had to exert myself to get them off.

I also took one of the horrible Chinese casters off Marvin’s cage and checked the threads. I have 4 much-better casters on the way. If we’re going to fix up the house, we have to fix Marv’s house as well.

We have Thanksgiving supplies laid in, and I am making cornbread for dressing. I’m making a lot of bacon because I need 3/4 of a cup of grease.

She has been tearing strips of bacon in tiny bits and eating them one at a time. Why do women do that? I told her she knew she was going to eat the whole strip, so she should quit fooling herself. She said, “You’re so vicious.” Then she ate more.

Our plan is to fix the bedroom, living room, and kitchen before anything else. My adored queen size mattress may be exiled to a guest room.

We’ll have to hit Orlando soon, because that’s where the real stores are. I hope the spending tsunami starts to abate by New Year’s.

I have been reading the news. It looks like Candace Owens has decided to murder her own career. Is it admirable, because she’s saying what she thinks is true, regardless of the cost, or is it just ridiculous, because she hasn’t spent two minutes verifying the things she says before buying herself a one-way ticket back to nowhere?

She seems to think Israel is an apartheid state, and she made an ambiguous remark about genocide which seemed to be intended to justify criticisms of Israel.

She said something nutty. She said Jerusalem’s Arab Quarter was the place where Arabs were “allowed to live.” Really insane. As a whole lot of other commentators have remarked since she made her claim, Arabs can live wherever they want in Israel. They hold Knesset seats They serve in the IDF.

The Arab Quarter is pretty small. It holds a small percentage of Israel’s Arabs. This is not classified information. How could an otherwise-bright woman fail to check this out before tying an anvil to her leg and diving into the Ann Coulter abyss?

By “Ann Coulter abyss,” I mean the hole where smart pundits go when they go off the rails publicly.

Owens appears to think the Arab-Jewish conflict is a spat between two peoples, each of which has major legitimate grievances. She seems to think Israeli’s Jews are foreign oppressors who showed up one day and decided to throw Israel’s bona fide historical occupants out, and she doesn’t seem to have any idea how differently Jews and Arabs in the Middle East have treated each other.

Every adult in the US should read a recent article about the rapes that have occurred since October 7. Muslims have raped girls, women, and old ladies repeatedly in more than one orifice. They have broken pelvises. While one victim was being gang-raped, a Muslim sliced her breast off and took it around for others to play with. One Israeli was raped standing up, and while the Muslim was still inside her, he shot her through the skull.

You can go online and see at least one Jewish captive with huge blood stains on the back of her pants and between her legs.

Close your eyes and try as hard as you can to picture Jews doing this.

Yes, Jews have killed civilians. While trying as hard as possible not to. On the other hand, they haven’t deliberately set fire to living babies. I doubt you will be able to find any stories about Jews cutting babies out of women and beheading them while their umbilical cords still tied them to their mothers, but at least one Muslim did that during the terrorist raid.

Antisemitic Muslims are not like Jews. They have equalled the barbarism of the Nazis and the imperialist Japanese.

I keep calling them “Muslims,” not “Hamas,” because their religion is what caused all this. Islam is a religion of murder, torture, rape, slavery, theft, and pillage. It encourages its adherents to do the kinds of things we have seen them do this year.

If Hamas itself were the big problem, we wouldn’t have a slew of other Muslim terrorist groups, and Hamas would not win elections in Gaza by overwhelming margins.

Islam got its start as a protection racket. It’s a shame people don’t know this. Look it up. Mohammed’s new religion was going nowhere, but one day he decided to tell Muslims they were free to raid the towns of infidels and do pretty much what they just did in Israel. People converted not because God opened their eyes and confirmed Mohammed’s ravings, but because they were terrified of their terrorist neighbors, and also because they wanted to be able to do to others what Muslims had done to them.

On October 7, many Muslims celebrated their religion’s origins.

I have never hopped on the Candace Owens bandwagon. I’m relieved I can say that. I saw her saying things I thought were immature and obnoxious, and after that, I didn’t really care whether she was right on the issues. I saw her as a person I did’t want to endorse wholeheartedly. I liked some things she said, but that was as far as it went.

I don’t see politicians or self-anointed pundits as our saviors. It is often enjoyable to see them put leftists in their places, but conservatism per se is not what the world needs. It needs the unity that comes from the Holy Spirit. Conservatism isn’t the answer to our problems. Holy-Spirit-led Christianity is the answer to our problems, and conservatism is just an essential and natural by-product.

Here is one thing I like about watching Candace Owens out herself: it shows how blind intelligent people can be. Conservatives keep telling themselves that if they out-argue and out-meme the facially idiotic left, eventually enough people will come to their senses to bring us victory in the voting booth. It’s not true. If brains and logic mattered that much, nearly all Jews would believe Yeshua was the Messiah and God.

People are subject to supernatural blindness. Only the Holy Spirit can enable you to know the truth. If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit, you’re full of other spirits, and they deceive. They may give you part of the truth, plus some toxic adulterants, but overall, you will be blind.

Candace Owens doesn’t know the Holy Spirit, so in spite of her intelligence and general knowledge, she believes things so stupid a 5-year-old can debunk them in two minutes.

We are swimming in a sea of demonic deception, and only a tiny number of us are hearing the truth from the Holy Spirit.

Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz are done with Candace Owens. They think she’s ridiculous. She is, but so are they. They can’t figure out who their Messiah is. Who is more blind?

Maybe she got her ideas from other black people. No one is willing to talk about the huge problem of black antisemitism. Who knows what Owens heard from her parents and grandparents when she was young? She used to be a leftist. Maybe she hasn’t rejected all the mythology and libel.

The deception is going to get worse, and it will be everywhere. People need to understand this. You can argue and meme all you want. You might as well try to describe sunshine to a rock.

“Your Package has Been Shipped”

My wife is somewhere over Africa, telling stewardesses they’re too slow with her champagne. I expect to be having burgers and fries with her some time tomorrow.

Things are going quite well here. One of my best friends was raised by his grandmother, and she just passed away, so he and his kids had to spend the night here on the way to her funeral. His kids seem to be from another planet. They’re polite. They don’t break things. I have to keep telling them to talk LOUDER. Also, they cleaned my house.

I don’t know why they do this, but it happens every time they show up. I would be happy even if they came alone and left Dad at home.

I was dreading cleaning up the man-filth in preparation for trying to fool my wife about how neat I am before she takes over. Now I don’t have to do it.

We had a fantastic day yesterday. We hit Sonny’s BBQ and filled up on ribs. Every restaurant has off days, normal days, and on days. Sonny’s had an on day. The ribs were perfect. For dinner, I made two Sicilian pizzas. One cheese and one pepperoni.

I spent a lot of time talking to my friend’s only son. He has a tough life. Three sisters still in the house.

He started telling me how he loved my computer. I know little about it. I decided I wanted to make Youtube videos, so I found a guy online, telling people which parts to buy to build a suitable PC for a reasonable price. I bought the parts and built the PC. That’s all I know.

Evidently, it’s a gaming PC. I did not know this. Gaming and editing video require similar capabilities.

He knew all about the motherboard and graphics card.

It turned out he had a lot of tech interests. I told him about Arduino and Adafruit. I told him about soldering stations and so on. Maybe the next time I’ll see him, he’ll bring a homemade communications satellite.

Very smart kid.

He’s also conservative, which is not something you see a lot in junior high kids. We talked politics, and I told him stuff I had learned about God.

These kids are so quiet, I never know what’s happening in their lives, so it was a real revelation, conversing with him.

Things are going well for me, but America is not merely circling the drain; it already has one leg in it. This week, many Americans are on the web claiming Osama bin Laden, the mass-murdering idiot behind the deaths of over 3,000 innocent occupants of the World Trade Center (including Muslims), was right.

I’ll post more about that later.

I should hear from the little woman after 5 p.m today, and the next window of opportunity will come tomorrow morning. After that, Orlando in the afternoon.

I am not ready to shift into real married life. I have spent about two months with my wife, but we were always on vacation in exotic places. I have become very good at phone marriage and sending money. Having someone here all the time will be different.

The phone, immigration matters, and trip arrangements have been our chief activities for a long time. When she’s here, we can forget all that. So what will we do?

Fixing up the house and my wife’s wardrobe will kill a little time. After that, we will have to deal with freedom.

It’s a good problem to have. Some people have to get up every day and spend 10 hours trying to sell Bud Light.

I’ll continue the post during the next flight so I can express my thoughts about the bin Laden letter.

MORE

My wife had to make a connection in a country that gives Hamas billions, and even though I know that country has no idea who I am or where my wife is, I feel more at ease completing this post now that she is somewhere else.

Bin Laden wrote a ridiculous letter to America, and people are urging others to read it, claiming it proves he was actually a good guy and we were the problem.

Some highlights:

The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.

Right away, you can see that this letter is a scary, revealing litmus test. If you agree with bin Laden after reading the above citation, you are a Jew-hater. It’s possible for a person who does not hate Jews to believe Israel has done bad or unwise things from time to time, but if you want to erase the Jewish nation, which is legitimate, and abuse everyone involved in supporting it, you hate Jews.

[Y]ou have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah.

Well, we have the Torah, and it does promise all the land in “Palestine” (a non-historical nation) to the Jews. We have copies that predate the birth of the pedophile rapist Mohammed, who was born in the 500’s. Muslims don’t have a “real Torah” to show us. They do have the groundless ravings that form their own scripture. The same scriptures that mandate the killing of Jews and Christians, not just in Mohammed’s time, but forever.

Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad

Yeshua received worship and said he was the Messiah, so obviously, Muslims don’t “believe in” him. The Old Testament clearly says the Messiah is God, not just an anointed servant, so when Yeshua said he was the Messiah, he was claiming to be God. If you don’t believe this, you don’t “believe in” Yeshua.

When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them.

How did Jerusalem “return” to Islam when it had never been a Muslim city? The Muslims invaded Jerusalem in the same century in which the thief and murderer Mohammed made Islam up. Mohammed’s efforts to create Islam are said to have started in 610, and Jerusalem was invaded and taken over by Muslim imperialists and slavers in 638.

You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque

The Jews held Jerusalem for thousands of years, including times when they lived under occupation. Islam’s claim is based on a dream someone supposedly had about an unnamed mosque in an unnamed location. And Israelis are not planning to destroy the mosque. It will be wonderful when Yeshua finally destroys this den of idolatry, but the Israelis are content to leave it alone.

Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians.

Torture is actually a Muslim thing, just like chopping hands off without anaesthetic, which they do every week. Israelis don’t torture as policy, and soldiers who do it on their own are removed from their posts and sometimes imprisoned, but when Hamas attacked civilians in Israel this year, they printed a torture manual and sent it with their cowardly murderers. As for killing, that’s normal when people are making war on you and rejecting peace offers.

And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.

I think he means, “”whoever has killed our civilians reluctantly and unintentionally, while making a great effort to spare them, at a high cost in lives to their own military, often while we have used our civilians as human shields, then we have the right to kill theirs deliberately, in huge numbers, using means banned by all recognized standards of civilized warfare, and we also get to torture and rape them.”

The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question: Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?

Actually, those questions have been answered about a billion times. We attacked in New York because they tried to blow the World Trade Center up by detonating a huge bomb in the parking garage, hoping to murder as many innocent, defenseless civilians as possible, in conformity with their official policy.

Bin Laden said Al Qaeda was calling victim nations to Islam. Funny how dumb Americans, virtually all of them leftists, are excited about the religion which will execute them SOONER than conservatives.

We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.

Evidently, people of honor set fire to living babies, and they cut babies out of pregnant women and behead them, without even cutting umbilical cords. That’s Al Qaeda honor. In Gaza, they throw homosexuals off tall buildings, so “Queers for Palestine” must be a base-jumping club.

[T]he Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

I have no idea what Ben Franklin said. I know my life is not controlled by Jews. Even the Jew I worship permits me to do what I want.

Anyone who thinks there is a big Jewish conspiracy should round up a hundred Jews and try to get them to agree on ONE THING. It’s impossible. If there were a Jewish conspiracy, we would see some sign of it in, hello, the government of Israel, which is constantly plagued by disunity.

The Jewish conspiracy is certainly doing a great job of making the media side with Israel; every day, I see articles blaming Israel for the deaths of civilians Hamas uses as human shields. It’s like the entire press industry has turned into Al Jazeera.

If this is what a Jew-dominated press looks like, what would it look like if Jews backed off? “MATZOH PRICES DROP DUE TO INCREASED AVAILABILITY OF PALESTINIAN BLOOD.”

You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

So leftists support a guy who wants to ban drugs and alcohol. Try and imagine a world in which leftists could not get these things. The Betty Ford Clinic would have to set up FEMA tents. The entertainment industry would cease to exist.

You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

That’s a little weird, given the common Muslim practice of marrying first cousins. Bin Laden married his cousin. Incest hasn’t been spreading in America, but give it time. Post-gay-marriage-revolution, some here have noted that there is no biological reason to prevent gay marriages between relatives, and then there are incestuous couples in which at least one partner is sterile. Leftists will be the first to march for the changes, so how can any leftist support a Muslim extremist? They think Mike Johnson is dangerous because he believes the Bible.

You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly.

So leftists, who gave us the term “sex worker” to replace the accurate term “whore,” support a guy who is against making money from sex.

Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.

AIDS came from Africa, and when did leftists suddenly become okay with linking AIDS to sin? I mean, it’s correct, but leftists lose their minds when you dispute the idea that people who got this venereal disease aren’t heroes.

People who did their best to get AIDS got a quilt, but nobody got a trophy for syphilis. Where is the syphilis quilt?

You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.

Japan was ready to cause the greatest bloodbath the world had ever known, and it was already off to a great start with little projects like the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March. They taught women and kids to fight invaders with pointed sticks. They were ready to resist down to the last person. When the government decided to surrender, the military tried to stage a coup in order to keep the war going. It took TWO bombs to end the war because Japan kept fighting after one city was reduced to radioactive ruins.

We all know how easy it is to get ignorant leftists to believe fake history, though. They still think white people invented slavery, and they won’t admit most black slaves were bought from black traders. This information has been concealed from them in things called “books.” It’s no wonder they think the Japanese were the good guys.

The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only

We had a black president, we have numerous black billionaires, and Muslims still enslave blacks, but okay. Leftists don’t read, and they discard obvious facts, so no problem.

Regarding nuclear weapons:

Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.

Wow. Wonder why that is. We let you get your hands on two passenger planes, and look what you did. You shouldn’t be allowed to have matches. But leftists who stare at Tiktok all day and think Kim Kardashian should be president believe you.

Tiktokers are claiming we need to read this letter, and they say, “It’s only two pages long.” It’s more like 15 pages long. Who is paying them?

The sudden adoption of hell-resident bin Laden’s beliefs should disturb Americans who aren’t crazy. My fear is that antisemitism has suddenly become fashionable. I think it will be like gay marriage: almost universally opposed one day but coercively, overwhelmingly, oppressively supported the next. I don’t think Jews have years time left to prepare. I think months are all they can hope for, and months aren’t enough. Christians–real ones–will be targeted for genocide next.

The letter is exposing a lot of de facto Nazis of whom we would otherwise be aware.

This is a good time to bring the wife to the armed, fenced Northern Florida compound. I’ll give her a lasered pistol to carry. We’ll get her going with an AK-47 of her very own. I already told her it was hers. We’ll get her a carry permit so she can carry in other states. We’ll pray like crazy and dedicate ourselves to the one who keeps us safe. Maybe we’ll get some dry food. The tiny pawn shop where I pick up guns is selling bagged meals, three for 10 dollars.

I visited the other day, and I have mixed emotions about it. On the positive side, the place was busy handing guns over to people who had had them shipped in, so people here appear to be taking a productive attitude, and that’s reflective of the culture here.

I saw a nice old lady talking about gun classes and various aspects of gun ownership. She was very enthusiastic and seemed to know a lot. The kind of person you would expect to be preparing for Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren right now. A guy who worked in the store had a $10,000 M249S on the counter. An old guy from California came and picked up a piece, proving some people have the good sense to leave the state. I was only there about 35 minutes, and I guess 5 guns were picked up.

On the down side, they were selling those dried meals. A sign of well-founded pessimism. Guns can help you prevent disaster. When you’re eating freeze-dried food, disaster has already come.

Another shop I’ve used has a Ma Deuce in the showroom. Probably still ready to rock, full auto. They’re that kind of people. It’s an impressive weapon for a civilian to have. It will lay down a wall of lead, one round will tear a limb off, it’s unusually good for shooting through vehicles, and you can scope it and hit terrorists a very long way off. They splatter. Horrific.

It will be hard imposing sharia law in that shop.

God, not firearms, is my protection, but I don’t see any reason to invite problems through lack of ordinary preparedness. I mean, I own an umbrella. I don’t stand outside in the rain and pray the drops miss me.

The plane is on the way. Before the sun sets tomorrow, my wife and I will be at White Castle.

Troll Poo on my Shoe

The Internet is like a beautiful bipolar girlfriend who also has borderline personality and perpetual PMS.

I have a problem with my well water; it may affect the quality of the beer I brew. I had the water tested, and it has 0.68 parts per million of iron in some form or other. This is something like a hundredth of the calcium level, but beer likes calcium and hates iron. I have read that iron levels above 0.1 are bad, and I’m around 7 times that.

I started trying to decide what to do. It’s not simple, and I overthink things anyway, so it’s a puzzle.

1. Buy distilled water. This will actually work, but I don’t like the thought of paying $30 for 5 gallons of beer instead of $20. I have a really great homebrew store, so my grain is very cheap. If I buy distilled water, I will have to buy chemicals to add to it, because beer needs certain chemicals normally present in tap water. I plan to get some of those chemicals anyway, and I already have one of them: salt. My well water needs a little salt, epsom salt, and gypsum. I could buy a still and make my own distilled water, but it would be slow, and it would take maybe 20 batches of beer to make it pay for itself.

2. Get a reverse osmosis (RO) filter. This will suck iron out of my water while not harming the other mineral levels all that much. It’s a can of worms, however. I would have to decide whether to mount it under my sink, turning that area into a bigger maintenance and repair nightmare than it is already, mounting it under my laundry room sink, where it will not be much use for anything but brewing, and having some kind of mobile filter I can put away. RO filters often break, and I don’t want to have water gushing out into my cabinets in the middle of the night or while I’m on vacation.

3. Brewtan B. I plan to try this first. It’s some kind of tannic acid product. It’s made for brewers. The maker claims 1/4 teaspoon in 5 gallons of beer will chelate enough iron to protect the beer from off tastes and other issues related to iron. They claim it will not chelate the good metals enough to cause trouble. You can only use it in beers that are supposed to be clear. It will interfere with the production of cloudy beers.

If I use Brewtan B or RO water, I will have to go through the aggravation of testing again. I will need to know what’s in water that has been treated with Brewtan B or filtered. With distilled water, I would know the water only contained minerals I added.

I thought about this yesterday, and I went to the laundry room to look at the cabinet under the utility sink. I wanted to see how much room I had. When I looked, I found a wet cabinet floor with places where the Chinese melamine film had disappeared. There was some swelling, and the sawdust and boogers the fake wood was made from were escaping into the cabinet, making a mess.

I found out the cheap modern plastic pipes were the problem. The genius who installed the sink appears to have put some kind of sticky substance on the joints, and I think he also used a big wrench to tighten the collars. You’re not supposed to do any of that. The joints should be clean and hand-tight.

I had to take the P trap out, clean off the pipes, reinstall them correctly, and clean the cabinet floor. Then I left the cabinet open to dry, and I put a stainless bowl on a folded towel under the P trap. It still leaks maybe 10 drops an hour, but it will be fine until I get pipes that haven’t been abused. It only leaks when I’m using the sink, so it probably doesn’t leak enough to overcome evaporation.

My cabinets are very nice, for modern cabinets. They have wood exteriors, and they look good. The sawdust-product sides, bottoms, and shelves are sad signs of the times, but the cabinets are what would be considered relatively high end. They would not be cheap to replace.

I now have a water-damaged cabinet floor, and the sawdust will continue to get loose and cause problems if I don’t seal it in. Also, I have zero protection from future leaks. I want to fix the floor so it’s tough and waterproof.

I thought I would get some epoxy paint made for garage floors, but I wasn’t sure it would work well in a sawdust-and-melamine cabinet, so I went to a home repair forum to ask what people thought.

Of course, the thing that always happens happened. I was pounced on by a keyboard-raging numbskull.

If you frequent forums or make comments on the web, you will run into keyboard-ragers all the time, and they will be boring as well as annoying, because the stupid things they say all fall into certain well-known categories. It’s like there is one predictable guy out there, making all the stupid remarks, trying to prove his mental superiority but succeeding only in publicizing a screaming case of Dunning-Kruger.

They’re too hostile to leave people alone. They’re too dishonest to admit it when they’re wrong. They’re too stupid to know it.

I got some good suggestions from helpful people, but one guy said I should just get a piece of 1/2″ plywood. He didn’t explain how this would help. I don’t think he understood the situation.

I explained that installing plywood would mean replacing the whole cabinet, and that would mean replacing all the cabinets, and I didn’t want to spend thousands.

This ought to be obvious to anyone. You can’t just turn three screws, remove the bottom from a modern cabinet, slide a new bottom in, and replace the screws. They’re not made to be disassembled.

If I put plywood in the cabinet, I would have to remove the sink, counter, and doors. I’d have to remove the drawers and sides of the cabinet. If, by some miracle, the bottom of the cabinet was still intact and could be removed in one piece, I would have to take it out, cut the plywood to fit, install the plywood, sand the plywood, and seal the plywood with some kind of plastic coating like the garage paint I described above. If I managed to put it all back together, I would then have a cabinet fit for Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack. It would be a monstrosity. I would have to remove it entirely and replace it. Then I’d need a new counter and wall cabinets to match. I’d have to paint the whole room.

It’s just a stupid idea. I was nice to the guy who offered it, but it was a really stupid idea, and it’s obviously stupid. This is a nice house. You don’t mend expensive cabinets with Home Depot plywood unless there is some way to conceal the repairs. That’s not possible in this case.

Epoxy paint would be invisible when the cabinet was closed, and it would look good when they were opened. It would look better than a new cabinet. A big slab of plywood would be right out there in view, making the house look like Jethro Bodine’s double-naught spy bachelor pad.

The keyboard-rager could not let it go. He asked how buying a cheap piece of plywood was like buying a new cabinet. Everyone else in the thread understood completely. It’s like saying, “Why would you repaint your car if all you need is a new clear coat?”

If you can’t understand why you would need to repaint the car, you should never try to tell anyone anything about body work, because you don’t know anything.

I think he understood, too, but keyboard-ragers have to do their thing. He wanted me to spend the day arguing with him, so he could dismiss a long series of proofs he was wrong, anoint himself victor, and congratulate himself on his imaginary brilliance.

I told him he was wasting everyone’s time, and I offered no explanation. I should have ignored him, but this stuff has a way of wearing on you.

He picked the wrong day. Earlier in the day, I actually thanked God for creating hell, because I was thinking of all the stupid, dishonest, arrogant, cruel people in the world. Like the people who lie about Israel and defend the Hamas baboons. There are millions or billions of people who are simply intolerable in the long term. I thanked God for creating hell so the rest of us would eventually get a break.

I don’t know if the keyboard-rager lives in a converted chicken coop or what, but he seriously wanted me to write an essay explaining why you don’t use plywood to make a new bottom for an expensive cabinet. I refused to engage. I had a surface I could restore and improve pretty easily. If I went insane and tried to replace it with plywood, I would have a major eyesore, and it would have to be sealed up, just like the surface I have now.

The Internet is as frustrating as the world that created it. The more you engage, the more abuse you have to swallow, for no good reason at all.

Nobody defended the keyboard-rager, even though he has been on the forum longer than I have. That shows what they thought of him. Traditionally, Internet forum members have always attacked newer guys, regardless of who was right. When they let the newer guy win, it means they already think the other guy is a jerk.

I use forums all the time to get good information and save myself research. Sometimes I have good experiences, but every once in a while, I rattle a troll’s cage simply by walking by. One of the great things about heaven is that there will be no Internet there and no trolls.

I learned some good stuff from the forum. They now make silicone mats you can put under sinks. They have vertical edges so a mat will hold a couple of gallons of water if there’s a leak. Some have little gadgets on the front sides that let water run out onto the floor outside the cabinet. This lets you know you have a problem. It’s supposed to keep the water off the bottom of the cabinet, but I don’t think it will work, because it will run down the side of the mat and go under it. Depends on the geometry of the little hole where the water is supposed to come out. It has to project past the bottom of the cabinet without interfering with the door.

Anyway, a silicone mat will probably take care of nearly all leaks your sink develops. The problem, other than the poor protection from really big leaks, is that they start at about $20. I would need 8 of them, I think.

At present, I think it’s a bad idea. I could order a mat and see what it’s like.

Independently, I and a forum guy came up with a great idea: vinyl flooring. It’s easier than applying epoxy. You cut a sheet of vinyl to fit the cabinet perfectly. You stick it to the bottom of the cabinet with 3M 77. You use silicone to seal the corners where the vinyl meets the sides of the cabinet. When water leaks, it can’t get into the sides. It will run out the front, onto the floor. The vinyl will look great and last for eternity. I use vinyl flooring to hold up heavy, oily CA-sized lathe tooling, and it looks new after maybe 10 years.

I think I should put vinyl under all my sinks, and I should also put it in my drawers and on my shelves. I could do the whole house for maybe $150. Beats the snot out of shelf paper, which is worthless and a scam. Home Depot sells vinyl for a dollar a square foot.

Epoxy would work. I’m sure of it. But it would be a pain to apply.

But for the brewing water problem, my sink would still be leaking, so it wasn’t just a curse. I got a blessing out of it.

I have some Brewtan B on the way. Hoping for the best.

Reliably Unreliable

Here at the Armed Fenced Northern Florida Compound, we have an electric gate on the main approach road to discourage riff raff and also possibly function as a choke point in dark times. I had some problems with it, and they merely served to confirm what I already knew about human nature.

The gate has a box with a keypad, and you push numbers to get in. The opener was installed 19 years ago, so I would guess that by now everyone in the county has the code, but I still make delivery drivers and the power company use it because I don’t want to find out how to change it. You push the buttons, the gate opens, it stays open while you do what you have to do, and then when you leave, a sensor by the driveway tells the gate to open again.

UPS has the code, but lately, they have been refusing to put boxes on my porch. I’ve had to walk over 100 yards to the gate to get my wet boxes covered with leaves and lizard poop.

What do you do when you have a UPS problem? You use UPS’s website, which has all sorts of ways to put you in touch with caring UPS employees. Right? I mean, the site actually encourages you to try.

Thing is, UPS has deliberately changed everything so it is virtually impossible to have any kind of communication with them. You complain to Amazon, and they tell you to complain to UPS. Then you find out it’s easier to have lunch with the Great and Powerful Oz.

Amazon could complain to UPS, and UPS would listen. But Amazon doesn’t want you bothering Amazon. Just keep buying that Chinese stuff with the funny names Chinese people think sound American. “Honey, look at my new IZMURDNULL golf pants!”

I think those names are like the Chinese characters ignorant millennials have tattooed on their bodies. You think it means, “courage of tiger,” but it really means, “fat chick pay me $300.”

Maybe Chinese factory owners make their US-educated kids make up those names, thinking they must have learned something at UCLA.

Feng Sr.: What “IZMURDNULL” mean?

Feng Jr.: “Courage of tiger.” I need the Bugatti keys.

In the past, you could call the UPS number and yell “AGENT!” over and over until the phone tree wilted and gave you a person. Now you go to the site, get a bunch of prompts that don’t apply to your situation, and then receive instructions to get lost. If you call and yell “AGENT!”, the system tells you you can’t have one, and it hangs up.

None of the web prompts matched my problem, and that was deliberate on the part of UPS. I had a driver who would not put boxes where they were supposed to be, and probably three million people had the same problem today, so obviously, they do not want people with poorly-placed boxes calling them. They would be inundated.

You can’t just go to the local UPS hub and ask for help, because they will shoot you when you try to scale the fence. UPS doesn’t like riff raff any more than I do. Okay, perhaps they won’t shoot you, but you can’t complain in person. That’s my point.

I tried to use the site in spite of the lack of relevant options. I picked a prompt which was not very appropriate, figuring some human being might read it and decide to do something even though I had responded to the wrong prompt. Unbelievably, UPS contacted me. A guy named Bill at the local hub seemed to be very upset that my boxes were being rained on, and I think he really tried to help.

He thought I hadn’t entered my code on their site. I told him I had. He said he couldn’t see it, and that meant his drivers couldn’t see it. He was convinced this was the issue. He gave me a number for UPS tech support.

I called and got one of the Indian guys.

Here’s something you need to know about phone customer service people. Generally, they have no interest in solving your problem. What they really want is to get rid of you. They look for ways to justify sending you to other representatives in other departments, and one of their favorite tricks is to connect you without permission, very quickly, while talking over you, before you can scream and tell them they’ve made a mistake.

Aedidev the CSR: OkayIamtellingyoutheproblemisnotwithourdepartmentyoumusttalkto billingpleaseholdwhileIswitchyouhaveagooddaynamaste…

You: STOP STOP WAIT WAIT

Aanandaswarup the other CSR: Hello, can you please repeat the long story you told the other CSR and repeat all the facts he did not bother to provide me with?

The Indian guy told me the general tech support people could not help me. He said the UPS My Choice tech support people were the problem, so he gave me their number.

I called and got a lady with an accent so weird I suspect it was fabricated by AI on the spot. She told me all the My Choice people could do was track packages. Which is why their department is called “tech support,” I guess. Totally appropriate.

I think it was the next day when Bill called me again, and he was distraught to learn that UPS had been no help at all.

At some point, I started telling Bill I thought the driver was the problem. I said the gate had had some issues, and I had had another driver who was a trainee, and he had been too cowardly to drive through the gate because he thought he would hit it.

No, no. Bill was positive the driver could not see the code.

I ended up talking to another Indian guy. This one started talking over me and repeating things he would have known were not true had he actually listened to anything I told him. I was somewhat abrupt with him. I said things like, “PLEASE STOP TALKING” so I could get a few words in.

Eventually, he told me to wait, and then he stopped talking. But I could still hear everyone in the boiler room in New Delhi talking around him. And I heard something that sounded like labored breathing.

I started asking him if he was there. I asked if he was all right. I think he had some kind of fit. After a while, he started to talk. He said he could not help me and that he would send me to another department. Then a robot voice came on and asked if I wanted to take a survey, giving answers to be recorded. I took the survey, explaining my complaints in detail. Then the robot said the survey couldn’t be processed, and it hung up on me.

I followed up with Bill and told him the second Indian guy seemed to have some kind of problem, and maybe someone needed to check on him.

I really said that.

Bill and the foreign lady continued to call me, and Bill also emailed. The lady was really annoying. She would say she was going to call at a certain time, then miss the time, and then call me when I was doing important things.

She always sounded the same, but she insisted she was different people. I kept asking her if she was the person who talked to me before, but she denied it.

AI. It’s coming for all of us.

Packages kept landing outside the gate.

Today, I saw the driver by the gate, and I walked out to talk to him. He said he had the code, but the gate had refused to open twice, and it was closing so fast it hit his truck. He was leaving packages in the rain to avoid being trapped or hitting the gate.

Exactly what I thought had been happening, had happened. Being old is like being clairvoyant. You get so familiar with human failings and incompetence, you always seem to know what’s really going on.

We talked for a while and did some experiments, including one where he drove through the gate. He barely moved. No wonder the gate closed before he made it. A garden slug could have passed him. It was bizarre to watch. But he was right about the open time being too short. The control box needed to be opened up and looked at.

He seemed a little nutty to me, and he definitely could have made it through the gate (like the Fedex guy and me) had he not had a bizarre fear of normal acceleration. Still, the box needed to be worked on.

I decided to go ahead and pay a tradesman. The people who built the house left me an opener manual, and it had two phone numbers written on it. A guy named Kenny.

I called Kenny, and he was surly. He said you can’t get Powermaster parts. He said the cost for a service call was $150. I asked if he was planning to do service or sell me a new box. He said he would sell me a new box. Then I asked him whether he was planning to charge me a $150 service fee for giving me an estimate on a new box.

You can see how the conversation went. The only thing I was sure about after we talked was that I was not going to do business with Kenny. If you’re a crabby old crank when a new customer calls, you’re going to be a horror for the duration of the job. Kenny, if you ever read this, this is why you work from a cell phone and your competitors have big, beautiful websites and nice shops and trucks. Get a life.

The box is from 2004, and Powermaster, the company that made it, has decided to cut off parts and support entirely. Their rationale is that it’s too hard to upgrade the boxes to current federal safety standards, but that doesn’t really apply in situations where customers want repairs, not upgrades. Their new boxes cost $3000. Why would anyone buy one after being told to forget about parts for an older one?

They encourage people to contact them via email, and they do not answer emails. It’s a good system. It works.

I have some documents that have some application to this old box, so I took a look. I also took some gut shots of the electronics. I found the potentiometer that makes the gate stay open, and I fixed it so it holds the gate fully open for 70 seconds. Even Mr. Magoo should be able to get a UPS truck through in that amount of time. On a good day, Joe Biden should be able to get his Corvette through in 70 seconds.

So I called UPS and told them what happened. No, I didn’t! I’m not that stupid. I taped a note to the keypad by the gate, saying it had been adjusted and would stay open for 70 seconds.

I did try to email Bill. UPS rejected the email instantly.

“MAIL UNDELIVERABLE

This email conversation thread has expired, and your message will not be delivered. No further action will be taken by UPS.“

Yeah, that’s not rude or anything.

What’s with the boldface? Is that supposed to be scary? Am I being scolded?

The inside of the box has a lot of dirt and crud in it, so I plan to take half a day, put a tarp down by the box, open the box, undo and clean all the connections, apply terminal protector, apply sealant to the box’s access plate, and close it up. I should be able to get another 10 years. The Powermaster people may be a little jerky, but the components in the box look basic and tough.

I think I can put an electric eye on the box to let it know when cars are in the gateway, which would be nice, because no one wants a gate that closes on cars. Driven by people they want to see, I mean.

Driver: STOP! I just wanted to tell you about the Jehovah’s Witnesses!

Gate: GATASAURUS CRUSH!!

They sell aftermarket electric eyes. I just have to find the right contacts to attach one to, and then I have to modify the box so I can run a wire into it without letting rain in. Pretty simple compared to other things I’ve done. I would rather just call someone, but I can hear the spiel already. “They don’t sell parts for this old box, but I can get you a new Liftmaster…”

If I get a new Liftmaster, guess who will install it? Me. There are like 4 wires involved. I can take it from here, chief.

In short, as has happened many times before, I was sitting here looking for people to take my money, but I could not find anyone worthy.

As for UPS, I hope Bill and the Indian guy with the anxiety attacks are doing well. Base pay at UPS amounts to $170,000, so I guess they’re fine.

Wonder what that comes out to in rupees.

Someone Wise Guy Would Sell a Product to Make Them More Comfortable

Yesterday, I resurrected my bush hog after several years, and I learned a few things that could help other people.

There are different names for bush hogs. “Brush hog.” “Rotary cutter.” “Brush cutter.” I call it a bush hog because that’s the term my grandfather used.

It’s a giant lawnmower you pull behind a tractor. A shaft connects it to the tractor’s motor, and a huge apparatus somewhat like a lawnmower blade spins underneath it, cutting weeds and even small trees. I call it a giant lawnmower, but it’s not for lawns. It’s for getting rid of stubborn plants you hate.

It’s a very crude tool, but when stuff gets deep, you need it. It’s also a cheap substitute for a flail mower, which is what you really want if you can afford it. A flail mower will really wipe out brush. It will have problems with saplings a bush hog will take down easily, though.

My bush hog is a 72″ model, so it’s very heavy. The tractor hitch keeps the front off the ground, and there is a little pivoting wheel in the rear that serves a similar purpose, although it’s perfectly okay to run the cutter with the rear wheel off the ground. I think it’s mainly there to keep the cutter from bottoming out.

When I tried to put my cutter back on the tractor, I ran into problems. There were two mysterious chains attached to the front, and I could not figure out where they attached to the tractor.

When I asked for help on the web, I was told these were “check chains” or “limiting chains.” They keep the rear of the cutter up. I was told you can omit the top link and rely on these chains instead. Because chains bend, they give when the rear of the cutter hits the ground, allowing it to swing up. This supposedly prevents pressure off the top link, which would otherwise be compressed.

It looks like this is a giant load of steaming BS. The chains appear to be unnecessary. My cutter, which is still made, doesn’t come with chains. The guy who sold it to me must have bought them.

There is a company that has gone so far as to manufacture these chains as a kit, complete with little bars to use to connect them at both ends. To me, this seems like selling people umbrellas because they’re too dumb to come inside.

My tractor’s first owner was a dentist. He and his wife seemed like wonderful people, but he was not a mechanical or landscaping genius. If you’ve seen the way he had my old brush fork tines attached to the tractor’s bucket, you know what I mean. It was a disaster. He used 4 turnbuckles to chain the tines to the bucket, bending it, and the tines were never rigid. They moved around all the time. He jammed two pieces of 4×4 in the bucket to resist the pressure from the chains.

The tines probably cost him two or three grand. They were made very well, apart from the design. They appeared to have been made in the USA. I didn’t care, because I could not stand using them any more. I cut them to pieces and reassembled them as one quick-attach unit, and it’s fantastic. I converted the bucket to quick-attach, too, so now I have two useful attachments instead of one attachment what works poorly.

If you can’t do steel fab, you are at a big disadvantage in this life.

I still have maybe 45 pounds of steel to throw out. Not sure what to do with 4 huge turnbuckles.

He also sold me a tractor with serious hydraulic leaks, which I cured in a short session with one wrench. Two fittings weren’t tightened enough. He told me I would need new fittings, or I could do what he did: top off the tractor after every use. Meanwhile, the shop floor kept getting oiled.

To get back on topic, I found out my cutter was put together wrong. This appears to be the sole reason it needed chains. I don’t think the chain company puts this information in its ads.

My cutter has a couple of flat bars that reach up to the tractor’s top link. At the top, between them, there is a U-shaped bar with two sets of holes in it. Whoever put this cutter together ran two bolts through the bars and the U-shaped part. In this configuration, the U-shaped bar serves no purpose, and it can’t move.

In reality, the U-bar is supposed to be held in place by one bolt. It’s supposed to swing freely. The other holes are for the top link pin. When the rear of the cutter hits something, the U-bar swings, allowing the cutter to swing upward.

I learned this stuff from a great video, which I will embed here. It will explain the situation so I don’t have to post pictures.

I learned something else about my bush hog. It has parts it may not need.

On the front of the deck, there is a bar with little places where short chains can be attached. There are only a few chains on the cutter now. They are maybe a foot long, and they hang down in front of the cutter, which is open so weeds can go in. It looks like they’re supposed to stop flying objects the blades kick up.

I used to think I should go to Tractor Supply and get more chains. I now suspect the dentist had a totally useless item welded onto his cutter. It’s obviously not factory.

When things are thrown out from under a bush hog, they can move pretty fast. I know this because there is a hole around 5″ long in the side of my bush hog. Something took off from under the cutter while he was using it, and it flew so fast it went right through steel plate. This probably happened right before he got the hanging chains.

It may be that the item that flew out was a piece of a blade. I think this is probably the case, because it left a long, thin hole. A rock would have left a round hole. Actually, a rock that small would surely have broken up.

I see some people on the web saying chains are great, but if objects can fly so fast they go through steel plate, what is a little wimpy chain going to do? Maybe they work. I don’t know. I plan to keep researching.

I don’t get off the tractor while the blades are moving fast, and I wouldn’t let anyone get near me while I’m using the bush hog. Best to keep them off the whole parcel where I’m working.

Hooking the PTO shaft up was no fun. The button that releases the coupler was stuck, so I had to hit it with a hammer. I got some good tips about making it easier.

I want to replace the shaft with a better one. Squirrels chewed up some plastic shielding around the shaft, and it looks like it’s so messed up it can’t be used without falling off. I don’t want to buy replacement parts if I can get something superior.

The shielding is hard to put on correctly, unless I’m doing it wrong. Far as I know, I have to use a huge screwdriver and pry a tough stainless ring out in order to remove the shields, and then I have to find a way to get it back in. I didn’t put it in yesterday, and the shields slipped back and let the weeds wrap up.

I only need to bush hog a couple of times per year. Thank goodness for that. But even at twice a year, I don’t want to spend 40 minutes attaching or detaching an implement.

If your bush hog is rigged up wrong, this post should be very helpful to you. If you know anything I don’t, let me know in the comments.

Spared

In case anyone cares, Hurricane Idalia came and went and did nearly nothing in my county. God was kind.

It was an interesting few days.

Even though I am in an area which has never experienced a true hurricane, we do get winds high enough to make a real mess. They don’t push houses over or throw cars around, but they can down enough trees to result in a cleanup effort that lasts months. Also, because I lived and owned houses in Miami, where hurricanes hit with their full force, I am conditioned to stress myself while observing the progress of storms. I know what it is to go days without running water and weeks without power.

If you own commercial property, or you own a home that’s part of a bigger common structure, hurricanes aren’t much of a problem for you. It’s hard for winds to damage warehouses and condos. A house is another story. Houses are built and landscaped stupidly, as though daring hurricanes to come through and ruin people’s lives.

It wasn’t until surprisingly recently that Florida had quasi-intelligent building codes for houses, and it still hasn’t caught up with regard to landscaping. You can build a house with 100-foot-tall trees 5 feet from the eaves, and no one will bat an eye.

Should the government be involved in telling you what kind of trees you can have, at your own risk? No, but people should be using common sense without the government’s involvement.

The house I live in now had a 40-foot maple tree about 15 feet from the garage when I moved in. Lightning killed it soon after I arrived, but I probably would have left it in place had it not been destroyed by nature. I should have planned to get rid of it as soon as I saw it.

I still have some big, feeble trees within falling distance of my house and shop. I’m considering hiring a company to come in and knock them all over so I can move them. They’re going to fall on their own sooner or later, with or without hurricanes, so I might as well get ahead of them. For $4500, I can get a whole day of work from a crew with some pretty impressive machinery.

The guy who built this house did some surprisingly stupid things. I guess the trees I have to get rid of now looked neat when they were smaller and stronger, and his wife probably insisted on leaving them where they were.

I’ve learned some things about tree removal. First, never pay a tree service. Tree services use wimpy tools to peck at large problems. A couple of outdoorsy-looking ladies who run a local service tried to charge me $800 to fell one oak without bucking or removing it. This would have been a 10-minute job. If I had to pay them to fell the other trees I don’t like, I suppose I would be looking at a $10,000 bill. That’s ridiculous. For $4500, I can get 8 hours of tree destruction, along with all sorts of trimming, ground grooming, and rock removal.

The $800 tree ended up costing me $0 to move. It was a tall oak that had broken about 30 feet up. The top part of of it got caught in another tree, so the top was resting horizontally on the other tree, waiting to fall on me if I cut the trunk.

I took a fishing pole and cast a weight over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a heavier line over the tree. Eventually, I had a tow strap and a chain attached to the tree, and I attached it to the tractor and yanked the tree down. Zero risk of injury and equipment damage. I used a chainsaw to get rid of the stump and waste wood, and that was that.

I like paying other people to do certain types of jobs, but if you’re going to yank my chain with an $800 bid for a job that will take you 10 minutes, I’m going to get creative and send you home with nothing. If these ladies had offered to do it for $250, they would have gotten my business, and I would have called them for all my future work. As it is, they will have to find comfort in the hollow victory of refusing to get realistic with their rosy pricing schedule.

I’m considering buying an excavator. I can get a decent one for $30,000. I wouldn’t buy a new one, because buying new equipment is stupid for amateurs and most professionals. An excavator would allow me to push most problem trees over, and I could also move trunks with it. I could remove all the annoying boulders in the yard and sell them for landscaping. I could pull stumps out quickly and easily. I could fix problems with soil distribution. I could build and repair berms and do light grading.

Biden and BRICS are probably going to destroy the dollar, so putting $30,000 into a machine that depreciates at a glacial pace is smarter than keeping the money in the bank. And who knows? I might even be able to make some money with an excavator if I had to.

I’ve pretty much decided that small landowners who don’t grow crops need two machines: a track loader, often misgendered as a skid steer, and a small excavator. A skid steer is a track loader with wheels. It’s not as good. It tears up the ground, for one thing.

A track loader can do everything a tractor can do except for farming, which I don’t do, and it does everything much, much better. It can lift at least twice as much for the same size machine. It can run bigger attachments. It can rip out stumps a tractor can’t budge. It can lift huge loads when rigged with a fork.

A track loader comes with a cage that protects the operator. A tractor will let things fall on you and kill you.

Track loaders cost more than tractors, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t need a track loader nearly as much as I need an excavator. The tractor, for all its shortcomings, does a whole lot of things reasonably well, and I improved it a lot by modifying it. If I can move soil, tear out stumps and rocks, and remove most trees with an excavator, it will be worth its weight in gold.

I’m always thinking of adding a building to hold stuff I don’t want to park in the rain. Problem: trees and rocks are in the way. With an excavator, I could clear the land myself, pretty easily.

As for Idalia, it made a big mess up the coast. I looked at videos of buildings besieged by storm surge, and it was disheartening.

The brutal truth is that most people who got flooded asked for it. It’s possible to build things on concrete stilts or raised mounds of fill, and people don’t do it, even though the cost of flooding is much greater than the cost of building correctly.

News stations always try to terrify us with claims that 12-foot storm surges are on the way. They’re not telling the whole truth.

First of all, the first three or four feet of surge only get the water up to the level of the ground in most of Florida, so those feet don’t count. Second, the worst storm surge I ever heard of in real life occurred during Andrew, and it was around 8 feet. This is a big deal if you’re right by the water and you built stupidly, but if you’re inland or you built correctly, it’s not a major problem.

If you go watch surge videos, you’ll generally see water coming up one to two feet on the sides of buildings very close to the water. Very bad, but not what the news nuts predicted. To listen to them, you would think houses were going to sink in up to their eaves. Real castastrophic, house-high storm surge is pretty unusual. You can find videos of it hitting places like the Bahamas, and it’s totally different from typical mainland Florida storm surge.

What they want you to think storm surge is like:

What it’s really like most of the time:

If you go on the web, you will see ridiculous stories claiming Katrina produced 28 feet of storm surge. Actual highest recorded value: 11.4 feet. Momentary waves aren’t storm surge. Flash floods from rain aren’t storm surge. Storm surge is standing water with a height that changes gradually. If 28 feet of water had gone across Mobile, it would no longer exist.

To Florida people, hurricanes are a lot like skin cancer. Except for melanoma, skin cancers are about as dangerous as hangnails, and you can cure them yourself with a can of computer dust spray and a Q-tip, in about two minutes. Floridians don’t get upset about them, but Yankees who get tiny basal cell carcinomas cut out have the gall to call themselves cancer survivors. As for storm surge, people who aren’t from Florida wave their arms and become incontinent when it’s mentioned, but most of the time, for at least 99% of the state, it’s not that bad.

I’m about 90 feet above sea level, I’m not in a flood plain (I checked before buying), and I’m in a place hurricane-force winds can’t reach. If I get my trees fixed up, hurricanes will mean nearly nothing to me. They don’t mean a whole lot now.

It’s terrible to see that people in Florida’s internal corner got surge flooding, but this is something you have to expect when you build a certain way. It’s not merely possible; it’s certain to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t make any sense to complain as though you had been hit by a meteor. You knew it was coming when you decided not to elevate your building.

I’m glad the storm is over, because I didn’t need any more stress after a 30-hour-long trip from Singapore. The flights alone accounted for about 24 hours, and the seats were like bricks situated under vises. The bricks pulverized my tailbone, and the armrests squeezed my arms against me. I made the mistake of buying exit row seats, and apparently, the seat bottoms are even less forgiving than the ones in the other coach seats. I was in real pain a lot of the time. A seat you can live with for three hours may seem a lot different after 10.

I think I also had coronavirus, which added to the suffering. I didn’t have a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or loss of my sense of smell, but I had a generally crummy feeling accompanied by the speedy and continuous accumulation of disturbing things in my nostrils. My wife had congestion and some throat problems, so I think I probably caught some of it, too. I wouldn’t have suspected anything had she not been sick.

Watching a storm approach is always draining, and combined with my other problems, it made for several unpleasant days during which I could not fully let go and recover from the trip. It was a little perfect storm that was reluctant to let go. Now I’m finally unwinding.

You’ll Have to Build Your Own

Today and day before yesterday, I used my new tractor fork to move a 70-foot oak. I feel like it’s safe to say this invention is a huge success and a giant improvement over what most people use.

The tines on the fork used to be 4 separate attachments. Each one had to be fastened to my tractor’s bucket with a chain and turnbuckle. They moved around when I used them, and I had to get on and off the tractor to put them back in place. When I tried to lift heavy things that were only a little wider than the gap between two tines, the tines would open up and drop the item. The chains were slowly destroying my bucket. It was stupid.

I hacked up the tines, discarding maybe 70 pounds of steel, including the chains and turnbuckles. I made a frame from heavy tubing, and I welded the tines to it. I made two plates that would connect to a quick attach adaptor, and I welded them to the frame. BANG. New fork.

If you look at it in a picture, it appears to be weak. You would think a heavy load would bend a tine downward. It looks like a blow to the side of a tine would bend it inward. No chance. I can stand on the end of a tine and jump up and down, and nothing happens. It’s much stronger than it looks.

A few days back, I was fiddling around in the woods, and I saw that a very tall tree had fallen across the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. It was stuck in another tree, so it leaned at about a 60-degree angle.

I had to move it. The road was unsafe with a big tree waiting to collapse on it. The cattle were in danger. Also, I didn’t want the leaning tree to destroy the tree that was holding its weight.

I went out with only a few tools. I had a hatchet, a tow strap, and an 18″ Makita electric chainsaw. Within about 90 minutes, the tree was flat on the ground, and I had moved about 15 feet of the trunk to the burn pile. By that time, the chainsaw batteries were dead, and I was dehydrated, so I quit.

Today I spent maybe two more hours, and I brought a timberjack so I could roll logs onto the fork. Now just about all of the tree is on the burn pile.

I had no problem lifting a 40-foot log that was about a foot thick on one end and 5″ thick on the other. This is the kind of thing buyers of $5000 grapples think is impressive. It’s like they have no idea a cheap, simple fork will do the same thing. I held the log up and sawed 5-foot lengths off each end until I had something I felt would be easy and safe to dump on the burn pile.

I could have carried the whole log to the pile, but that would have been dumb. Long objects can turn a tractor over if they’re not balanced right, and they can do funny things when dropped on a pile from 8 feet off the ground. Cutting the log up added maybe 10 minutes to the job, and it left me with a safer load.

I found something else the fork will do. If you lift the fork high and push it against a tree that’s rotten or just small, you can push it right over. No stump. The inner two tines prevent the tree from sliding out of the fork. The only problem is that the fork tends to slide up the tree. I can fix that by welding a piece of serrated steel to the frame to catch on tree bark.

I considered welding a hook to the frame in the same place, for chains and straps. I can’t do that if I put the log-catcher there. I can still put a hook on my bucket, though, and since I have a quick attach adaptor, switching to the bucket is fast and easy.

I’m thinking of things to do to my ballast box. This is a heavy steel box on the rear of the tractor. I put sand in it. It counteracts the weight of stuff on the front end loader and takes weight off the front axle. It’s not quite full of sand, and I can put a chainsaw and a few other things in the top.

I need more storage, however. I’m considering getting a Harbor Freight hitch cargo carrier. This is a cheap steel platform that goes in a trailer hitch receiver, like the one on my box. There are a couple of problems with these things. First, they are nearly bottomless. The bottom of a cargo carrier is just a few steel tubes several inches apart. I guess I could put expanded metal or plywood in it. The second problem is that cargo carriers can wobble around in receivers. I don’t know if that would bother me or not.

Right now, I have a big steel hook in the receiver. The purpose is to let me connect a strap, brush grubber, or chain, so I can do light pulling. I don’t think it’s a great idea to pull really hard on a ballast box receiver, but removing shrubs and little stumps should be no problem at all. If I don’t use the hook, I have to run the strap or whatever under the box to the tractor, and that’s kind of a pain.

Someone suggested I connect a short chain to the tractor’s drawbar. I guess I’ll do that. I will then be able to connect things to the chain without getting between the tractor and box. I’ll be able to rest the chain on the box or something when I’m not using it, so it will be handy.

I have considered buying or making a chainsaw holder. When I put a chainsaw in the box, I have to keep a scabbard with it. I have to make sure the scabbard is on the saw when it’s in the box so the chain doesn’t gouge things. Putting the scabbard on and taking it off gets to be inconvenient.

A company called Sawhaul makes a polyethylene saw holder you can mount on any flat piece of steel. It looks fine, but the price is insane. They want $150 for something that should cost $50, and people say the polyethylene gets torn up and has to be replaced. I’m thinking I might be better off making something from pressure-treated wood. I’m not sure. If I get a cargo carrier, a chainsaw holder will be pointless.

I’m also thinking of making a hook for my subsoiler. A subsoiler has a single bar of steel that goes down in the ground, and it has a flat blade attached to it. The bar has about a 45° bend in it. You can use the subsoiler to dig shallow trenches in a hurry. It’s also useful for lifting stumps, but because the bar has such a wide bend in it, it slips off the stumps. If it had a 90° bend, it would hold on and lift better. This would give me 3300 pounds of lift, concentrated on a very small area.

Stumps need vertical lift. They don’t resist it very well. They’re great at withstanding sideways force. Obviously, a 3300-pound lift will do more than a much smaller force applied at 45° from vertical.

A lot of guys use something called a stump bucket to remove stumps. This is a thing that looks sort of like the lower jaw on a tyrannosaurus. It goes on a front end loader. It has serrations where the dinosaur’s teeth should be, to prevent stumps from sliding off.

It’s a great tool. For a skid steer or track loader. A skid steer will lift several times what a tractor will, so the bad leverage you get from a long bucket out in front of a front end loader is not a problem. Stumps come flying out. A tractor can’t lift nearly well enough to make a stump bucket work well, unless the tractor is enormous. There are Youtube videos of skid steers and tractors using stump buckets, and the difference is disturbing, if you own a tractor. Guys on tractors have to nibble and nibble and nibble.

Tractor:

Skid steer:

A subsoiler with a hook would be very different from a long stump bucket. It would be right under the 3-point hitch, so no lifting power would be lost. If the tractor can lift 3300 pounds, I’ll get 3300 pounds of lift at the stump. I think it will work.

A guy in the Netherlands has a tiny Kubota with a front end loader attachment which is a single piece of plate steel on a quick-attach mount. The piece that does the work has a profile like a rhino horn. It seems to work much better than a stump bucket, probably because a bucket is a foot wide and spreads force out over a huge area. If he can do great things with a single piece of plate on a weak front end loader, I should be able to do much better with a subsoiler hook.

I bent my subsoiler working on stumps, so I welded gussets in and replaced the little lower pins with a solid bar of steel about three feet long. It should be way harder to bend now. If it does bend, I’ll reinforce it some more. Welders don’t have to put up with any BS from steel tools. It will do what I want, or I will add steel until it does.

Anyway, the fork is a total success. Wish I had had it 5 years ago. When you need the right tool, just buy it or make it. Don’t cuss and do nothing while life passes you by.

I Wouldn’t Let These Guys Change my Oil

I’m waiting for my wife to call, so I am killing time with you.

Today we all know what happened to the Titan sub that was on its way to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. It blew up, or more accurately, in, on Sunday. Our Coast Guard found the pieces near the Titanic. I have heard they were 600 feet away and 1300 feet away. Maybe someone knows the correct figure.

I was surprised to see that the most intelligent, or seemingly intelligent, analysis of the accident came from film director James Cameron, who directed the movie Titanic. He has a lot of contacts in the general area of things that go down deep in the ocean.

He says the sub probably imploded way above the depth to which it was considered safe. The Titanic rests at around 12,500 feet, and the sub disintegrated at 3,500.

That’s not the kind of failure a company can come back from without a whole new design. The sub fell apart at less than 30% of its working depth, so it experienced less than 30% of the pressure it was designed to endure every time it was used. It’s like having a hitch designed to pull 12,500 pounds snap in front of a 3,500-pound trailer. It suggests the design was totally worthless.

How would you like it if you were on an elevator rated for 2,000 pounds, and you and the other occupants weighed, say, 500, and the cable snapped?

Cameron says he emailed people on the day of the implosion, telling them the sub’s occupants were dead. He says he was very confident.

According to Cameron, the sub lost communication and tracking when it imploded. He says the tracking equipment had its own pressure-resistant housing outside the sub, as well as its own power. His conclusion when he learned this information was that the sub had been torn apart, because gentler failures wouldn’t have interfered with the tracking equipment.

That sounds pretty smart to me. Of course, Cameron is a movie guy, known to have a monumental ego, so it could be that he’s just good at looking smart. And he’s the same guy who thinks he found the bones of Jesus, which Jesus is still using.

He also says Oceangate, the tourism-sub company, was urged repeatedly to have its vessel certified, whatever that means. Experts wanted it to receive proper testing, and Cameron says that never happened.

He also says the composite hull was a stupid idea.

A composite is a material made up from at least two different materials. Two examples are fiberglass-reinforced plastic, which is used in boat hulls, and steel-reinforced concrete, which is used in nearly everything made from concrete. A composite will combine desirable qualities of different materials. In concrete, adding rebar allows the concrete to bend more without cracking.

The Titan’s hull was shaped like a watermelon (the old kind). The ends were titanium domes. The middle was a carbon-fiber tube. “Carbon fiber” is shorthand for “carbon fiber imbedded in something else.” Plastic, maybe?

Cameron used the word “horrible” to describe the decision to use this composite. He said the problem was that the carbon could start separating from whatever it was imbedded in, and that eventually, this would produce weak areas that would cause implosion. He believes this is what happened.

I would guess it works like this: carbon fiber and plastic are not equally stretchy, so whenever pressure produced tension inside the hull, the fibers would try to stretch more or less than the plastic around them. After many repetitions, the fibers would start to come loose and move slightly. When that happens, you don’t have a composite or its virtues. You have two different materials rubbing against each other.

Again, just my wild guess.

Something like this happens to car paint in the sun. Cars are now painted with stupid two-layer coatings. The bottom layer is colored, and the top layer is clear plastic. When the car heats and cools, the layers expand and contract at different rates, causing them to try and slide past each other, and a few years down the road, your clear coat falls off and can’t be replaced unless you redo the entire paint job at enormous cost.

Cameron claims it’s not possible to do a quality analysis of a sub made from a composite. He says one “contiguous” (he means “homogeneous”) material can be tested using finite element analysis, but composites can’t.

I think he is getting in over his head, because the web says finite element analysis works on composites. In any case, as far as I can determine, the sub never got any kind of creditable certification.

I see someone in the submersible community, if there is such a thing, is now claiming the sub must have been engineered well because an expert went down in it with the rest of the dead. The idea is that he wouldn’t have done that if the sub had been unsafe.

That doesn’t convince me. A 2012 article from the New York Times says that up until that time, only 5 people had died in submersibles, and there had been plenty of descents. The first bathyscaphe was launched in 1948.

If Titan was so safe, why did it implode? If implosion is a risk that can’t be mitigate well, why have all those other vessels done just fine?

I would have more faith in the Titan design if they built another one, had it tested with extreme rigor, and got the company’s top remaining employees to do a hundred safe descents. My bet: plastic deep-sea manned submersibles aren’t coming back soon.

If Cameron is basically right, the vessel was doomed by third-rate engineering. In that case, even if the company can somehow hold together and get over its now-abysmal reputation, it will have to splurge on a real sub. No one wants to enter a demolition derby in a Ford Pinto.

I don’t think anyone seriously believes the company can survive, though. On top of all its other problems, the guy who ran it is dead.

Some people are calling for new laws. That’s ridiculous. You should be allowed to go down to the Titanic in a cheap sub if you want. It’s not like this is a significant threat to the public. So far, the death toll, since the beginning of time, stands at 5. Also, the people who rode in this sub all signed a disclaimer that made it very clear the company thought there was a good chance they would die. I don’t know what more we should do to protect people from their own bad judgment.

Over 1500 people died when the Titanic sank, they died due to incompetence and greed, and humanity continued using ships. That was the right decision. If rich people want to continue risking death in tiny subs, they should be allowed to do it. As for disclaimers, liability, negligence, and all that, we already have laws covering those things, as will become obvious when the lawsuits start.

Yesterday I read about a high school classmate of mine. He died on a mountain in the Himalayas at about 33 years of age. He had kind of an ego. He decided to leave his group for a while, and he fell into a snow-covered crevasse. They found his sunglasses, journal, and trekking poles next to the hole he made, and that was it. There was nothing they could do. For all the world knows, he was wedged between two walls of ice, dying, for several days, watching light appear and disappear above him as the sun rose and set.

He is still there.

We still let people climb mountains.

Mount Everest is not the world’s hardest mountain to climb. Not by a wide margin. Annapurna has a fatality rate of about one third. Still, 1% of the people who try climbing Everest end up dead. That’s a horrible record. No one is trying to end the lucrative Mount Everest extreme-tourism trade, and people are allowed to climb mountains that are much more dangerous.

It’s sad the Titan’s occupants died. It’s even sadder that their deaths appear to have been caused by incompetence and recklessness. It’s a good lesson for anyone who thinks fancy-looking equipment, a cute logo, vehicle wraps, and custom golf shirts make a company trustworthy.