wolc123

Ok, just ordered the Ryobi recip saw, $ 62 and it will be here Sunday.

I guess it won’t hurt to try yanking it down first, with the diagonal braces still on, but I don’t see how a sawzall would be any safer than a small (14”), sharp electric chainsaw up on a ladder. If you can tell me why a sawzall would be safer, I’ll order that $59 Ryobi recip saw from Amazon now, rather than waiting for Christmas, as I had intended. I guess the lack of a cord would be a reason, but the tool weight is probably heavier than my small chainsaw, and the shorter blade would take longer to cut thru the braces (about 6” square).

The older I get, the less I like heights. I probably should get up on an extension ladder with a chainsaw and cut out the diagonal braces on the side walls, before I try yanking that last old barn down, but that part scares me a little. I probably will do that though, since I now have a close outlet to plug my electric chainsaw in, thanks to the just-completed pole barn wiring project. I used my electric chainsaw for that job on the other one, because it is a lot quieter than my gas saws. I thought I might hear some “warning” cracks and be able to get down fast and out of the way before the whole thing fell down on me. Speaking of widowmakers, watching my wife’s video of me taking down the old concrete silo was pretty comical. I had knocked out most of the bottom course of blocks with a sledge. There were only a few left, on the barn side, where I was standing. The 30 ish ft tall, 12 ft diameter concrete silo was leaning slightly the way I wanted it to fall (opposite the barn). When I pounded out the last block, the remaining few on my side buckled, and some flew my way. You can hear her yell “oh God”, as I turned and ran. Thankfully, I was fast enough and none of those flying blocks struck me (they must weigh about 50 pounds each). If I had to do it again, and ammo was cheap like it used to be, I would leave the last few blocks and shoot them out from a safe distance.

My wife will record it, like she did when I sledged down the silo. Removing the siding weakens it a lot. I will wait until I get the rest off, before I try. If I cant yank it down then with my tractor, I will cut out the diagonal braces. I am pretty certain that it will drop fairly easy after I do that.

I drove the two 8 ft ground rods last night and they are just over 8 ft apart (code requires at least 6 ft). Hopefully, I will be able to get them wired up to the sub panel on Saturday. I can’t believe that I didn’t hit any hard fill (busted up concrete, etc), because we put in a lot of that, to get the grade up where it needed to be. That was about the only part of the job that went easier than I expected. The last “electrical” work that I need out there, is to replace the old 15 amp, 120 volt outlet, that is currently on the west side porch, with an exterior outlet with a GFI. Everything should be “up to code” then. My grandfather burried the wire from that outlet, on the outside of the old barn to the house, more than 40 years ago. I Guess that an inside outlet is good outside for at least that long.

I would not count on screw-threads holding up if you don’t need to. The laminated wood stock on my T/C Omega busted, after the factory installed screw-thread front sling stud pulled out and the gun swung down onto a hardware floor. I repaired the busted stock with gorilla glue (maybe 15 years ago), machined a new sling stud from a bolt, and put a nut on the backside. There is no way that is pulling out. Machine a small counterbore for the nut into the stock if you need to. There was plenty of room for one, without doing that, on my Omega.

Happy birthday xnyrkr.

I did that a few times, back when I had a spreader. I don’t recall that it did the plots much good. It was mostly wood chips. I think to get any real value from it, you need to stockpile it for a year or more, and let it compost before application. That also might cook off the weed seeds. What I used went basically from stall to plot within a week. I only use foodots to help get deer into mankind’s food supply. Planting enough to last past hunting season would get more of them into coyotes. Filling all tags on opening day is a lot easier said than done (I usually have (7) tags but I dont often fill more than half of those all season long). I have a hard time processing more than one deer at a time, and my deer fridge only holds one of average size. The best thing about food plots (particularly corn which gives the deer food AND COVER), is that they hold deer on my ground all season long.

That’s where I always go. It is a little under a half hour away for me, and back roads all the way. I have not seen fertilizer cheaper anywhere else. They also have good prices on seed. I’ll probably pick up a bag of buckwheat, and some silver queen sweetcorn, when I pick up my spring fertilizer. I have plenty of RR field corn, early sweetcorn, and brassica seed leftover from last year. I will make another trip, at the end of the summer, for white clover and wheat.

When I am on the range with my shotguns, I always use a pin on recoil pad. It is about 6” x 8” x 1/2” thick and filled with a material like silly putty. It has a Velcro patch, that pins onto the shoulder of a t-shirt. You don’t notice the recoil at all, when wearing that pad, and there is no shoulder bruising. I bought it many years ago, while I was working on a shock absorber for a complicated recoil-absorbing mechanism, that mounted into the stock of shotguns, that were used mostly for trap and skeet shooting. The silly putty pad was more effective effective and way cheaper to produce.

I sold quite a bit for $ 2 a board foot, which was less than wholesale cost pre-Covid. I also used a lot for the loft and shops in the new pole barn. I will probably keep the rest for siding the back porch and for wrapping tree blinds. I have killed a few 3.5 year old bucks, including last year’s, from behind that barnwood. The main building is 36’ wide x 50’ long x 12’ wall. It has (2) 10’ wide x 25’ long porches, one of which I will eventually enclose with old barnwood. Inside, the loft area is 30’ long x 12’ wide, x 8’ high. Below that is a 20’ long x 12’ wide woodshop, which I can heat, and a 10’ long x 12’ wide metal shop, which is open to the rest of the building. The metal shell is a Stockade building (kit made in Ohio cost $ 27k in 2018), with 10’ truss spacing. That makes for lots of useable space, up in the loft between the trusses. I have plenty of room to store lumber up there. I keep most of the loft load over those interior 9” hand-hewn posts, that I salvaged from another old “1883” barn. Each 9” post has a 3 ft long section of pressure treated 9” square laminated post and two bags of concrete below grade. The loft floor is 1” thick x 12” wide chestnut boards recovered from the old roof of that “1883” barn and covered with 7/16” thick 4’ x 8’ sheets of osb (those were just $ 5 ea in 2019 at Home Depot). The cross beams below that loft floor are 6” square hand-hewn from the same old barn, on 20” centers. The lofts in those old barns were similar, but the floor support beams were on 40” centers. After we switched from loose hay to baled hay, in the mid 1970’s, those beams broke in a few places, from the heavier load. The pilgrims didn’t design for baled hay. I didn’t want to ever worry about that with this barn, and I had plenty of beams. This loft would support elephants. Most of the barn floor is packed crusher run stone except for the shops under the loft and one porch, which are concrete.

We had two big (60 mph plus) wind storms since December and both stretched that 1/2” cable, that’s holding it up, a little farther. As soon as I get the rest of the siding off the end and the ground dries enough, I am going to try and yank it down. I am guessing it will be down by May 1 (hopefully to the south). If it does go down before then, and falls straight to the north (the way it’s leaning) it will just miss the house and new barn, but crush the crap out of our favorite shade tree. The maple which you can see to the north in this picture. A siding-stripped twin to that old barn, that was originally on the site of the new pole barn, fell down on the east side of that tree in 2018, while I was at work and nocked off some big branches. Our daughters called me at work and said it fell down. They said it sounded like two semi trucks had crashed out on the street, and there was a huge cloud of dust. I had noticed it leaning slightly, when I cut out the last of the diagonal supports the evening prior.

I am going to cut back just a little, and probably just get (3) 50 lb bags of triple 15 fertilizer this year. Last year, with (4) bags on 4 acres of corn, I still had some left on the stalks on March 1. I only need it to last until January 1 (last day of Holiday ML) season. I don’t care where the deer go or what they eat after that. Eradicating the “damaging” coons, starting in August, stretches the corn a lot farther. Spraying gly on the rows only, cultivating in-between, and planting only on old clover ground, also minimizes fertilizer requirements. Seed and spray price increases won’t hit me at all this year, because I stocked up good last year, and have enough for a few more years left in storage.

Thanks, it will be nicer when I get it done. I still need to enclose the back porch and add another porch to the back of that for firewood storage. Stuff is open to the weather back there now and I am sick of storing firewood outside on pallets and covering with tarps . At least there is a light in that back porch now. I need to drop and finish dismantling this last old “1883” barn first though, to get the rafters (for framing) and some roofing lumber (for siding). As soon as I get the last of the siding off the south end of the old barn, and the ground dries up, I am going to try and pull it down to the south with a tractor. It might hit our house and/or the new pole barn, if it falls north, the way it is leaning. Currently, it is held up by a 1/2” wire rope, that is attached to a big pear tree out back.

God would have put your eyes like that if you were supposed to shoot one of those. That’s what I would always tell the guys on my trap team, who used them, when I brought out my side by side.

I’ll be wearing Levi’s blue jeans in one of these blinds:

Just euros when they are drying. I hang carcasses and butcher in the insulated garage that is attached to the house.

That one job was well worth the $ 80 that the Ryobi “one-plus” drill kit cost me. I’ll ask for a recip saw for it for Christmas (they are only $ 59) right now on Amazon. I’ll also take the drill up ice fishing next winter, and see if it works as well as my Father in law’s Dewalt on the auger. I might not use it so much any more, out in my pole barn, since I have lots of corded drills and there are plenty of outlets out there now. I do like it’s 1/2” keyless chuck though, so it might end up getting more use just because of that.

I have had the LED 4 footers out there for a few years. I had temporarily rigged extension cords to the two hard wired ones in my wood shop, and I was running everything from a power strip on a single 15 amp outlet. That worked ok, because those LED’s take so little amperage. What I really like about them, is they you have instant bright light when you turn them on, unlike the old fluorescents which gave much less light and took a long time to give that when it was real cold out.

I intended to get a Dewalt. They showed a similar 20 volt package on the Home Depot website for $ 99. They didn’t have it at the store and a worker there recommended the Ryobi. So far, so good. My brother and father in law like their Dewalts. I used my father in laws for drilling holes thru the ice last month and it worked pretty good. I burried a 2” PVC conduit 2-3 ft deep for the service wire when I did the site work for the barn. I left a 1/8” wire rope thru it, which I used to pull the wire. There was a spare 30 amp circuit from the 200 amp main panel in the house (for an electric dryer that my grandmother used to have). I ran 100 ft of 10-3 UHB wire from that circuit, thru the conduit, to the sub-panel in the barn. Pulling that wire thru the conduit was the toughest part of the job. I could only get about a foot at a time by myself, running back and forth “pushing” from the house side and “pulling” from the barn. I should have asked my wife to push for me, but it was real cold and windy outside that day, so I was on my own . If I ever need more power out there, it won’t be too bad to feed it they that 2” conduit. I have had a couple many years ago. A 12 volt Skill, that didn’t have much torque, and a cheap Asian 14 volt one that the charger took a crap on. I will admit that this new one is pretty nice, especially up on a ladder. I couldn’t believe how long the batteries lasted.

One nice thing, about the extended outside crap weather we are having this spring, is that it has given me time to finish wiring my pole barn. I just about wrapped that up yesterday. All that remains is installing a couple of 8 ft ground rods for the sub-panel. Electrical supplies sure have escalated in price, but fortunately, I already had many of the big ticket items, like the sub-panel box and most of the conduit. Some things were cheaper than they used to be though. I never liked cordless drills, but with so much ladder work, I needed one for this project. This Ryobi 18 volt kicked ass. It came with an extra lithium battery and charger and Home Depot sold it for $ 80. The thing had no trouble with 1-1/8” dia holes for the conduit, thru thick chestnut, and the battery life was impressive. I had been running everything out there with extension cords from a single 15 amp 120 volt outlet, that my grandfather had installed on the old barn that was on the site previously. Now, I have 30 amps and 240 volts out there, and plenty of 120 volt outlets. I also put in a 30 amp, 240 volt outlet for a welder (that breaker cost $ 36 at Home Depot and I only paid $ 50 for the used welder), which works good for up to 1/8” rod. My old 15 amp, 120 volt “buzz box” could only handle 1/16” rod. The LED lighting is really nice, compared to the fluorescent fixtures I had in my old shop. I had to run an extra 2x6 thru the wall for the light fixture on the back porch (last picture), but that pretty much completed the job.

The best thing about science is : that it PROVES religion. It is physically impossible to make something from nothing, therefore GOD must exist. That’s what they ought to teach in school, rather than “evolution” horse shit and the “big bang” theory. It is also quite simple, using pure science, to prove that new life begins at conception. How anyone can argue that fact, is beyond my understanding. I guess they are just nit-wits. I am thankful that Biden picked a black woman for the Supreme Court. Once she looks into the numbers and learns that black lives have been aborted in the US at 5 times the rate as whites, she will likely get onboard with overturning Roe v Wade. ALL lives matter.

The Spring Bock is the darkest I have. Maybe, I will bring a Negra home, when we visit the in-laws, over Easter. That way, I can try a one to one comparison, changing just one variable. This guy had a long neck. The shot was far back, and no “finisher” was required, so there was no damage on it. I made two decent-sized neck roasts from him: The neck roasts have become one of my favorite cuts. I rank them just below the backstraps. If I need any more “finishers”, they will be to the head, on an antlerless deer, or center-lung on a buck (so I don’t mess up the euro).

That’s my go to. Had one for lunch with angus heart:

That’s my plan for next weekend. Neck roast and Spring Bock in crock pot.