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The plan was to skip my usual Saturday night restaurant meal and dine at home. But life is the stuff that happens while you're making other plans. Today's project was installing a switch on the end of the kitchen cabinet for the sink light. It took so long that by chow time the counter and the table were still covered by tools and other clutter. I didn't want to put everything away because I have more of the job to do, so I went to La Fiesta and had tasty enchiladas supremas and frijoles refritos. One thing that made for slow going today was that sometime in the past hundred years or so some boob with a brush painted over the switch and I had to scrape the old paint off the buttons. As things stand now the switch is installed and controls the sink light. The light beside the switch still has its own separate cord plugged into the outlet over the stove. Tomorrow I'll wire it to the sink light switch and both lights will be on the same switch powered by a single cord. Eventually I plan to install a new ceiling. Part of that project will be installing a line above the ceiling and down through the cabinet to feed those lights. Another part of that project will be a third light over the stove, also on the same switch. Will that be too many lights on a single line? No. All will be LED and will draw a small fraction of the current used by incandescent lights.

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Done. Today's project was connecting the light on the end of the cabinet to the same switch that controls the sink light. Now they both operate on a single cord plugged in above the stove. With that adventure over I went to town for groceries, which included cereal. My current routine includes four breakfast cereals in rotation: raisin bran, rolled oats, granola, and rice, plus a daily apple. As a kid I always hated cooked cereals, and as soon as I started making my own choices of what to eat I made them a thing of my past. I found them all repulsive, but rice was especially bad, and Cream of Wheat was even worse — the most stomach-turning of all. In fact I remember one occasion when I was nine when it actually made me upchuck. Mom was mad at me, as if I'd actually done it on purpose. I really didn't. The stuff was just so repulsive that it made me sick. But recently it occurred to me that I eat rice with Chinese and Korean food, and it's fine. So why were rice and other cooked cereals so repulsive for breakfast? Milk and sugar. They were always served with milk and sugar on them. That's what made the vomitous combination. So I tried oats with butter, salt and pepper. It was good. Rice the same way, with butter, salt, and pepper, was also good. So I added both of them to my breakfast rotation. I'm thinking maybe I'll even try some Cream of Wheat.

Monday, April 5, 2021

The name of the game today was spark plugs. I had intended to send a friend some Splitdorf plugs in exchange for Edison plugs, but when I put them in the tester I found that they weren't up to snuff. So I'm doing a bit of a restoration job on them to see if I can make them work the way they should, with a good strong spark under compression. Restoration includes derusting, cleaning, removing carbon, bluing the metal, and gapping. I've been running a set of these plugs in my runabout, and I assumed the extras were just as good. They weren't, and I'm going to see if I can make it so. On the optical/medical front, it seems that recovery from last Wednesday's right eye cataract removal is progressing nicely. Vision in the left eye is still improved a little by my regular glasses, but on the right side I see a little better without them. Overall, I now see better without the glasses than with them. But up close things get blurry. I was having trouble reading, so I blew ten bucks on some 3X reading glasses. Now I can once again read the paper and do the puzzles. It's just a little inconvenient to have to keep taking glasses off and putting them on. I'm to see the eye doc again in late May, I assume to see how things have stabilized, and after that I'll get a new prescription for the bifocals and resume putting on glasses when I get up and taking them off when I go to bed.

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Well, good for me. I finished another job today. Those spark plugs are done. I posted the story and photos on the Model T forum.

Wednesday, April7, 2021

Last fire of the season? It was a chilly day with an evening sprinkle, and I lit fires in the kitchen stove and the living room fireplace. A lot of trash went into the fireplace, and that may have been the last trash burning until next fall. During the warm months when I don't need heat in the house, paper trash goes to a burn barrel in the back yard. The forecast shows highs in the sixties and seventies for ten days, but those are low sixties next week, so there may still be a few more evenings chilly enough for a fire in the kitchen at chow time.

Thursday, April 8, 2021

A week after cataract surgery, once again I was up early and off to Wichita. This was check-up day. The doc said the eye is recovering well. In late May I'll go back for another check, then I'll get a new prescription. Since the surgery my vision is a little better without glasses than with them, except up close. With bifocals, I've never had to use reading glasses, which I'm finding annoyingly inconvenient. I put them on to read, then take them off and forget where I left them. I'll be glad to get back to bifocals. I put them on in the morning and forget about them until bedtime when I take them off. Today the doc lifted my restrictions on physical exertion, so I can lift as much as my old feeble self is able to lift.

Friday, April 9, 2021

For well over a century, electric switches and outlets have used 6-32 slotted pan head brass terminal screws. Those sometimes get lost, and local hardware stores are likely not to have them. So yesterday I found them on the Fastenal website and got the SKU, went to the local Fastenal store and ordered fifty of them, and picked them up today. That many will probably be more than a lifetime supply. So now I have replacements for the switch parts that are often lost—terminal screws and plate screws. I replaced three terminal screws that were missing from a couple of switches, which I put into the box of switches that will wait on the shelf until the next time I need one. With that little task out of the way I turned to spark plugs. I finished sorting and counting them, updated the inventory, and put the boxes back on the shelf. I'll print a copy of the inventory and take it with me to meets so I'll know what I already have or don't have. I'm up to my eyeballs in Champion X plugs, which were original equipment on Model T Fords, but I want to assemble a few full sets and spares of other brands that were used in the Model T era. If you're curious about Ford's original X plugs used in the teens and twenties, I have a page about them here. One other thing I did today was an inspection tour of the wood lot roads. The swampy areas have dried a little, but not much. The thought has occurred to me that I could corduroy the boggy sections of road with hedge logs, but it would be such a big, time-consuming job that I really don't want to do it. For now I'll just wait and hope that there's enough dry weather to make the roads passable in a month or two.

Saturday, April 10, 2021

What a lazy bum! But eventually I did tear myself away from the internet and get a little work done. I got back to the magneto post contact for my runabout. The material I have isn't thick enough to make it of one piece, so I had to make two pieces and glue them together. I'm leaving them clamped in a vise overnight while the glue sets. Another little job today was short but influential. I taped a cord on my reading glasses so I won't set them down and lose them every time I take them off.

Kirk B. Jelf driving his Dodge through a Sequoia in 1937. Today would be his 118th birthday. Ah, the questions I should have asked...

When he came back from Aruba in 1935 he went to Detroit and bought a new Ford at the factory to save shipping. Why is he driving a Dodge two years later? What happened to the Ford?

Sunday, April 11, 2021

In the morning I finished and installed the mag post contact. Next I need to adapt my valve spring compressor for transmission springs, then use it to install the transmission cover. Then the engine will go in the car.

After a trip to town for cucumbers and tomatoes, my afternoon project was putting the mower back on my mowing tractor. I got the mount bolted on, but still need to drag the mower underneath and attach it to the mount. There's a lot of mowing to do, but I will need to get a lot of fallen branches out of the way. Winter storms left several piles of them to cut up and haul away.

Monday, April 12, 2021

Today's main chore was reinstalling the mower on the mowing tractor. I didn't finish. Taking time in the morning for researching a future project (replacing an old water line), I got a late start. Then I had to go to town to get a replacement for a lost hitch pin and a couple of clips. By quitting time I had dragged the mower under the tractor and installed two of the pins, with two left to go. But I also discovered a piece of the mower hardware that is badly cracked. Tomorrow I'll have to remove it, take it to the shop and weld it up, and reinstall it. The final step will be installing and adjusting the belt. Then I will mow. Along with the digital picture above, I also took a shot on film. I still do that on the theory that digital pictures may turn out to be much more ephemeral than photos on film. We have film photos well over a century old that look like they did when new. I don't fully trust digital images to be that stable.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Who was that woman? I recall some classic dreams, some going back to when I was three, but it seems that in recent years I don't remember many when I wake up. Well, this morning I did remember the one I had last night. I was downstairs in the kitchen, and somebody was with me. It was either Mom or her sister Ernestine. Mom didn't live here after 1936, so it was probably Ernestine. I noticed that the cabinet over the sink had been removed, and she told me she had hired a contractor to redo the kitchen. I said, "Oh, please don't make it modern." I suppose a psychologist might find some deep meaning in that, but I think it probably just means I prefer old styles over new.

This morning somebody posted the ever-recurring question on one of the Facebook Model T pages: What kind of oil should I use? That always gets quite a variety of answers. One of my website pages deals with that question, so I posted a link. But I thought of more, so I spent a good chunk of the morning updating the page with additional information and pictures, and rearranging the layout.

I the afternoon I got back to installing the mower on the Allis. In theory that shouldn't take long, but with time out to look for the pry bar I was using yesterday (never did find it), get a couple of little bottle jacks working, fetch parts, etc., I didn't finish until 4:30. I put gas in the tractor and drove it around to the shop, mowing a swath as I went. The mower worked fairly well, but tomorrow I'll need to adjust it to make it more level.

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

For many years it's been my custom to go to town Saturday nights for a restaurant meal and a movie. Very rarely I would skip the movie because there was nothing I wanted to see. After a pandemic year of Saturday nights at home, last month I had received my Covid shots and resumed the practice. I've had five restaurant meals, but I have been to only one movie. Not only have most of the movies showing been ones I wanted to miss, it seems there are fewer of them. I checked the theater website this morning, and all the pictures showing this week will be the same ones I skipped last week.

As planned, today I adjusted the mower a notch lower in the rear. I'll find out when I use it whether that was enough. I also greased the tractor and mower, which involved one of the things I detest most: trying to get a balky grease gun to work. I finally accepted defeat, gave up on that one, and used another one that actually works. After grocery shopping I was going to mow along the road by the west field. But there was so much trash to pick up that I didn't even finish that before quitting time. If the falling weather holds off, I'll get in some mowing tomorrow.

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Never went off the place today. As planned, I finished picking up trash along the road and mowed there. Actually a lot of the grass wasn't tall enough to need mowing yet, but there were enough taller patches for me to hit them now. I also hit the yard behind the shop with clippers and Tordon and removed a lot of little trees there, then mowed. It's nice to have all three mowers working again. The Allis B is for the big areas, the Dixon ZTR is for smaller spaces, along edges, and around trees, and the push mower is for banks too steep for the Allis or the Dixon. With chilly and wet weather in the forecast, I made up half a dozen bags of kindling and put them in the kitchen, laid fires for this evening, and put the big tarp over the kindling pile east of the house. Finally I put away stuff I didn't want to get rained on, then took a walk in the wood lot to see how the roads are. The boggy areas are still boggy, but I was surprised at how much has dried out in the past week. But I'm afraid tomorrow will wipe out the progress. It looks like the storm will be an all-day soaker. I know there will be rain storms all spring and summer, but I hope there will be enough dry weather between them to lower the water table and let those wood lot roads become driveable again.

Friday, April 16, 2021

The rain went on most of the day, and amounted to .75". I worked in my office, updating my Model T oil web page. What kind of oil to use is a question often asked online by new T owners, and always gets a flood of varying answers. Rather than retyping my long answer every time, I just post a link to the page. It occurred to me that I should add a title photo that will show up with the link when I post it on Facebook. I knew exactly what I should use for the photo — a rack of vintage oil bottles. When I put it away in the barn many years ago I put it in a plastic trash bag to keep it clean. When I went to fetch it today I found that the bag had disintegrated long ago. The rack and all the bottles were covered with dust and leaves that had blown in, and the spouts had developed a lot of surface rust. So I cleaned off the dust and leaves and put the spouts to soak in rust removers. I had enough Evaporust to cover four of them, and the other four went into the molasses tub.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Work on oil bottles continued. The old cork gaskets were falling apart, so I made new ones from rubberized cork. I rinsed the derusted spouts and caps and treated them with metal prep to prevent more rust. Finally I photographed the refurbished rack of bottles and posted the title photo on the oil page. This being Saturday it was eat-in-town night. I enjoyed a good stuffing at the Pizza Ranch buffet.

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Laundry and yard work day. For several years I have been solar drying the wash on a clothesline strung between the swing and the big old walnut tree in the back yard. After a few years, the first line I put up deteriorated and recently broke. I replaced it with a woven cord also designated as clothes line, and it's unsatisfactory. The weight of wet laundry stretches it so much that some of the clothes reach the ground. So I plan to set up a proper clothes line with steel poles and wire that won't sag. Today's yard work was gathering the many branches knocked down by winter storms and putting them in a couple of piles. One pile is east of the house, and I'll have to mow around it until I get rid of it. The pile west of the house is where I won't mow until May, after the poppies have bloomed and gone to seed.

Monday, April 19, 2021

It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. The forecast says winter will return tomorrow, with lows near or below freezing and highs in the low fifties. I got a start on that new clothes line today, buying a roll of 9 gauge galvanized wire and eight eye bolts. The rest will be stuff I already had on hand — some heavy pipe from the scrap pile and a ten foot stick of 1" galvanized pipe. I cut the ten footer for two five-foot cross pieces and drilled them for the eye bolts, and got started on grinding the top ends of the uprights to prepare them for welding on the cross pieces. I should get the welding done tomorrow, but I don't know if I'll do the installation in the back yard. That depends on what the weather is and how I feel about it.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Well, I got the cross pieces welded on top of the uprights, but I still have to put the anchors on the bottom to keep the things from leaning after I plant them. Once again, everything takes longer than you think it will.

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Getting closer to the finish, but I'm not there yet. Today I used a die grinder on some of the bolt holes in the cross pieces because I didn't get them quite straight, and I welded the anchor and braces on the bottom of one upright. Tomorrow I'll weld the anchor and braces on the other pole, and if time permits I'll sand blast the welded parts clean and shoot some Rustoleum on them. Blasting is outdoor work. so if I don't get to it tomorrow I'll have to wait a couple of days. The forecast says Friday will be wet.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Two things done! Well, almost done. I finished building those clothes line poles and set them out in front of the shop. Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy, so I plan to blast them and paint them Saturday, and perhaps get them in the ground Sunday. The other almost finished job today was one that's been waiting for many years. Sometimes the valves on oxygen and acetylene bottles are awfully hard to turn. So today while I was still in welding mode I made a valve-turning wrench. One end fits a handle with five knobs and the other end fits a handle with eight. It has holes for a quarter-inch rod to serve as a lever. I'm out of that size rod, so I'll go shopping for it in the morning.

Friday, April 23, 2021

I went to Winfield and bought cold-rolled round stock to keep in the shop for projects. I got 6' of 1/4", 6' of 5/16", and 6' of 3/8". I used eight inches of the 1/4" to make a handle for my new gas bottle wrench, so that project is done.

Saturday, April 24, 2021

Another little project finished. This one was adapting my home made valve spring compressor to fit transmission pedal springs. I was going to go ahead and install the hogshead but I decided to wait and have a welding shop fill a stripped out hole so I can redrill and tap it anew. I'll call a shop Monday. I'd do the operation myself if the patient was cast iron, but I have no experience welding aluminum and don't want to learn on this job.

Tonight's stuffing in town was at the Chinese buffet which reopened for walk-in dining this week. It was nice to have some hot and sour soup and their other goodies after a year without.

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Sandblasting is outdoor work, so it's dependent on weather. Today I set up the equipment for the first time since last fall and blasted the welded parts of my new clothesline poles. That didn't amount to much. The poles are galvanized pipe, so all that needs to be blasted and painted is the small area on each where welding removed the galvanizing. While I was at it I blasted the exhaust manifold for the runabout. I should have had that car back together and running by now, but I've been spending so much of my time on other things that work on the old cars has taken a back seat.

Monday, April 26, 2021

Two old sayings come to mind: I bit off more than I could chew, and Oh! My aching back! I foolishly thought I would get those two clothesline poles in the ground in the morning and spend the afternoon planting my seedlings from the Arbor Day Foundation. But in my advanced stage of elderliness I am not the ditch digger I once was. It took all day to get just the first pole in the ground. In the afternoon I took about an hour off to take my transmission cover to a welding shop in Winfield and have that stripped out hole filled so I can redrill and tap it. Then I came back and dug until chow time. After dinner, about seven, I finished digging, planted the pole, and started shoveling dirt back into the hole. I finished up at sundown, a little after eight. So this evening I am pooped, and I expect I will be sore in the morning. I think I will plant seedlings tomorrow and rest a couple of days before I tackle that second pole.

This was the day the uniform of the day changed from flannel to the lighter weight shirt of the warm months. The flannel shirts will return with the chilly days of fall. The wool cap of winter gives way to the straw hat of warmer weather.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

A post hole digger make the right sized hole.

Red oak tag.

Each seedling gets two gallons to help it settle in.

Old electric fence poles mark each spot.

Almost all day I planted seedlings. They are American Redbud, Colorado Blue Spruce, Pin Oak, Red Maple, Red Oak, River Birch, Silver Maple, Sugar Maple, White Flowering Dogwood, and White Pine. Next to each one I put an old electric fence rod to mark the spot. On each rod there's a metal tag to identify the tree and a plastic bag to make it easy to spot from a distance. The redbud went beside the lane, which I'm lining with redbuds on both sides. In a few years it will be a nice display in early April. I scattered the rest in various places around the wood lot. I won't be here when they're fully grown trees, but somebody else may enjoy them. I got the fifth tree in the ground at noon, and the tenth about four. I walked back up to the house and put the tools away, then took care of a couple of things that needed to be done before the predicted rain arrives. One was moving a little loose dirt remaining from yesterday's pole installation, putting it on the filled-in ditch to settle, and the other was collecting and sifting sand off the blasting tarp, and folding and putting away the tarp until the next blasting job. Now, bring on the rain.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

While rain fell and left an inch in the gauge, I spent the day in the shop repairing and installing the hogshead. Photos are here.

Thursday, April 29, 2021

Time flies when you're having fun. And where does it fly? Dunno, but it sure does. I worked on the runabout some more today, and accomplished amazingly little. I installed the fourth main (ball cap) and the inspection cover, then somebody on the Model T forum pointed out that I hadn't safety wired the six bolts on the back of the transmission, so I had to take the cover back off and wire the bolts. I don't know why I unwired them in the first place. Anyway, that job is done and I should get the engine back in the car tomorrow or Saturday. Then I have to sew the floppy top to remove some slack, pull the rear axle and fix a leak, finish fixing and reinstalling the windshield, figure out some kind of tail lights and turn signals, and a few other little odds and ends. Considering how much there is to do, I guess I'll be happy if I get it all done before summer.

Friday, April 30, 2021

A Model T oil pan supports both the engine and the transmission. Carrying all that weight, sometimes over rough roads, it's not unusual for a pan to be slightly bent in the middle. That causes the crank shaft to flex, leading to metal fatigue and eventually a broken crank. So a good engine/transmission rebuild always includes pan straightening. There are aftermarket braces that bolt on where the engine and transmission come together to reinforce the pan and prevent bending. I have pair of those braces for the runabout, but to put them on I need longer bolts than the normal pan bolts. So today's project was buying and preparing bolts. Preparation includes drilling holes for cotter pins, grinding the modern markings off the heads and buffing, stripping off the cad plating with muriatic acid so the paint will stick, and painting. The bolts will bake in the oven overnight, and I'll install the braces tomorrow.