7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
Penelope has been waddling a bit more than usual the last few days and it looks like it was for a good cause. Last night she had 8 or 9 piglets, all on her own and not in a farrowing crate. She made a nest and did everything the way God intended. She’s nursing well and so far, so good on the new piglets. I’ll post more pictures as we have them. Right now we’re giving her some peace.
Finally! Primer and progress. Seems quick here on the interweb but this was months of work to get to this point. The color. Tiffany Blue, which was the color of Aussie’s wedding. I thought it was called teal but I was corrected by the girls. However I believe that in the presence of men I’ll still refer to it as teal since the mocking I received for calling it Tiffany blue was somewhat brutal.
It’s a picture of some paint. Big deal. At this point we were months into restoration, LMC truck knew me by first name and voice when I called to order more parts, and the little bit I’d told my friends about the color, they all thought I was crazy. I could find NO pictures on the internet of my year and style truck with a color like this and it was hard to picture what all this color was going to look like looking at a truck that was still in this kind of shape. To top it all off, the painter, who speaks very little English, had previously picked the wrong color by having a really bad green picked. Luckily Miguel and I had stopped by to check on him and he’d thought to have us verify the color one last time before he ordered it so there was some trepidation that he’d have the wrong paint through a mistake. When I saw this color in the can, there was a lot of relief. It was spot on, and it was going to look great. Plus now that the paint was ordered, there was no room for doubt so being committed took some of the worry about the final product off my mind. Some people get nervous being locked into a choice. When you’ve worried over choices for so long, it’s sometimes a relief to not have to make them anymore.
We made more progress on the apple press. First, we had to finish the remake of the cast part that I broke. Fortunately I have easily reversible jaws on my chuck so a quick flip and I had the part locked in and ready to turn. It took a bit to get the surface finish better than what you see here as the metal was getting thin so there was some chatter. As usual, a sharper bit did wonders. After everything was trued up on the back, I flipped everything around again and cleaned up the outside diameter with one quick last pass and this part was done.
While I was on the metal lathe, Miguel was working on the drip tray. He removed all the nails, and there were PLENTY, and removed the bottom board. We’d soaked the old drip tray in water for a few hours prior to doing anything to see if when the wood swelled it would close the cracks. While they did get closer, they never closed fully and we elected to just replace the two piece bottom board with a single piece of red oak from the farm. It came out very nice.
We also had a piece in the hopper which was cracked and needed to be replaced. It would probably have been fine to use as it was, but a few minutes with the correct tools and it was as good as new.
The new wooden parts all back in place on the press. Once we’ve run a few bushels through and darkened the wood up, things won’t be quite so dramatic in their contrast.
So we were down to the macerator drum repair. Our original plan was to take a cut from a red oak we’d sawn earlier and turn it to size. We needed a 5″ outside diameter final dimension which required a 6″ or so log. We have plenty that size but as you can see by the above picture, what we had had been on the ground too long and had started to rot. The was plenty of spalting (the black lines) and some punky areas which are very soft. After quickly turning this piece of wood to a rough dimension, it was clear we were going to be chasing non-serviceable wood for some time. That left only one option.
We took some more red oak from the hurricane blow down and cut it to size. Then we glued up the boards and clamped them to make one solid piece. Unfortunately I wasn’t prepared and hadn’t done this a day earlier so that ended the days work on the apple press as we have to wait for the glue to set 24 hours before chucking it in the lathe. I’ve had things come apart in the lathe before, it’s not a pleasant experience. Maybe this weekend I can get to turning this drum to size, cutting in the knife slots, and making the knives. Also I think I’ll pull the new bronze bushing and cut an oil ring in so it has a better chance to hold oil. Once all that’s done, this apple press should be ready to put back together and hopefully will be fully prepared to go to work come fall. Of course at the rate I’m getting late winter apples at the market, maybe we’ll have to get a bushel just to try it out.
Yesterday, cow #24 had what should have been a beautiful little calf. However this calf was still-born. On our farm we do not employ hormones, drugs, or a veterinarian unless someone is showing signs of distress. This little calf was born normal in all ways and everything was progressing as we’d hope during labor but when he was delivered there was nothing we could do to save him. He’ll be buried on the farm, just like many other cows who’ve died, mostly of old age.
Death is a part of life, both in the harvesting of animals when they reach their prime, and in the unfortunate circumstances we come across like this one. It’s never easy but there are only two ways to not experience it.
1. Pretend bad things never happen. Meat comes from a grocery store. Grandma went on a long vacation. The little lies we tell ourselves and our kids that turn into big lies when the truth hits us in the face and we cannot look away.
2. Skip off of the mortal coil yourself.
For those who chose to stick around and hope God lets us stay, and to not lie to ourselves and our children, facing these things is another part of the job. It doesn’t make it any easier though.
I did some work over the last few weeks to create a weekly wrap up email newsletter that will go out to everyone who subscribes via our website. It’s just a recap of the week’s blog posts, plus any other details I throw in there. The reason for the email newsletter is that Facebook elects to not show everything people post so if you want to not miss a post, this is a way to make sure. I spent a lot of time learning how to use everything and got it all set up, I thought.
Then Friday came and no email. So I reset it to Saturday. No email. I scoured the web, no luck. I finally broke down and emailed tech support through their cleverly hidden link. This morning, they emailed back and basically said, read the instructions and finish your setup. How infuriating. Don’t they think I’ve already gone through the instructions? Don’t the think I’ve done everything possible multiple times?! Don’t they think… “Confirm?” I never hit confirm. Where is that? Hence the face palm above. Look forward to receiving an email Friday morning with the weeks wrap up. I’ll endeavor not to mess with the thing during the week and hopefully not mess something else up.
Today the cows move out of the front pasture and into the main pasture again. They still have not completed the loop as the have their overwinter pasture to go through before they get to where they started.
Todays move is one of the trickier moves because I have to move the cows through the barnyard which opens lots of areas for them to take a wrong turn and get adventurous, especially moving them single-handed as I was this morning. Fortunately I has a box of sweet corn husks to entice the cows with and moved them without a hitch, mostly. While the cows are fairly easy to move, young calves, not so much. Hence the above picture of Art. He’s our winter baby, born just before the snow. And like most kids, he’s kinda stupid. Always turning the wrong way, running when he should walk, left instead of right. This morning was no exception. Art watched every cow in the herd quietly walk through the gate into the new pasture, then turned around and went back into the old pasture. After getting him out of there, I took him two laps around the barnyard and finally got him into our corral where I locked him in so he couldn’t get back to the barnyard and opened the gate to the pasture where the cows are. 15 minutes later he was still standing in the tiny paddock and not about to find the one and only way out. His buddies Birdie and 37, who are both younger, were standing on the other side of the open gate quietly mocking him.
Ahh spring calves. They are exceptionally cute but stupid till about summer.
Two pork chops from our pigs from our hog class. Our hogs weigh about 250 pounds before we even think about harvesting them. Typical hogs weigh half that or slightly better. The result? Real flavor, real meat, and really huge pork chops. This is a 14″ pan that can barely hold two pork chops.
Tired of dry, puny, pork chops? Forget the other white meat. Eat real pork like the Ninjas are having tonight for dinner.
Miguel and I went to work on the apple press yesterday and worked on it most of the day. We’d be mostly done by now but I had a brain-dead moment right when we started. You see, we had to press off all the pieces of the macerator using our new hydraulic press. These parts had been pressed onto the shaft about 100 years ago and they just wasn’t going to come off easily. My brain-dead moment came when I didn’t even think about the parts being cast instead of steel. As old as this thing is of course they are cast. Well, as you can see above I cracked one of the two side pieces that encapsulate the wooden macerator. There’s no good way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again so I’m going to have to make a new one. But first we have to finish fixing the shaft.
Here you see the bronze piece, already turned to dimension on the outside, being drilled out with progressively bigger bits until we hit our base dimension of .937 thousandths. The hole we need is .941 thousandths so a 15/16ths bit gets us pretty close. After that, it’s a boring bar and a few light passes.
This part was anti-climactic. After breaking one of the irreplaceable pieces and struggling to get the entire thing apart, we chucked the shaft into the lathe and dressed the end until it ran true in about 2 minutes. Once it was true, two quick light passes and we had my final dimension, .9415 or 1/2 thousandth over the bronze bushing inside diameter.
A quick trip back to the press and the shaft and bronze bushing are united. The bushing is oversized because we had to bore out the bearing so that means we cannot press all the pieces back onto the shaft from either end. We should be able to press everything on from the other end though so everything should work out.
Now onto the piece I’ve broken. We didn’t have any stock that would work for make a 5″ round plate with a collar because really, who keeps 5″ round bar lying around? So we chose instead to make the collar separate and use a piece of mild steel cut into a 5″ circle. Then we weld the two pieces together. We did have some stock that was barely big enough for the collar, thankfully. Here you can see the stock, all roughed out and cleaned up, and with the center hole drilled out. We broke the outside edge (The piece facing you) so it’s easier to get a proper weld on it.
Here we’re parting off the collar and chucking the rest of the stock into the scrap bin for possible use another day. We’ll end up with a collar that matches the old one in all ways except for the coolness of being original.
Everything put back together to test the fit and finish of the new bushing. It’s a bit tighter than perfect but can be turned by hand. The bronze will wear in nicely and as long as things are kept oiled should last for many years. The shiny bronze looks pretty good installed I think. Like we’re dressing up this old work horse.
Not everything was metal work. We also had to remake the wood on the press part of this apple press completely. This is red oak, blown down when Hurricane Floyd hit our farm. It’s been patiently waiting to be used all those years and now has found a home on this apple press. It’s actually a bit beefier than the old wood so it should hopefully last another 100 years.
Here we have the plate welded to the bushing we made earlier. We’re center drilling the plate in preparation for drilling out the hole on this side to 15/16ths. Then a final pass with a boring bar and the entire thing is bored straight and true.
One thing we’ve elected not to do is to remake the notches on the outside of the circle of this piece (You can see them on the first picture). We’ve looked the press over and can’t see what function they provide. They don’t line up with the blades on the macerator and they don’t need to do anything to move the apples around because the blades do that plenty. If we get it all back together and find that the notches are needed for some reason, we’ll just take it all apart again and make them. We debated most of the day on making them so the two pieces would match cosmetically but in the end we figured it wasn’t that important to the overall result. 
Finally here we have a 1/4″ keyway broach being pressed through the new part making a keyway like the old one had. 1/4″ isn’t actually large enough to match the old dimension. I’ll have to hand file the rest of the way but that should only take a few minutes.
As you can see, I have not dressed up the back side of this new part yet. The weld needs to be cleaned and the back side of the plate needs to be machined true. Then this part will be done. We’ve already selected a piece of red oak for the new macerator so after the last of the machine work today, we’ll move onto wood work, again on a lathe, to make a new one piece wooden drum and blade holder. Then finally we’ll make some new blades and hopefully put this thing back together and test what we’ve done.
So I have a guilty habit that pretty much nobody knows about. I’m an avid fan of Wranglerstar on Youtube. Cody (Wranglerstar) is a man living in the Pacific Northwest who has a christian family homestead with his wife and son. He does a lot of interesting things that I enjoy learning about including timber framing, logging, antique tool repair, etc. Last year he happened across a really old apple press and I was very jealous of his find. You can see the beginning of the series here where he starts with the press coming home, and ends up after a series of videos with it fully rebuilt and processing apples. I thought to myself, “Self, you’d be the envy of strong men and irresistible to women if you could find a press that was half as cool as Cody’s.” Of course, that will never happen.
Fast forward a year. A few weeks ago I was lying in bed with Darling Wifey, surfing the interweb and about to go to sleep. She asked me something that caused me to go to Craigslist to find the answer. As I started to type into the search bar, I hit “A” for the beginning of whatever it was she needed and “Apple Press” popped up as the suggested search. Hmm, not very common. Sure, let’s see apple press.
One real hit comes up and it’s a doozy. I don’t know if it’s the same one that Cody has but it sure looks awful close. A few phone calls and I make arrangements to go see this apple press. When I arrive, I see the press is in pretty good shape. It turns out that this press was owned by the man’s grandfather, who purchased it sometime in the early 1900s. It was used long and hard on the farm and made a lot of apple juice. The man was selling off his grandfathers stuff, who had just passed away at 94 years of age. Our seller hadn’t had any hits on a rickety old apple press. I looked over the press and found that the wood was in really good shape. No real rot and the original Oak looked solid and strong. The baskets and drain boards could use some attention. The shaft’s pillow block bearing was worn badly and egg-shaped and the macerator had some blades missing and the drum looked beat up. None of this the man had really noticed so I was able to talk him down quite a bit on his price. However for me, all of the things I’m noting are easy enough to fix and the things I’d struggle to make all look fine. I can make most anything from wood or metal except gears so although it’s a bit of work, it’s nothing I can’t do.
The plan with this worn area is two-fold. One, the bearing has to be machined out round and true, something I’ve already done boring it out to 1″. Also the drum shaft, where it rides in the bearing, has worn irregularly and needs to be machined true and undersized. I happen to have a piece of 1″ bronze round bar so the plan is to bore out the bronze to accept the steel shaft of the drum shaft. I’ll press the bronze bushing onto the shaft, then insert the shaft and bronze bushing into the pillow block bearing where everything will run on a nice film of oil. And if anything wears now, it’ll be the bronze bushing which is replaceable.
Here you can see the entire macerator drum. I’m going to remake the wooden segmented drum and I have four macerator blades to remake. I thought the blades were hardened steel, but it turns out they are not hardened at all, making my job that much easier. The entire drum has to be disassembled, along with the fly-wheel so that the shaft can be mounted in the lathe to true up the end.
This should be a fun project with machining, wood working, and detective work to figure out how things are supposed to work. I’ll try to take pictures as we go and report back on the progress. Now if the squirrels will quit eating all my apples we’ll really have something come fall.
We’ve started round three of partnering with Wake County Soil and Water to fix things on our farm that have been wrong for many years. As we’ve documented here before, we’ve already fixed a big erosion area in our main pasture and we’ve also drilled a new well to better water our cows using a solar-powered pump.
This time we are working on a much larger erosion area in our wooded paddock near the road. This is the paddock we are working to thin to begin a silvopasture test project. As part of the overall project, we need to fix the major erosion areas that traverse about 3-4 acres of land.
All the folks from Soil and Water and from NRCS worked all day and till after 5 surveying our paddock. They have to have detailed plans on what the before looks like so they can do the engineering to determine what is the best fix.
So far it looks like we’ll be hauling in a bunch of fill again. This is vs. piping some or all of the water drainage or adding rip rap for the main erosion areas, or even building some small dams to slow the water. Since I’m better running a dozer than laying pipe, I hope they say fill dirt is the solution but we can install whatever the engineers deem best. I’m just looking forward to getting the plan in hand and getting started. I do have to finish the well project but that relies on outside contractors for what is left so my main limitation, time, isn’t a factor on that project.