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I have been using Sta-Lube lithium-moly grease for years. I may have changed my mind. Lucas may be worth the extra money. What do you think?

The PNW has been pretty wet with snow if you get much above sea level. They are hoping for a great ski season. Where I live it has been rainy, with 27 degrees predicted for morning. The wife's rig needs new tires. They're almost down to the wear bars and were just street tires. I'm thinking all...

I don't often pass on ads for free, but this item makes my life easier. If you have ever struggled to wire a travel trailer battery isolator, electric brake controller, inverter, and Tx radio power onto a factory battery terminal, this product is for you...

What do you do to get ready for winter? Today is the equinox, and the days are getting shorter as fast as they can. In my idle moments, which I have a bunch of, I'm making a list of things I need to get done before 1 November. - Waterproof my canvas jackets and grease my boots. - Put new tires...

What a day. We canned a bunch of tomato base, including garden vegetables. Hey, it was free produce, thanks to some gardener friends. The last canner was boiling merrily away and I decided to take the dogs for their evening walk. They vanished up the hill, and my standard poodle came back...

Loctite Stick'N Seal Extreme Conditions, Clear. Good stuff. I have used it to repair plastic refrigerator drawers, a chipped double glazed window I did not want to re-glaze. I'm going to keep some around for those times when Gorilla Glue, cyanoacrylate, and Elmer's won't do it. I am very...

Just to show I really do cut and split my own firewood, here are a couple pictures. The first one is maple in the pasture, plus some madrone that has been down long enough to bleach out. The second one is wood that fell off of trees in my yard during snowmageddon last December. There is oak...

I ran across this article this morning. Why was it not headlines in every coastal newspaper in the US? Desalination may become the default fresh water source on coastlines. https://interestingengineering.com/fluorine-nanostructures-desalinate-faster

I totally lost the "firewood for fun and exercise" thread, and wanted to post a photo of my splitting maul. It is 6 lb., fiberglass handle, and really never gets stuck in a split. All it took was a little kick in the casting on one side. I've never found another like it.

Info from the Ag press. Propane supplies are down 20% from a year ago. If you have any empty tanks, get them filled now. It may be a mild winter, with no shortages, or the supply chain may crumble again and leave you in the cold. Simple supply and demand indicates prices are going to go up...

So far, things have been pretty quiet, but farms are only surviving on federal aid and crop insurance. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article253476059.html

Roseburg Lumber, one of my largest local employers, is building a new sawmill in North Carolina. It will be called Roanoke Valley Lumber. https://www.ncconstructionnews.com/roseburg-investing-200-million-to-build-high-capacity-sawmill-in-halifax-county/ I know there are NC folks here, so I...

I thought I would start a thread on rural events. If it's not close enough to attend, at least we can find out what folks all over are doing. This one is 90 miles from my house, and darn few things are interesting enough for me to do a 180 mile round trip just to pay admission. This one is two...

A couple years ago I built a deluxe shop with room to pursue all my random hobbies. Thanks to once being a building contractor, and inheriting a bunch of tools from my machinist/blacksmith/farmer dad, I had more tools than I knew how to use. Brother-in-law already had a shop, so he got the big...

Potato Salad Research! Who knew? I decided it was potato salad weather, so peeled some potatoes. I don't like how soggy they get when I boil them up, so decided to put them in a large casserole dish and microwave them. Susan suggested I put some vinegar in the bottom of the dish to steam them...

The shed where I store my tractor does not have electricity. Parts of the year the tractor is not moved. When spring rolls around, I have to deal with a dead battery, often sulfated. Then it's jumper cables time, the battery bounces around in the field mostly discharged, the lead sulfate sheds...

Is anyone else a fan of air tools in the shop? It seems everyone is fixated on battery power nowadays, but I'm fond of air wrenches, grinders, drill motors, etc. I piped 3/4" black iron around the shop with drops over benches and tools. Air to clean out chips from the lathe, drill press and...

The fuel gauge on my L3130 has quit working. It reads empty all the time. It looks like it shares a circuit with other gauges, which are working fine. Before I pull the sender, is it common to for a sender to go bad?

I just found out I will have FIOS available at my house starting in May. There is no cell phone service at my house, so I would like to do a low power cell tower using my internet. Has anyone ever done anything like that? There's plenty of internet over a cell signal, but I can't find anything...

I just paid $120 for a 50 year old Rockwell 17" drill press. The only thing wrong with it is the switch, and it's missing the nut that sets the depth stop. There are instructions for wiring the motor for 220v on the motor plate, and for reversing the motor, so that will happen soon. The bearings...

I'm thinking of you guys in the Midwest - East who are faced with record cold temps. The stratosphere is dumping right in your laps, and it's cold up there in outer space. Here's hoping your propane evaporates, your pipes don't freeze, and your car will start. The weather this year is insane...

I have a line on a milling machine that has two 3 hp. 3-phase motors. There is no 3-phase power to my property. I have a 400 amp 1-phase service split 200 amps to the house and 200 amps to the shop. I'm looking at several solutions: - Solid State phase converters. Expensive, and you lose 1/4...

You guys have really been getting pasted the last couple of weeks. If you ever get your power back, or if you are running on a genset, tell some stories. Things must really be bad if your weather makes the news on the West Coast. Three blizzards in two weeks, and possibly another one coming? Or...

What do you guys use bacon grease for? The most common use I have is to fry bacon. I don't have one of those plates that flattens the bacon while it fries, so just scoop half a cup of bacon grease into the pan and fry bacon in that. As the edges curl, they don't lift out of the grease, so the...

Yes, having a commercial heat source in your home may seem very convenient at first glance. You just set your thermostat and forget it. The actual costs mounts quickly if you figure the cost of equipment, which has to be serviced, maintained, and occasionally replaced, plus the frustration of...

This might be handy for those of us who don't want to make the 75 mile round trip just because we stripped a thread. Caution, very earthy language, but good humored. Manly-Man Skill: Repair Stripped Threads with Nothing but a Bolt, a Wire and a Flat Bastard - YouTube

My wife and I are both 70. I'm doing fine, but her mobility is starting to suffer. She has already had knee surgery and has a hip going bad. This has limited her exercise enough that she is starting to go downhill pretty fast. With that in mind, we are remodeling one bathroom into a wheelchair...

Handy stuff. I was trying to get a shaft on the PTO spline and the old grease was all congealed. After fighting with it for about 3 minutes, I got smart and grabbed a can of Break-Free. Slid right on. I'll let you know next year how it stood up to annual congealment.

I thought this was cute. You may need to have a FB account to see it, I don't know. Carol Hansen - Love it... | Facebook

This is an old song. I first heard it about 30 years ago, but if it's new to you it's worth a listen. Water From Another Time - YouTube

I need a wood splitter, and the commercial ones with small engines seem pretty slow. I'm thinking about either buying a pre-built one or building my own out of a splitter with a bad motor. The ones I have seen on YouTube seem to run best with about a 20 gpm PTO pump. That cycles a 5" ram in...

It has been drizzling off and on for a couple of weeks, but the first autumn storm is predicted to hit the NW Coast on Thursday. They are predicting 6" of rain and winds to 80 mph. "If your grandmother can drive 65 mph through an 80 mph southwester without flinching, you are from the Oregon...

Does anyone else use a bread machine? I always found it a nuisance to have to go to town just because we were out of bread, and I never really cared for the factory sponge loaves, but I didn't care for the mixing, kneading and baking to make bread either. A few months ago I bought a bread...

The OSU extension service is presenting a workshop on building a cabin in the woods. Location is Roseburg, Oregon. They will cover permits, material costs, design features, amenities, accessories, and access/liability. Date: October 26, 2016 Time: 6:00 - 8:00 PM Cost: $15/family Registration...

I hope you can see this article. I subscribe to Capital Press, so get the online version as a part of my subscription. In short, this is an export hay compression operation that was sued by his neighbors. He prevailed under the "right to farm" laws, and promptly sued to recover $50,911 in...

I just wanted to remind folks that the pre-season wood pellet sales are about to wind up. Coastal Farm has their pellets on sale for $199.50 a ton, Bear Mountain for $204.50/ton, and Goldenfire for $209.50/ton. Pellet stoves 10% off, and a free ton of pellets with each stove or insert. Your...

I was just thinking about the number of pieces of identification that I have. There's the driver's license of course, which now requires my birth certificate to get. There's the CCP, and the passport, and the Social Security Card, which is required to get a job. Then there's the medical...

Is anyone else getting a homestead orchard started. This is not a commercial orchard, it's just fruit for us and maybe the neighbors and friends. This place had some really old fruit trees when we bought it, but they are almost on their last legs, still giving fruit but half rotten, hollow, and...

I ran across a Magnatrac the other day, and was astonished to see they are still in business. I remember seeing Magnatrac crawlers at the state fair 40 years ago. In those days, tractors were big iron, and the Magnatrac looked like a toy. The world has changed.

Does anyone else do bulk cooking on weekends? Rather than eat out, my wife and I do marathon cooking on weekends and then brown bag and microwave stuff during the week. Last night I pulled a couple of cacklers out of the freezer and stewed them up in a stock pot. This morning I started...

The compressor motor thread got me to thinking. I had a standing offer to buy a compressor with a blown motor, but it's about the same size as mine. The label says mine provides 4.6 scfm at 90 PSI, but I have never seen it. Anyway, the guy wanted $50 for a compressor with a blown motor, so I...

Due to a short peanut crop, prices are rising. You can expect peanut butter to increase in price 30% by November. You may want to stock up. M&M Peanuts too. Resers Pieces. Roasted peanuts.

With all the homes burning, it occurred to me that people who don't normally live in a wildfire area might not know what they should do to preserve their house. 1 - The first thing to do is clean your gutters. During dry weather, the duff in the bottom of the gutter turns into tinder. A single...

LightSquared telecommunications plans to build a rural broadband network using 40,000 high power transmission towers at the same frequency as GPS satellites. This will overpower the weak satellite signals, and make GPS receivers useless. Farmers fear new network may jam GPS navigation signals |...

I heard on the radio today that NAPA Gold filters are 70% off, this weekend only. I have no connection to NAPA, other than buying filters there sometimes. I don't know if the sale is nationwide, or just in Oregon.

I'm thinking of setting up a hybrid solar/wood hot water system. I'm planning an active system with low wattage circulation pumps. One loop will go to the roof solar collector, and the other loop will go to the wood stove. The storage tank will have an electric backup. I think it will give...

The thread about log houses reminded me of Dorothy Ainsworth. If you haven't seen her web site, take a look. DorothyAinsworth.com Many of the articles and photos were published in Backwoods Home Magazine.

So, how do you guys handle your fuel? I don't use that much, so I just have four 5 gallon plastic cans. I use diesel Sta-Bil in each can, since I never know when the weather will shut me down until spring. That way the tractor tank and storage cans are all stabilized. When I re-fuel, I don't...