Mower Deck Repair

We have a saying in the Army, "Nothing is as permanent as the temporary." My temporary pallet wood shed I built several years ago is still standing and still where I store my firewood. So my current temporary fix is a repair to a broken spindle on my mid-mount mower deck.

Last summer my spouse hit an exposed root and knocked a blade right off the mower. I did the same thing a couple weeks later. Since then the mower hasn't cut evenly. One of the blades was slightly bent so I hammered that out. But the problem persisted.

Last weekend I removed the deck to do my normal spring maintenance. My Tractor is a 1995 John Deere 325 and it has 1,000 hours on it. I use it hard mower, hauling a trailer, and plowing snow. But I do all the suggested maintenance, I clean it, and make repairs as needed before anything gets too damaged. But as careful and attentive as I am I found that one of the spindles was broken when I power washed the deck. Two hits on a root must have done it. It is possible to get parts, I think, but I don't have the time or the money at the moment so I needed to do at least a temp repair so I can start cutting grass in a couple weeks.

As you can see, it broke around one of the four bolts. This allowed the spindle and blade to tilt and that's what was causing the uneven cutting. I also didn't want another piece to break and have parts flying out of the mower at a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately it is aluminum and I can't weld aluminum. So I decided to build a reinforcing bracket to put over it and hold it tight together.

I used a piece of cardboard to make a template and then transferred that to a piece of bed frame I had on my junk pile. Bed frame metal is very hard and stiff. I cut it out with an angle grinder with a cutting blade and finished shaping it with a bench grinder and hand files. Then I drilled the bolt hole.

It did take a good bit of trial and error removing a little metal at a time so it would fit snug. Here it is, mounted and supporting the spindle very nicely. The materials were all free and it took me about three hours to fabricate this. That saved me the price of a new spindle. I will now start searching area junk yards to see if I can buy a couple spares in case I break something else.

I cannot recommend enough the need for everyone to learn and practice fabrication skills. I can do basic stick and gas welding as well as blacksmith fabrication of parts. Besides the money you can save, if you buy used equipment or have something that has been out of production for decades, you need to be able to build replacement parts and do your own repairs. Self-sufficiency is a big confidence booster. I can fix pretty much everything I own and I never went to school for these trade skills. Study books, watch videos, go visit shops and ask to watch. These are skills that are marketable.

Winter is here. Prepare for an emergency on the road.

This is a link to a previous post I wrote.

Make a cold weather emergency kit and store it in the backseat of your car. NOT THE TRUNK!

If you have an emergency on the road there is no guarantee that you will be able to access the trunk.

Click HERE

When to Eat Supper/Dinner (Main meal of the day)

"In 1870, the American cookbook author Jane Cunningham denounced an alarming new trend in the nation's mealtime habits: eating dinner in the evening. Since the colonial era, Americans had eaten their primary meal around midday, fueling themselves for the rest of the workday. But with more men spending their days outside the home as wage laborers, dinner was becoming a nighttime affair. Critics like Cunningham hated this sign of the changing times. "Six o’clock dinners ... destroy health," she wrote in one of her cookbooks. Late-day meals were harder to digest, she insisted. Perhaps worse, they gave women more daytime for idle "gossiping and visiting to shopping and the promenade."" - Peter C. Baker, a Pacific Standard contributing editor, is a writer based in Illinois.

There is an old saying that "One should eat like a king for breakfast, eat like a Prince for lunch, and eat like a pauper for supper." The idea behind that is to eat the appropriate foods for the activities that you will do AFTER the meal. Far too many, most in fact, eat large meals AFTER high levels of activity. Why? Because they are hungry. But the body doesn't need those calories now, it needed those calories BEFORE the high activity level.

It is a waste of food and tends to cause weight gain when you eat large meals after your active period of the day. I eat a high protein and medium fat and carb meal for breakfast; typically Greek yogurt with oatmeal and mixed nuts mixed in along with a glass of half-orange juice and half-energy drink (I don't like coffee and this is my caffeine drink in the morning). I eat breakfast at between 0630 and 0730 in the morning (at my desk, at work, while reading the reports that came in over night).

My main meal of the day is lunch and that is typically my only cooked meal of the day. I have a fairly large, well-balanced meal at lunch, which is five hours into my ten hour workday. It is a well-looked forward to break.

After work I go to the gym and work out for 45-60 minutes and then have a protein drink and sometimes some raw vegetables for supper.  I generally have a small snack of meat and cheese with a glass of wine later in the evening.

Between breakfast and lunch I will have a small snack and I have another small snack between lunch and the end of my work day.

This spreads out my calories in a manner that most of them get burned by the follow on activity and I am being fueled most of the day so my energy and metabolic levels don't drop too much.

The only real problem with this is that I now work in an office and it is a fairly sedentary job. I do try to walk the building by going up all the steps to the top floor, down to the far side of the building, then down all the steps to my floor.

There are a lot of diet gurus out there. Self-declared experts that come up with hundreds of diet plans every decade. And while some of the plans are sound, they are very difficult for a two working-parent family to follow. How in the world would you have the time to shop for fresh food and cook delicious balanced meals every day? It can be done, but it is very, very hard.

This is where meal planning and shopping comes in handy. During the busy work week, crock pot meals are ideal. Prepare the ingredients the night before, dump them into the crock pot in the morning, and have a good meal that evening. If the kids are getting a good cooked meal at school each day, then the adults should be eating their big meal at lunch as well. Then the evening meal can be a cup of soup or chili and a salad; or a good sandwich, or some other light fare. These things can be prepared in advance or cook during the day to save time and effort in the evening.

Then on the weekends mom and dad can cook special meals with fresh foods that everyone enjoys. Make extra so you can reheat good food for lunches during the week. I cook almost all my work-week lunches during the previous weekend. I pack them into glass storage containers (I no longer microwave in plastic containers) to heat up and eat at work. I just grab a container in the morning and stash it in my insulated lunch bag with some cut up vegetables and a dessert. In five minutes I am packed and out the door.

I work a four-day work-week; four ten-hour shifts. So I only need four lunches for the week and I have three days at home for fresh cooked meals. So perhaps a little bit easier for me than someone working a longer work-week and with a shorter weekend.

Spring Foraging has started - Go get some food

I have posted a few specific things that I forage such as dandelion, nuts, berries, etc. I might rehash some of that again, but not today. Instead I'd like to point you to a fellow Blogger that has a nicely done site with ample photos and basic information on the plants you can eat.

The site is specific to Texas but the plants certainly aren't limited to Texas. Take a look and support the author if you can.

>>>>>>>>>>>Forage Texas<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

My Son's Fishing Channel on YouTube

My oldest son is definitely the best Fisherman in the family. I do pretty good myself but he is better. The link below is to his YouTube channel. He has posted quite a few videos and you can learn a lot about how to catch fish. Recently he has started bow-fishing and that is a method I have not tried yet. 

O_JO Fishing

If you like his videos please subscribe to his channel for new videos as he posts them. He's in the Army and doesn't get out as often as he would like so it is not a channel that gets a weekly update.

Enjoy!

Food Salvaging

Dumpster diving has some pretty negative connotations for obvious reasons; you're going into what is essentially a garbage bin and retrieving food. But I have found that many food stores have dedicated dumpsters that they use only for food items. My guess is that they are participating in some sort of food composting program or something. 

I am a big salvager, if you have been on my blog you know that. Recently, I have recovered a nearly new splitting wedge from a scrap metal pile. I also picked up a brand new military camouflage net system worth over $400. It was thrown in a dumpster. My son and I will use it to built a duck and goose blind for hunting this coming season. I also retrieved a gated "Y" for a garden hose and a ratchet strap. All perfectly usable stuff someone threw out.

But food? I never looked for food items before. So this past week when I was out for an evening walk I checked out three dumpsters behind a big box food store just out of curiosity. One dumpster had store trash, from their trash cans. One dumpster had thrown out produce; just fruits and vegetables. And the third dumpster had boxed and canned items from the shelf. It was about one third full. I grabbed a few items just to see the sell by dates, to see how old the stuff was. Surprisingly, none of the items were actually expired. I wasn't about to crawl in but I did grab some items that I typically eat and took them home. See below:

About $25-30 of high nutrition food

Tortillas - The dollar Stretching Wonder Bread

By the nature of my vocation I am often living for months or years at a time as what we call in the Army, a "Geographic Bachelor". I am again living in a barracks room away from my family. So I noticed something that is almost always in my refrigerator; tortillas. I am not Hispanic and I didn't grow up eating Mexican food. But sometime in my early Army career I started buying tortillas. Why, you ask? Because they are the perfect way to stretch your food dollars. It all depends where you shop of course, and sale prices, but generally they are cheap. I like the 10 inch flour ones best. 

What goes into a tortilla? Pretty much anything. If I have any sort of left over meat I slice it up, add lettuce, onions, tomatoes, grated cheese, and some salsa and presto, a healthy, filling meal. Peanut butter and jelly is great on a tortilla. Lunch meat and cheese, also very good. If you are traveling, hiking, fishing, or hunting a tortilla "roll-up" is handier to eat on the go, packs better, and gets less damage. I roll up whatever is going in the shell then roll that in aluminum foil. If you have health concerns about aluminum, as I do, lay a piece of wax paper or parchment on the foil first so the food does not come in contact with the aluminum.

Tortillas have far more calories than regular, fluffy bread, which is mostly air. More calories in less space at a cheaper price is always a good deal (unless you are trying to lose weight). 

 

 With a pack of the larger, burrito size tortillas, a can of refried beans, some onions and shredded cheese, you can make a dozen cheese and bean burritos in the oven for less than six dollars. My kids love them.

Check them out and use your imagination.