Cold, Snow, Repairs, Campaigns, Barn Cleaning...And It Goes On and On...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well here we are now…How special…More SNOW! They are telling us that on Wednesday we might have rain, but Wednesday evening the temperature will again fall into the single digits (around 7°) so they say…and on Thursday, we will again get snow. They say possibly 1-3” or 5” at the most, but I don’t trust them to tell me what day yesterday was. It seems they guess and then change it by the day, so why even forecast the weather…why not just wait and then report on what it is doing? At least when they say it is snowing and we look out the window and see snow, we can say, “Yep…it sure is snowing…just like they said it was!” At least that would be something. We’ll get everything ready for the worst today, including putting another round bale into the animals.

 

My KickStarter project took off last evening and is now live and ready to accept funding. It is a humanitarian effort to use my skills to produce 18^th century spinning wheels right here on the farm, at really affordable prices so young spinners will be able to buy one. It will be my small contribution toward helping young and old alike to afford a wheel and helping to preserve a part of our heritage that was actually performed by our ancestors on a daily basis years ago in making their own clothes. Check my project out at this site: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1315338287/affordable-spinning-wheels-spinning-back-to-self-r or Skip’s Spinning Wheel Project Either link will work. There are some neat gifts for donors. Help if you can…we’ll all win when we help each other.
I didn’t get to work on the glue press last evening like I planned. The pellet stove quit working and kept jamming the auger, or overflowing the fire pot with pellets. I originally thought the auger was probably jamming, which indicates bad bearings, which we’ve experienced before. When we got home, it was off again, so I again un-jammed the auger, removed all the pellets and removed the auger drive motor, getting ready to pull the hopper off and remove the auger to replace those bearings. As soon as I had the motor off and purges the tube of all pellets, it was obvious that the bearings were good and didn’t need replaced. It dawned on me at that point that perhaps the clogged condition was snuffing out the flame and the pellets were then overfilling the firepot and jamming the auger when the pellets backed up the tube. I removed a ton of soot and ashes from the exhaust pipe, which you can see in the picture. That seemed to do the trick and it has run all evening long and was still running this morning. You can see in the pictures the pipe was completely plugged, so when I vacuumed the stove out. I got a tiny opening where it pulled soot from the exhaust until air could pass and that was all that would come out after that, so it plugged quickly again, snuffing the fire.
It was a cheap fix this time…just a few hours of my time.
Today Josh comes to clean and like I said, we will put a new round bale in the barnyard and get everything ready for substantial snowfall…and then maybe we’ll just get rain.     

 Greatest heating system ever made.....

 My bag if tools and included inside...a bag of tricks...

 A necessary piece of equipment for this job...

 This pipe was plugged solid...

 No wonder it quit working right...

 This little pipe was packed full at the blower too...

 I've completely rebuilt this unit three times in eight years...

The actual firebox of the fireplace...still pristine

 

Pray that we don't get any snow today, tomorrow or the rest of the winter and in the coming two weeks when spring arrives on the 20th...or after that either. We've had enough until next January.

 

 

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072365 Cluckin' "A" Critter Farm, LLC