Saturday, Apr, 13, 2013, Guerneville, CA.

Did some much needed spring yard work

I looked at  the weather report for Jenner today, and it said real windy, so I thought it would be a good idea to stay home and enjoy my yard. The sun was out and it was real nice here.

My first project of the day was to fix that lawn mower carburetor problem I discovered the other day. I took the carb apart. It had a bunch of semi clear Jell-O stuff in the float bowl, which seemed to be plugging things up and stopping the float bowl needle from closing as it should. Cleaned that all out and put it back together and tried it out for a bit. That seemed to fix that one ok.

I filled the chain saw up with gas and oil  and cut some more unwanted small fruit trees down in the yard, as if I didn’t they would soon take over the road that comes in to the house. Of course that meant I had to pack all the brush to the brush pile.

Mowing and sawing and packing brush is what I did most of the day, not counting naps of course. :O)

Worked on the van some too.

Toward evening, I worked on a couple little projects on the van. I needed to move the CB radio out where I could see it, so I figured out a method to do that and got that at least started. I had it mounted under the center console and that worked as long as I didn’t have to change channels while driving, which you sometimes have to do to get away from channels that turn too busy.

A foot rest block for the van gas peddle.

Then I started making a foot rest block for the gas peddle which I fastened next to the gas peddle to rest my foot on. I made this because when I’m in low range four wheel drive, low gear,it’s hard to control the gas peddle without surging forward. Usually when in these gears, it’s real rocky so one wants to go real slow to crawl over the rocks and not have the van surge forward real fast.

I thought this was just a problem with my new injection TBI system, but after ridding around in several newer Jeeps in Arizona,  I see this is a problem they all have, so I’m doing something to try to work this out a bit.

The problem seems to be that in low range, low gear, there isn’t much back pressure on the engine so it winds up fast or races more easily, especially when ones foot is bouncing around which it usually is in these types of situations.

I won’t know if this will work until I get a chance to test it out, but it was an easy modification.

I also spent a good deal of time today looking at Google Earth, checking out places to go on my next adventure. I’m looking at the forest area just below Lassen, and heading east from there to the Jarbidge area in north eastern NV., maybe in a month or so. Still plenty of time to investigate this area to figure out how I want to travel. I think I need to wait for the snow to melt too.

Despite the work today, it was real nice in the yard.

Had a nice day.