Saturday March 25, 2023 Guerneville CA.
Waking up the old Toyota
I’ve had this Toyota since 1968 and been a lot of places with it. I was going to sell it once but came to my senses just in time. We’ve just done too much together, so I’ll die with it.
I think I paid 4000 for it new and now it’s worth about three or four times that, even though it is a bit older.
It sits around a lot these days, so today I had a use for it and it was time to wake it up. I’d put the battery on the charger last night. A good thing as it took a lot of cranking to get it started up.
Grease and air
I decided to grease the drive lines as I have no idea when the last time that was done. And then I aired up the tires.
Ok that’s ready to go for later today.
New shed work
Then, I went over to my new shed foundation and started working on that. I’m starting to put some boards on it so I can screw the metal roofing pieces to it. I’m using the metal roofing for the sides too.
Plasma cutter
I purchased this green box the other day. It’s called a plasma cutter and is used to cut steel.
I figured it out and tried it out on some stuff to mount the boards and it worked real good.
Now I need a new helmet as my old one is real old and old fashioned compared to what they are using today. The old one, I have to hold it with one hand so I only have one other hand to use to do stuff and I have a hard time seeing what I’m doing with it.
Rock
Eventually my brother Tom came back from selling at the farmer’s market so I hooked up our dump trailer to the Toyota and he took his tractor up in the hills to load some rock for the new shed site. I hauled three loads and the last one on the right, I got stuck and had to be pulled out as the ground was real soft from the recent rains. There should be more than enough rock to do the job now
Habitat pile
There was a question about my brush pile. I have one big one off to the side of my property. We used to just burn our brush but these days that’s frowned on, so I just keep stacking it up and it rots down, making mulch. I called it a habitat pile for the critters as todays people don’t like brush piles either as they think they are just fire hazards, I changed the name so now it’s ok, at least with me. I also once had a chipper, but I used it so little it always needed work so I could use it, so now I do it this way.
After we got all the rock, I wanted to add some oil to the lifter as it wasn’t going up all the way,so I did, but when I raised it up, it stuck in the up position for some reason.
I’ll work on getting it down, but not today. I did put the battery charger on the hydraulic lift system to charge it’s battery up.
After that, the day was about shot, so I put all my tools away on the shed foundation work site and that was it.
Nice day.
My brush piles always welcome critters. They like setting up housekeeping close to a food source! I try to use as little mechanical stuff as I can so I’m not having to make repairs. I love that you can fix ANYTHING!!
Time for a new helmet indeed. Well, yes, that’s how I considered my brush pile, which soon became higher than my head…I don’t know how it did that…and a tree grew up in it, and it always seemed full of critters, and it always seemed too dry to set that big of a fire, and I hated to do it for both those reasons, so when I moved to town a bit more than 10 years ago, I just left it. Here, things don’t get enough moisture to decompose quickly – heat yes, but stuff just dries out. And kind of sits there ….unlike your Eden.