I can tell you why I fell in a 3 page essay. :confused3: But best I can say is be careful. :thumbsup:
Ron, I hope you're alright as can be. I watched a lot of news videos of cars sliding, people slipping, and wreck after wreck the last couple of days. Seems this storm caught many offguard.
I need to go get diesel. I saw it in Bastrop Texas for $2.79/gallon. Many places it is still over $3/gallon. My buddy and I have noticed that this year, diesel is staying about $.70 - .90 cents a gallon higher than regular gas. It used to fluctuate lower, and higher than regular, but the last 10 years or so, it seemed to be maybe $.35 per gallon more. I told him I wish I had a gasoline powered tractor too.
So my daughter's 8th grade science class had a "balloon powered car" competition. All of the materials for building it were her idea. She wanted foam for the body, picked some 5 mm x 220mm wooden dowels, and last but not least, she chose mason jar lids for wheels. Not the whole lid, but the 2 part ring and lid type where we just used the lid part. Walmart had them in the 2.75" diameter size. So she told me to saw the basic shape of the car foam body on the bandsaw. Now comes the advantage part of having a machinist for a dad. I took the lids and dowels to work and drilled a hole for the axle "push pins" to fit through. I had just the right sized drill, and used my 6 jaw chuck on the lathe to grasp the lids and drill the hole very close to true center. I then drilled some undersized holes in the ends of the wooden dowels, so that the push pins would be a light press fit. Also put the car's foam body in the mill to drill the axle through holes as true as possible. She painted the body and I showed her how to assemble the wheels and pins for the least amount of friction. I also had a 6" piece of 10mm diameter nylon tubing that I heated and bent a curl on one end. We used some orings to connect the balloons. She told me the teacher says they could use 2 balloons. Since we only had 1 tube, I said we would put 1 balloon inside the other for more flow. After some different tube configuration testing we settled on the best and then took the car apart for transport to school. She put her car on a shelf in the science class when she got to school, and some boy stole her wheels and axles when she was in another class. It was found out that he took them, and she was able to get them back and complete her first day's competition. I went up to the school and complained that the kid should be in some form of trouble or another, and they said they would handle it. But my daughter doesn't believe they did anything to the punk. Anyway, she won the first days initial competition, and then the 2nd day's she said she won by even larger margins. So she ended up winning the fastest, the furthest, and the best looking by the class's vote.
I'm planning on teaching her to drive my 4310 tractor today, so she can help me mow. She's very mature, will stay clear of obstacles, and has been driving the riding mower for 2 years now.
RNG, I'm guessing there will be a shortage of N95 masks, so use them until you can't stand them before you throw them away. So sad about all the deceased and missing. What a horrible catastrophe. I remember the Japanese sent over balloons, hoping to start such fires. I'm still so glad you took so many precautions with fire prepping your land/home. Maybe a good reason to build a pool and have an automated fire suppression sprinkler system around the home. Sadly, not much left to burn. And we were worried about dam's breaking and earthquakes prior to this.....
Don, the war on weeds is a difficult situation that has manifested itself to GMO herbicide resistant varieties. I was told early on that roundup was in the chemical family Getting more and more bushels per acre has driven the ag industry to these extremes. There are no easy answers for this. And hay farmers put all kinds of chemicals on their fields to kill weeds too. Which ends up in meat, and Drew's garden. But some of the weeds have toxicities and need to be curtailed from getting harvested with the crop, so what do you do? Then, top it all off with the use of pesticides and we really have some bad stuff going in our bodies. I eat Oat cereal daily, and don't buy any special stuff, so who knows what will happen...
Have a blessed day all.
