Bob's Eyes

Saturday April 6, 2024 Guerneville CA.

Forest ride

Barry showed up this morning so we went out for a bike ride. The ground was just right for riding after the recent rain.

We stopped at this spring called Pig Wallow for a drink of water after riding around for awhile.

After riding around for awhile we headed on up to our break area at the top and had a nice break.

Coming down from the break area we ran into this downed tree. We are preparing to trim a passage through the trees as all we had was hand clippers.

We rode around some more and then headed on home. Barry took off for his home and went in for a nap.

I puttered around in the yard and did some chair hopping for most of the day.

Metal template construction

But later in the day, I worked on making this cardboard template out of sheet metal, which is the piece in the back.

Now the template had to be bent to shape. I needed to clamp the metal and looked for some adjustable clamps that size but couldn’t find any, so I did it the old fashioned way with wire.

This is the finished product. The pipe is marked using the template and then the metal is cut and shaped to fit on another piece of pipe. I think this template will work real well, especially now that Tom has the right measurements..

Nice day.

Friday April 5, 2024 Guerneville CA.

Bumper work

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do today. Going up into the forest was my first choice, but instead I worked on the pipes for the bumper for Skiddy.

This pipe was two inches too short so I cut another piece two inches long to weld to it.

I welded the two inch piece up in this setup.

And cut some metal for end caps and welded them on both ends of the pipe.

A bit of grinding to finish up the end and this piece of pipe was ready to go for the bumper.

Butterfly

I was taking a break when I saw something flutter over on the chicken house so I went over to see what it was. A black butterfly. These ones are attracted to my California Dutchman’s pipe plant as their caterpillars love to eat it. This is one of the larger ones of these I’ve seen.

Now for the hard part of pipe joining

Tom made me a template to make the special end on the pipe to join it to another pipe.

I used the template but was having trouble making the pipe fit properly to the other pipe.

That meant I  had to do a lot of grinding on the pipe to make it fit. which I did.

I went over to talk to Tom about the bad template and he decided he likely had forgotten the proper measurement and he made me a new template that should work better for the next pipe.

This is the one I made by grinding it a lot and it fits pretty good.

All that grinding I did to make the pipes fit wore me out so enough of that for now.

I spent the rest of the day finishing up the 2nd. bridge I was making, doing some more welding on it and got it all done.

Nice day.