The Tao of Internal Combustion Engines

I really would like to post my current projects. Unfortunately they are Christmas presents, and the recipients read this blog. Sigh. Well, I have a number of posts up my sleeve, as it were. One of them concerns the Ubiquitous Infernal Combustion Engine or UICE for short. We are all faced with these things, unless we live in apartments. At Chalupy, we boast (or deplore) a lawnmower, three tillers in various stages of disrepair, a snowblower, four chainsaws, two used frequently, and an edger or string trimmer. This does not count Vicky, my car, or Lysander the tractor. Every one of them worked fine when new. The problem is to keep them that way. So here are short and bitterly learned lessons on keeping these UICEs going.

First, a bit of Taxonomy, or classification if you prefer a more common word. All UICEs fall into two big classes:

1. Two-cycle engines. Here the gasoline is mixed in with the oil.
   
2. Four-cycle engines. Oil is in one place, fuel in another.

Examples of two-cycle or two-stroke angines are chainsaws and trimmers. For four-cycle engines anything else goes, e.g. cars, most tillers, and lawnmowers. The Tao is a little different for each type.

There are likewise two big cycles in the Tao of UICEs:

1. The fall cycle: putting away the stuff that is no good in winter (e.g. lawnmower).
2. The spring cycle: prepping the stuff you will use in summer, again e.g. lawnmower.

In this post I will concentrate on the fall cycle. Let's put stuff away for winter here. There is a simple Golden Rule that will keep your contraption running much longer than other people's: drain the gas out of the engine. Not too complicated a rule, eh? But how do you do it? If you are clever and know your, say, lawnmower, you will contrive to mow the last blade of grass just as the mower coughs and runs out of gasoline. If not, you will have to siphon the gas out of the machine. Fortunately, auto parts stores sell siphon pumps for just this purpose. Plastic contraptions with a squeeze-bulb that allows you to suck (most of) the gas out. Then start the blasted thing and let it run dry. If you do not do this, your gas will turn to jelly over the winter and the machine will not start in the spring.

The second sound rule is to stabilize your gas. This is indispensable for anyone who lives in a cold climate. Gasoline has a very limited lifetime, about three months from the time you buy it. So you add some obscure chemical to it, and it lasts a year. Essential for snowblowers, and really, really good for everything else. I buy some stuff called Sta-bil, because I can get it at the Willow hardware store. Stabilizers are said to keep gas from turning to jelly. Maybe so. I prefer to run my machine dry anyway. You add it according to directions on the container. I buy gas in 5-gallon lots (20 liters). I put the proper amount of Sta-bil into the 5 gallon container before I fill it up, and let the trip home shake it well.

If you have a two-cycle engine (e.g. edger or chainsaw), get rid of the gas before storing and that's it. My chainsaws live indoors in winter and always use stabilized gas.

And a special word about snowblowers. These UICEs are unusual because they have to run in the winter. So the cycles are completely reversed. You drain the gas in spring and in the fall you do the spring thing. What's the spring thing? I'll get to that next spring, I hope. If anyone really wants to know, right this instant, do the unusual: drop a comment! I will do a quick rundown for you.

The Alaska PFD

I have to get in the habit of reading comments! There usually aren't many, but I missed one by Sean on the PFD (sorry, Sean). Well, it is almost PFD time, so it's time for a post on the subject.

The PFD stands for the Alaska Personal Dividend Fund. It is a fund -- a very large fund -- set aside by the State of Alaska. Every year, the earnings of the fund are distributed equally between all qualified Alaskans. This includes children, so a family of four would get four dividends. Last year, the dividend was about $1600, a fair chunk of change. I doubt that it will be so large this year! You can get all the details by Googling "Alaska PFD."

This is a unique arrangement. We owe it in large part to the efforts of the late Governor Jay Hammond. Hammond was a fighter pilot, bush pilot, commercial fisherman, biologist and a "bush rat," i.e. he lived in the bush when he wasn't in the Legislature or being Governor. He claimed that he hoped to be defeated in every election he stood for, because then he could get back to Lake Clark and his cabin.
He wrote several books, Tales of Alaska's Bush Rat Governor comes to mind. It is an amusing and thoughtful collection of Jay Hammond's ramblings.

In this book, Hammond relates that he was in Bristol Bay when the fishing was a bonanza. What to do with all that money? Hammond advocated setting a chunk of it aside, as a fund for hard times. He was voted down, and Bristol Bay built a gymnasium with swimming pool. Soon after that, fishing went kaput, and Bristol Bay had a pool, but no income. So when Hammond got to be Governor. he leaned on everyone until Alaska took a big chunk of its petrodollars and set up the PFD.

The politicians hate the PFD. They would rather spend it. Bristol Bay redux. I will not go into this because this blog is not, repeat not, a political blog.

Miniatures again

Astronomically, winter is still some ways away. But this is Alaska. Early morning temperatures below freezing. Time to move indoors and do winter projects. It is time to work on Christmas presents. Unfortunately I cannot mention the subject in full, because the recipient is all too likely to be reading this. So let us say that it is a miniature of my future woodshed, which happens to be true! It is not the done thing to tell lies on a blog. The woodshed is held together by mortise-and tenon joints. So after some trial and error, I decided I needed a new mortising chisel.
So off to the microforge, and out came a 3.5mm chisel, seen stuck into a future mortise. The calipers at the left are 80mm long, to give you the scale. The chisel turned out at 3.7mm but I do not mind this; too loose is much better than too narrow!

I am using round pieces of wood for the woodshed. I could square them. That is a lot of work. The "logs" are prunings from my lilac tree (no bush, that one; it is as tall as the house!) and from ditto Japanese Maple. The lilac has a nasty pith; Japanese Maple is better. But one's prunings are what they are; selection is limited. Anyway, it is useful to have a centerline on the "logs" and thereby hangs a tale. In real life, you take a chalk line or a Japanese india ink line and snap it. I spent a whole morning trying to duplicate this system. I used sewing thread for a line, a pin to anchor the works, and tried inking and snapping. Alas, my ink is alcohol-based and dries much too fast. Plus snapping -- well, your fingers are not to scale. Very difficult to snap a 10-cm thread. In the end, I went to water color on the thread, and rubbed the thread with a chisel instead of snapping.
You can just see the thread, you can easily see the brush I used to color the line, and the line down the log. Now, I can line my tenons up. If you don't have a reference line it is all to easy to get the tenons out of line. Then they don't fit the mortises, or if they do, the thing ain't coplanar. The shed consists of two "sides" which are called bents in the trade. They will be tied together by two beams. I have to think as to how I will do this.

I microforged a couple of holdfasts, seen above, and cobbled up supports for the log from a split birch twig. I have to say that microforging is wondeful. Need a tool? Make it! Harder, of course, at full scale.

Airplanes next door

Within easy walking distance from home is Vera Lake. It is a curious lake, because it has a more or less circular bottom and a more or less elliptical top, connected by a narrow channel. Two floatplanes seem to live in the bottom of the lake. The other day I walked by and heard the familiar sound of an engine starting. I dashed to the end of the lake, and sure enough, a floatplane.
The plane cruised the lake at idle; the pilot is warming up the engine. The channel connecting the lake bottom and top is right by the plane's tail. Mr plane passed close by.
Eventually, he warmed up, so he did a circular turn, pointed to the channel, and off we go into the wild blue yonder.
Sorry about the blur, the light (bad) was too much for autofocus/autoprogram. I find it hard to believe that something that big and clumsy can fly, but fly it did. It gets up on the step in the floats, friction is cut way down, and it takes off.

Airplanes on the lake are usually a summer phenomenon, but it hasn't been that cold, so Mr Plane took advantage. Half an hour to Anchorage at most, it's only 35 Km away as the plane flies. This is very Alaska; floatplanes in the backyard.

Termination Dust

In the old days of Alaska, there was gold mining and little else. The sourdoughs, as the old prospectors were called (what we call "newbies" were called cheechakos) would work a claim, panning or placer according to your means; it was all well as long as nuggets came out in the wash, as it were. But sooner or later you would get nothing but a thin sprinkling of gold dust. This meant your claim was worked out; the dust was called termination dust. No more gold; time to go somewhere else.

In modern Alaska, the term "termination dust" now means the first snowfall on the mountaintops. Fall is officially finito. Today I drove down to big Lake to do some grocery shopping; as I drove over the hill there it was -- termination dust. The storm that put it there didn't have enough horsepower (or wattage, if you prefer) to push over the mountains, but it left a new coat of snow. It means winter is here. Having put the snow tires on the car yesterday, I have completed the essential chores. I only regret I didn't take a picture -- I even had the camera, but didn't think of it. Blast. Maybe tomorrow I can return and do the picture.

Added next day: I did.
The light was awful -- flat and washed out. But you can see the Chugach mountains south of me. This was taken from about mile 60 on the Parks highway, which connects Wasilla with Fairbanks. My new camera needs a while to focus and the shot is not so good, but at least you can see t6he dust on the mountains!

Equinox is here. Clean up the garden.

The autumnal equinox -- the day the sun crosses the equator on its way south -- came and went. (Yes, I know. The Earth revolves around the sun. But if you have only two bodies, it doesn't much matter who revolves around whom. Much of the literature has the sun revolving around the earth!) The sun crosses the equator on Sept 21 -- by tradition, but it is somewhere between 21-22 March. However, the next day it froze. Not much a frost, to be sure, -0.5C. But Uh-oh, time to finish up in the garden. So we went out with the scythe and got the oats.
With Maximilian the scythe in good form, it took less than ten minutes to get it all cut. Then we raked it up and put it in a container:
It was a pound of oat seeds, "naked oats" (or avens nuda to latinists) to begin with. It is not commonly grown in Alaska, which surprisingly is a good place to grow oats. But you don't have to hull it, and I have no machinery, so it appealed to me. We will see. I haven't flailed it yet, but I think we will barely break even. I am following Gene Logsdon's Small Scale Grain Raising book (google!). Next year we may do a better variety for Alaska. I will then be faced with the problem of hulling my oats. In the old days, oat-hullers could be bought quite cheaply; nowadays they are really hard to come by. Nowadays, they are still built, but for astounding prices, like $1000 a copy. Grrr.

In Italy, there are a great number of small-scale farms. So appropriately scaled machinery is still made. Just google "walk-behind tractor" and you will see what I mean: all Italian. But by the time you import it into this country it is prohibitively expensive. So stuff you could buy reasonably from a 1905 Sears Roebuck catalog is deader than a dodo. Dear me, I suppose I am ranting. So be it. It's my blog. But just try to find, for example, a hand-operated shredder (leaves, kitchen scraps, and garden wastes). It pays to shred before you dump it on the compost heap. But a chipper-shredder with YAICE (Yet Another Internal Combustion Engine) is upwards of $1500. Far too much. And too many Internal Combustion Engines at Chalupy anyway.

There is hope, however. There is a wonderful magazine called Backwoods Home
In one of their issues, an ingenious gentleman by the name of Rev. J.D. Hooker takes a lawnmower and converts it into a shredder. You frequently find inoperative lawnmowers at yard sales really cheap. Usually a spark plug replacement is all they need. So next year...

And my daughter came out and helped me with a great number of chores that require more than two hands, and sometimes more than two brains. So we pulled some of the leeks and all the parsnips:
The leeks should be left to overwinter (covered, of course). But we pulled some anyway, and they were great. We put them into the by-now-traditional fall borscht. Borscht could well be called "harvest stew" -- wonderful stuff, especially with sour cream.

And the minimum temperature next day was -4C. This harvest was what the computerniks call JIT (Just in Time).

A capital ship/ for an ocean trip...

Well, no, it isn't the Walloping Window Blind, as the song goes. And we're not going out on the ocean. But my trusty kayak, Mi Gaviota has spent all summer sitting around, because it has been much too rainy for kayak jaunts. But we have this sort-of-strange spell of good weather, so I put the kayak up on the car and off to Little Lonely Lake.
Miss G. is a Folbot Aleut, derived from a German tradition of folding kayaks. In German, Faltbot, or folding boat. She will come apart and fit into a package that could be put on a bush plane. You can still get Faltbote in Germany. The Rolls-Royce (or Mercedes-Benz, if you prefer) of folding kayaks are the Klepper series, made out of wood -- a marvellous (and very expensive) series. Kleppers have crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Folbot is a South Carolina outfit, and they make very well-engineered models. Perhaps a Ford, but a good kayak nevertheless, and extremely stable. Most kayaks, alas, are very narrow beam -- 60cm or less. Miss G is almost impossible to upset. This saves you from many an Eskimo roll. At my age, I think it wise to pass on the rolls. Anyway, Miss G has been out on the Inland Passage in Juneau many a time. She never shipped a drop of water. Slow, perhaps. In a headwind very difficult. But safe.
Being a weekday, there is no one on LL Lake. We can get into the shore, because we draw less than 15 cm of water loaded down. Lovely fall colors. There are houses on the lakefront; the satellite antenna looms on the left.
Some of the lakefront houses (all of them, in fact) have docks and assorted craft attached. Miss G slips on by them. We turn toward the uninhabited side of the lake.
At this point I rigged up my fly rod (in vain, as it turned out). This makes it much harder to take pictures. You have the paddle, the fly rod, the wind, the chop, and the camera; it takes six hands. But it's fun. It's quiet. The sun is shining. Can't ask for more. Well, maybe a bite on the fly! So eventually we head for the put-in place.
Note the fly rod. Note the complete absence of fish. Oh well, you can't have everything. A kayak is far from an ideal fishing vehicle; it takes both hands to do the paddle. You are quite cramped, and I always wonder how the Aleuts and the Inuit did it!

Eventually we get back to the put-in place, manhandle 20 Kilos of kayak up on the car, and drive a few minutes home. A wonderful day in the sun, even if we caught no fish. And Miss G is happy -- back in her element again.

The barometer falleth. We may not have a day like this until next year.