Day 481 - Checking Boxes

PPO3 is supported by Timber King sawmills. For more information on my 1220 CRZ mill or one of many fully hydraulic options, go to timberking.com. [Music] [Music] This is one of the many I think useful items that I find on the side of the road. I find all kinds of stuff, mostly buckets. If I find a 5gallon bucket on the side of the road in a ditch somewhere, I'm stopping and I'm getting it. It's just free usable materials for your time to just simply stop and get it off the side of the road. Well, this chair was on the side of the road near someone's trash. So, thought something's probably got to be wrong with it. The base is all destroyed. It was uh you know, sitting on the ground like this side of the road near someone's trash. It's like, okay, well, it's going to have some problems. Well, it was standing up on its own, but the base is all janky. You can tell that looks like someone tried to weld it back. And I'm not going to say my fix. If I do fix it, will it look any better than that? But I'm going to give it a go. And that's because a chair like this is very beneficial for Jamie. When Jaime's doing Tyler's hair, she's always bent over. We don't have really have a good spot for Tyler to sit. So, if I can get this going again, then uh it'll be a useful item. And if I can't, well, I'll put it in the trash just where I found it. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music] about. It's definitely nothing special and it's not entirely perfectly flat, but for something out of the trash and something that we just wanted to uh have get a little bit of use out of, I think it'll be all right. My daughter can sit on it and Jamie can do her hair at a comfortable height. Uh if it fit me on there or if it held me up, it'll hold our daughter up just fine. the welds on the bottom. These are nothing uh nothing fancy. Somebody else got to it before me, but I didn't make it any better. All I did was just keep tacking and tacking and tacking and hey, it works and that's all it needs to do. That was fun, though. That's probably the first thing I welded in 10 years. Just something different. In the summer between 10th grade and 11th grade and 11th grade and 12th grade, those both both of those summers, um, I spent a lot of time with my grandpa welding a bunch of stuff. Uh, just he basically had a junkyard. He had so many old vehicles and we took this old huge truck frame. I forget uh what size truck it was. It had a cab on it. It was like an old u picture like a a 550 series, right? an F550, just the cab and frame, and I welded up an A-frame on the back of it, and then put a bunch put a big I-beam over the top of that A-frame A-frame, connected it to the back of the truck frame, uh, about mid-level on the truck, and then put some pulleys up at the top and put a winch on the bottom side of the I-beam, and we essentially made our own mobile crane. We'd pull this truck around and back it into where we wanted to lift something up. typically an old car to back a trailer underneath it to take it to the scrapyard. Uh but we did a bunch of those welding projects over the summer and it was just a lot of fun. I I that was the greatest concentration of welding that I've ever done in my life. Never been trained on welding. I can get things to stick together. I've never really put any effort into making them look good. I just want stuff to stop moving when I'm welding. Right. Well, grandpa used to sit back in his chair in the shade and drink him a couple cold ones, watching his grandson climb up and down the I-beam and weld stuff together. And good times. Good times. I know there was some of you out there who were just in tears that I was welding on a woodworker's workbench. I don't know what I will ever do if this thing gets any more scratches. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] I need to incorporate some more metal working metal projects into the uh into the arsenal here. This is a lot of fun. I suck at it and only thing that's going to get me better is education and practice. So, I suck at this this one. I've I've This is the first wire welder that I've had. Um I forget what it's called. I don't know the terminology on welding. Uh but I'm not using any gas. Flux core. That's what it is. I'm using flux core uh wire welder. Hobart handler 140. I bought this in 2014 15 something like that. And I think that's the last time I used it. Uh, like I said, back in the high school days, it was an old I think it was an old Lincoln stick welder. And it was so old you had to unplug and go to a different spot and then plug in to change your voltage, you know, and a couple of those plugs you had to use vice grips to hold it in place cuz it's all beat up and janky. Anyway, um, this is fun. Looks like crap, but this is fun. This is a lot of fun. My grandpa had three famous words. But it works. It's super ugly and beat up and welds are bad, but it works. I added these little braces. I even added little feet down there at the bottom to stop it from wobbling. And um you know what? It works. Next up is some basic maintenance on the wood chipper. This is a Woodland Mills WC68 wood chipper and it's PTO powered. Uh we put a lot of miles on this thing. I guess you could say hours. Uh we used it quite a bit last year. I haven't used it at all this year. And I just want to look everything over and grease all the grease fittings. And uh I want to jump into here where the blades are and actually probably swap them around. I haven't rotated the blades at all. There's two sides to each one of the blades. uh that or possibly sharpen the ones that No, I'll just go ahead and rotate them. That I don't have to mess with sharpening just yet. Also, uh last time I used it, I got a piece of wood stuck in there and I said, "I'm done with it for today." And today turned into 8 months. So, I got to get that out of there. Um just want to take all the stuff off and kind of clean it up a little bit and you know, basic maintenance. Heat. Heat. This is the flywheel for the blades and dirt dobbers. Dirt dober, mud dober. We commonly call them dirt dobbers here. They build these mud nests basically everywhere. And uh if you got any equipment with an exhaust manifold or stuff like that, they will clog it up in a heartbeat. These are kind of sort of annoying. Of course, Grace. What is that? Oh, that's nollie. What is that? I think I'll chew on this. I think I'll chew on this dirt. It tastes just like Oh, he's talking about me. I shall chew on this dirt. Tastes just like the dirt I had yesterday. Although there's there's something inside it. Now I'm getting nervous. He's looking at me. I think I'll still chew on it. What is that? A squirrel? Where's that bird? That's a bird over there, Daddy. There's a bird. Yeah. Grace is like, "What are you doing, dude? What am I doing? So, part of me is a little bit dis disappointed in the condition in which I left this. I should have cleaned this up quite a bit and then tarped it or something, but uh it is what it is. Last year was pretty much a blur. Last year was so chaotic. Um, no obstructions on the flywheel now. The wood is out. There's no tension on here, so I can get inside the roller. This is a uh hydraulic powered infeed roller. So, it rolls this direction and pulls the wood into the chipping zone. And of course, the uh chipping zone is powered by this PTO shaft, of course. So is the hydraulic pump, too. There's a pulley back here. So the PTO shaft goes onto this this uh axis right here, this shaft. On the shaft is, of course, the flywheel on the other side, but this pulley goes down to another pulley, and this turns uh the hydraulic pump. So internal hydraulic pump. Uh there's the hydraulic oil reservoir and it uh powers this infeed roller. Pretty neat little setup. And of course, as material comes in through right here, it is met by these sharp spinning blades. I wouldn't say they're sharp anymore. Uh and these blades have two edges. This edge is exposed. This edge is not. So, I'm going to rotate these around. Uh, how do we lock up the flywheel in order to to help with the ease of changing all this? Well, there's a pin. Let me go to this this other side over here. There's a pin that is captured right here. This this pin. I'll pull this pin out. Rotate this pin 180°. And the smaller side goes through this bushing into the flywheel. And that's one of the holes that it locks into. So, if I position this down right here, it'll lock into place, allowing me to service this blade right here. So, I'm just going to take all these off, flip them 180, put them right back on. Also have to uh grease up this bearing block on this side and this side. There's a regular interval to grease those up as you're using it, and I was pretty good about that. Uh there's one more down here on this bearing. Got to grease this. And of course, the PTO shaft itself has uh grease fittings uh on these knuckles. So, these are still nice and tight as they should be. I don't have that much time on this. Um but basic maintenance. Nothing fancy. Nothing really was wrong. It was just idle and stationary for too long. I wanted to take a look at everything. After some examination, I'm not entirely sure if I need to sharpen these or spin them around actually because a good test of sharp is if you can shave a fingernail. And these dig into my fingernail and stop me from sliding. And it shaves pretty much effortlessly. So, I think I'm going to just roll with it. Now, we kept getting a bunch of clogs in this thing, and that was when we were running a lot of leafy vegetation. So, maybe that was why I was thinking these are so dull. Uh, I'm going to roll with it because everything we're chipping going forward, at least in the immediate future, is not leafy vegetation. It's just slabs off the sawmill. It is the next day and I brought the chipper back in the shop. Yesterday, I put this back out in service and started chipping some stuff and kept breaking the shear pin again. And that's when it occurred to me, ah, that's the reason why I quit using it last the beginning of last winter is I kept breaking the shear pins and my shop wasn't quite set up yet to work on it to figure out why. Okay. Okay. Now I remember. So, uh, did a little research last night and there's a there's a bed plate right here. So, this plate has a little locking knob right here. Just a hand knob to isolate the movement. And then it has three actual bolts to lock that movement in place or lock that position in place. Uh these bolts go through this plate which is threaded. Uh so that's how it's captured onto the plate. And these bolts are in a slot allowing left and right movement of this plate. Well, this plate, the vertical edge in here, it's extremely difficult to see. You got to shine light down this little gap right here in between the blade and and this can't see it on camera. I've already tried. Uh but this this plate needs to form a gap in between the blades and this plate that is between 1/16th and 1/8 of an inch. And I think that that is the size of the bite that we're going to take. or if it's not the size, it correlates to the finished size or the finished bite that will be taken uh as we feed material through. Well, if that is the case, it does make sense because these bolts were covering up the slot completely on this side, meaning this whole plate was further away from the blades than what was necessary. Um, okay. So, that that makes sense. Uh, I adjusted it to where it was between 1/16th and 1/8 of an inch away from the blades and I've got a bigger gap on this side. So, does that mean I'm going to take less of a bite? I do think so. Uh, I'm about to go test it out to make sure. But, if that is indeed what what that setting is for, well, that makes a lot of sense because if I'm taking too big of a bite, of course, this side is going to be doing a lot more work than what is this is designed for. and therefore it'll put a lot more strain on the drivetrain and therefore keep breaking the shear pins. So, I think I'm on to something. I'm going to put this all back together. Well, I'll just put the lid back on and uh go chip some more stuff. I don't care what people say. Tomorrow is too far away. We can leave and they can stay cuz I for one never going to change. Ever since I was a kid, nies and lots of lip. I found it hard to listen when they told me to be quiet and to wait. I think they'd agree that's just not possible for me. I want to shout. I want to scream. I want to dance. I want to sing. I think you are just like me. Let's go see what we can sing. Sing a little louder if you want. [Music]