Bob's Eyes

Monday July 14, 2025 Guerneville CA.

Skiddy blade valve

I had the old defective blade valve of Skiddy’s I took off last week and replaced it with a new one, so today, I thought I’d take the old valve apart to see if I could see anything wrong with it.

I got the valve apart but there wasn’t anything I could see obviously wrong with it.

Smoker gas jet

Then I searched for the smokers gas jet I built to try on the smoker.

Here it is.

I hooked up the gas jet to the bottom of the smoker so I could give it a try to make sure it still worked after sitting around all these years.

The jet is all hooked up and ready to test it out.

I got it lite up and it worked just fine,………….But.

I found that it was going to be too hot to smoke fish as the fish needs to be smoked at about 150 degrees F. and this jet wouldn’t go that low, so I removed it and will hook the wood smoker box back up.

Chickens

These broody hens have been hanging out here for a long time now and fighting with each other a lot. I decided to try and do something about it as they were fighting too much to hatch out any eggs.

Late in the day, I closed up the regular nesting boxes and put this one box out with five eggs in it to try and get one of the hens to use it. So far, none will use the box, so that might not work for my purposes.

Smoker

Later in the day, I worked on putting the smoker back together with the wood fire box. I think it will work and with this setup, I can hold a real low temperature for smoking fish and generate lots of smoke too.

Nice day.

Sunday July 13, 2025 Guerneville CA.

Old smoker

I made this smoker many years ago and I started to set it up about a year ago, but never got around to getting it all set up at that time.

So, today, I decided to work on setting it up. The first thing I needed to do was clear the weeds out of the area for fire protection. I found an old hoe and got started on that.

Smoker box

Once I had the weeds under control, I needed to get the smoker box working again as most of the metal stuff was frozen up a bit.

I got some oil out and big hammer and worked on freeing up the metal pieces.

Wood burner

I got all the metal stuff working again for the fire box and setup the system.

Once that was done, I remembered I have a gas burner somewhere, so I hunted up that and found the parts I needed.

I think I’ll just use the gas burner to start with as it’s much easier to use which I will set up, maybe tomorrow.

Salmon

One of  my neighbor’s offered to give me some salmon so that’s why I’m working on getting this setup. And it will be good to use it for smoking some of the grass fed beef I just got, so it’s good to get this thing working again.

Nice day.