Well - it's winter - again!

Riding mower service time

It was nice and warm Thursday.  In the 70's!.  Friday temps dropped into the teens!   Oh and it snowed more!  I drove up through the snow storm; it wasn't so bad on the roads.   It made for some nice pictures though!  I came up early on Friday to be here to have the zero-turn riding mower picked up for service.  The mower started up and I was able to just drive it onto the truck bed (they had a tilting bed truck - nice).

Shelving over the chop-saw station

I got to finally putting up the shelving over the chop-saw station.  I used a cleat attached to the concrete block wall using concrete screws.  The shelves had a lip on them that was designed to hang from - kind of like a french cleat system.  I don't know how much weight these can take.  I will try to take it easy on the weight i put in them!

Its cold as heck, so it must be time to do some rain gutter maintenance!

I was walking out to the shop and happened to look back toward the house when I noticed the rain gutter hanging about 1.5ft from the roof!  In fact, about half the length of the gutter on the front of the house had been pulled away by winds!  So I immediately found some fasteners (fortunately I had 3 packs of screws and ferrules made for this purpose on hand!) and got the big step ladder out.

I never think to get the "before" shots! :(  So this is after repair shot of the front gutter.  This piece was about 1.5ft from the roof when I started.

I went ahead and repaired the entire front.  Cleaned it while I was at it.

That should hold (famous last words...)

Here is the back side of the house - THIS is a BEFORE picture - lol - finally.

It has pulled away some, but most of the gutter is still intact.

NIce after shot. All clean and screwed up tight

After shot of front.

After shot of rear.

Scrub plane refurbishment

I started going through my recent ebay purchases and found my "new" replacement base for my recently acquired scrub plane.  The seller of the scrub plane said that he discovered the plane in a pile of dirt in an old family barn.  It was in fairly decent shape, considering how it was treated, but the base had been rusted pretty bad - big pitted rust marks.

Hard to see how deep these pits go in the picture - they are almost a 16th-8th on an inch deep!

So I found a replacement base for this plane on ebay.  It was also old and rusty but it wasn't as bad as the original.  I replaced the original base and started cleaning it up.

As per my usual habit I did get a before picture!  Here is a shot of the base after considerable cleanup.

Here is kind of a midway through picture.

Below are the after pictures!  I sanded the wood portions some and treated with danish oil.  I lightly oiled the metal surfaces to keep them from rusting.    I had to trim the bolt that runs through the rear handle to get it to tighten sufficiently.  All in all - I like it!

This Stanley 40 Scrub plane is ready for some work! Actually, I need to sharpen the blade yet - but otherwise its good to go!

Shelling beans

It was cold out and I couldn't get to most of my to-do items so it was time to shell some beans!  These are "accelerate" variety of bean.  This coming year I think I will just plant kidney beans and maybe some navy beans,  These beans, "accelerate" and "velour" are just too small and difficult to process.