Things I Find in the Woods

Looking back at my photography archive, another possible direction to take my online inscriptions could be a site like www.scarybridges.com. Except it would be like thingsifindinthewoods.com.

This weekends discovery would be this monstrosity, found by ever-loving dog on the shore of Beaverdam Reservoir near Bramblton VA. When I first saw it, I thought it was a steam shovel scoop, but the huge flywheels and concrete pad on a slope suggest it had a different use: I'm pretty sure it's a rock crusher. Basalt is mined through out the area for use as gravel, and there's the old Luck Stone Quarry to the north.
 

Bearings made from a different material. Soft iron or ceramic? Unclear.

Snakes molt in the strangest places. This one found a stub on the end of a twig at the top of the flywheel to get started.

This flywheel was attached to the shaft using a giant pin. In 2014, having a rusty metal shard spinning round and round looks like mutilation hazard.

Tension spring for the crusher.

Did I mention the snake was 3 feet long?

It looks like the flywheels were packed with concrete to give them more rotational mass.

Bearing plates where put together with gaskets.

Grease holes? It looks like they were cast in after the main pour.

Layering

These things can be quite beautiful.

It is so intriguing to have a big hole right in the middle.

Prior Tenants

Before we bought the house, it was a rental.

A rental with a bit of local history.

 That is to say, it had a reputation around town.

 It's taken over a year to really put a dent in the evidence of all that, but things keep cropping up.

 We moved that huge brush pile, and found a bunch of stuff at the bottom that wasn't brush.

Boomers

I put new speakers in our Cutlass Ciera.

The ChevOldsmoBuiac was down to one or two speakers that made any noise. A cars stereo is not really high on the livability scale of a vehicle, with things like working brakes and seat belts really taking priority. However, the tome of the ages says that when non-audiophile spouses start registering complaints, things have gotten pretty bad and something might be done.

The annoying things about the base model Ciera is that it only has a couple of small 3 1/2" speakers in front and a couple of 6x9's in the rear. There's no center console speaker and no door speakers. The haynes manual shows there's slots for front door speakers, but the trim doesn't have an obvious cut out. Given the age of the car (crumbling plastic) and the extant head unit (2012 vintage Wally-world wonder), sticking with the same size speakers seemed the best way to go.

3 1/2" speakers are not a common size in car audio and I couldn't find any locally. I opted to use amazon to isolate a short list of speakers and then choose the cheapest, a couple of Kicker DS 30s. You can see that they'd likely work better than the 24 year old OEM speakers.

After installing them, it became quite obvious that the new speakers had vastly better high and low response than the rear speakers, giving the car a strange, over-the-telephone quality of sound from the more voluminous rear speakers. I found some 6x9 speakers on clearance at worst-buy.

The 6x9 were clearly intended to be installed with screws and an included grill by cutting out all the OEM mounting hardware. Partially due to lazyiness and partially due to the lack of desire to have a car that looked like it might have anything valuable in it*, I modified the original speaker brackets to hold the new speakers. The new 6x9s have a much wider magnet and a deeper cone, so I cut the back of the bracket off and moved the support to the back of the cone.

As alluded to earlier, car audio isn't exactly a place where a lot of investment is warranted. Old cars tend to have a bit of natural noise from being driven, and isolating or drowning out the outside world is a recipe for an accident. That said, even with economics optimized replacements, the new speakers sound terrific... Lynard Skynard sounds three dimensional.

*Painful irony is when someone breaks a 200$ window to steal a $60 head unit.

Slow motion evening

Relaxing with the Girly.

Peppers II

Story Continued from Peppers I

The peppers didn't die from what will have to pass at my attempts to harden them by accidentally leaving them out overnight to freeze. In fact, they were starting to get pretty gnarly. I think they were permanently scared by their fears of abandonment.

So, I put them in the ground! It turns out a tray of 36 pepper plants will fill 1 and half garden beds. I'm going to have to find a way to build some more.

I'm surpised at how well plants work, honestly. While the Girly swears that I have a green thumb, my actual approach is pretty much plant, water, and then see what happens. Not "hope for the best", there definite resignation that things probably won't work. I don't take my plants seriously at all. I randomly decide to sprout seeds, randomly decide to plant seedlings, and keep random green things as house plants. Regard to soil? Little. Regard to timing: less. I'm pretty sure I started carrots in late august last year. That's why they only made it to a few inches long. And yet, usually things survive and often produce... as long as I can keep the animals away.

The 80 Year Assault

The lack of foresight and high level of apathy it takes to allow a tree to grow out of the side of a structure is neigh unspeakable.

 For each tree, there is a near 10 year window to first yank, then snip, the chop down a trifling thing that cost no time, money or energy to deal with. Some people must prefer to have things done the hard way. Beyond that, it starts to get a bit tricky as the tree starts to meaningfully fight the building for access to sunlight, rotting panelling and pulling off shingles.

Our barn is in the historic district and is a "contributing structure" which means that, just because it's termite ridden, falling over, with a tree growing out the side, not quite the right size to hold a car, and your not allowed to keep any animals that would like barn, doesn't mean you're allowed to tear the barn down. Thus, I relented, opened my wallet, closed my heart, and allowed a bunch of thugs with chainsaws come in and settle the score.

Before:

During:

I've always wondered how to pilot a cherry-picker.

I saved this one to demonstrate how wide around the tree was. I almost stopped this guy from carrying this section off, since it looked like a coffee table in need of some legs, but I have enough projects at this point.

I counted the rings on the stumps. The smaller trees were 20-40 years old, while the big one is near 80. 80! That's a long time to wait to deal with a wee problem that's pushing over your barn.

After:

You know the trees are winning when it seems easier to just cut holes in the wall around them rather than cutting them down. That craftsmanship! Or pride of ownership. Or something.