{"id":58,"date":"2007-09-23T23:51:26","date_gmt":"2007-09-24T06:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/2007\/09\/23\/sometimes-it%e2%80%99s-time-to-quit\/"},"modified":"2007-09-23T23:51:26","modified_gmt":"2007-09-24T06:51:26","slug":"sometimes-its-time-to-quit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/2007\/09\/23\/sometimes-its-time-to-quit\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes it\u2019s time to quit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, not quit, quit, but hang ‘er up for awhile to regroup.\u00a0 Let me explain.\u00a0 Yesterday afternoon was a gorgeous fall day.\u00a0 The sun was out, making the colors of the autumn trees brilliant and the moist warm soil simply smell wonderful.\u00a0 Definitely a time to do something outdoors.<\/p>\n

\"bulldozer-trouble-002-copy.jpg\"I was working in the house, getting ready to can up some on-sale turkey breasts and David took the bulldozer down the hill to do some clearing in front of his main deer stand.\u00a0 During the three years we’ve been here, those little popple trees went from shoulder high little wisps to twenty foot high bushy tree trees.\u00a0 There were also some large bunches of alder and a few fir trees that needed to be cleared out of the area to ensure a good shooting lane in several directions.\u00a0 No one wants to shoot a deer they can’t see at least a good portion of.<\/p>\n

When I finished working, I went down to help David chain up the trees and watched as he pulled them out just like I pull weeds out of the garden rows.\u00a0 That 1010 John Deere has plenty of power without even thinking about it.\u00a0 I can only be a few minutes outside at a time because I don’t dare leave Mom home alone, so I jumped on the four wheeler and went back up the hill to check on her.\u00a0 I told David he shouldn’t take the crawler across the little creek closer to his stand.\u00a0 It was getting late in the afternoon and I didn’t want problems.<\/p>\n

So of course when I came back, where was the crawler?\u00a0 Yep.\u00a0 Well it was going okay, but I just had this feeling…..\u00a0 And when he turned around in tight quarters, the track hit a stump and peeled off.\u00a0 Ker-screech.\u00a0 Nifty……\u00a0 The rear end was down in the swampy creek and the blade was up on high ground.<\/p>\n

We worked until almost dark with a huge pry bar (tanker’s bar), raising the front end of the dozer up with the down pressure on the blade.\u00a0 Then David had the idea of releasing the grease pressure in the tightening arm to let the grease out that provides track tension.\u00a0 To do this, he unscrewed the bolt that is on top of the assembly.\u00a0 Sure enough, when he shoved back on the front wheel and track, the assembly slid backwards, a big gob of grease popped out the top.\u00a0 So he did it twice more, shoving against it for all he was worth. Lots of grease and the tension was much less.<\/p>\n

I wanted to read the shop manual first, but it was almost dark and what the heck, maybe the kid’s right?<\/p>\n

Right.\u00a0 Well, we got the track back on and went to re-fill the grease by pumping it into the special fitting with the factory grease gun made for that purpose.\u00a0 But as we pumped, it was evident we were out of grease!\u00a0 Had to gently back it out the way it was and go to town this morning for more grease.<\/p>\n

We returned all gung ho, but were quickly shot down when grease not only went into the fitting but ran out in a steady stream from a hole underneath.\u00a0 At this point I went back up and read the shop manual.\u00a0 What we should have done last night was to unscrew the cap bolt SLIGHTLY to allow the grease to escape from the hole underneath.\u00a0 Oh oh!<\/p>\n

I talked to my friend Will, in Washington, and he said he thinks there was a little spring\/ball valve in there that blew out with that first big gob of grease.\u00a0 Oh great.\u00a0 I went back down and dug around in the piles of grease that I could find.\u00a0 Nothing.<\/p>\n

To make a long story short, we put the track on like five times totalled and got kind of smart by jaming a heavy bolt against the tightener to hold the tensioner tight enough to drive it up the hill, back home.\u00a0 David almost made it too, but near the top, the bolt bent and….you guessed it, the track came off again.\u00a0 Now we’re talking about a track that weighs probably four hundred pounds here and it’s NOT handy to handle.<\/p>\n

We’d just about had enough of the bulldozer for the day and just parked it.\u00a0 We quit.\u00a0 Kind of.\u00a0 Tomorrow I’ll call a John Deere parts dealer and find out what we need and get it ordered.\u00a0 In the mean time, we’ll have a mental health vacation for a couple of days.\u00a0 Read the directions first!<\/p>\n

Readers’ questions:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Canning goat’s milk<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a question that may or may not be able to be answered. I have nubian does in milk and want to can some of their milk. There are directions for this in my Goats Produce Too book to both use a
\nhwb or pressure canner. However, I would also like to can sweetened condensed milk. Would the addition of the sugar change the canning time? (Goat’s produce says to can at 15 lbs. pressure for 10 minutes)<\/p>\n

Jammie Payne
\nMoody, Texas
\n<\/em>
\nNo.\u00a0 The addition of sugar won’t affect the processing time of your milk.\u00a0 I process my milk at 11 pounds pressure for 10 minutes, but it would depend on your altitude.\u00a0 I live at 1,500 feet above sea level.\u00a0 But when I lived in Montana, I was at 7,400 feet and processed everything at 15 pounds pressure.\u00a0 — Jackie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, not quit, quit, but hang ‘er up for awhile to regroup.\u00a0 Let me explain.\u00a0 Yesterday afternoon was a gorgeous fall day.\u00a0 The sun was out, making the colors of the autumn trees brilliant and the moist warm soil simply smell wonderful.\u00a0 Definitely a time to do something outdoors. I was working in the house, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}