Ulu

I've had this mini streetlamp in a box in my garage for some 10 years, and while I'd installed the matching coach lamps on our house in 2009, I've successfully avoided putting up the lamp all these years. The truth is that I just didn't want to dig the footing and trench for the wiring & I didn't want to mix concrete. I don't enjoy mixing concrete , but we have hardpan under the surface soil. Digging hardpan is even tougher. You need a pick and a digging bar, and some water. Lots of soaking is required, because the water won't penetrate the clay in the soil much. I used this thing I brazed together to water my tree roots. With it, and some water pressure, I can generally blast a 1" hole about 4' deep in a few minutes. The hardpan was broken up here with dynamite a century ago, and so some places have a considerable thickness of hardpan, and sometimes there's none. Where there's none, we have silty sand which is easy to dig once damp. But the hardpan isn't & turns a small trench into a lot of work. Here's the excavation & the cable laid (layed?) The formwork was just 2x4's, a 3/4" particle board, and some 18 Ga steel flashing. I bent the rebar with a conduit bender & a vise. For #3 (3/8" dia) this worked OK. Here's the reinforcing cage, all bent from #3 rebar. I added some long dowels welded to the shorty anchor bolts that come with the kit. the triangular template is threaded & kept the bolts perfectly spaced. I wired the ends up to the cage to get them plumb too. I mixed 4.5 80lb sacks by hand in a bucket with a mason's trowel. This part was a killer, as once started you cannot stop. Not in this weather. It was anywhere from 80~100+F the whole time I was doing this, except the electrical work done at night. You take any break & that stuff gets hard. A selfie, shot with one hand as I fake-trowel with the other: The finished footing, waiting to cure 3 days. Here's the lamp assembled and on the pedestal. I couldn't tamp the concrete well enough, as I mixed it a little too dry for the weather. Anyhow there was some minor porosity in the surface when I removed the forms, so I decided to stucco the pedestal to match my house. I put on 2 coats of acrylic-fortified stucco & it's too white to match the house but otherwise looks OK & is plenty strong. Anyhow, I have learned my lesson. I don't want to do any more masonry, or at least not in July. Way too hot here for top notch concrete work. OK, there's probably still some masonry in my future, but I'm going to do it in the winter. LOL

I haven't yet posted the photos of me digging holes, welding rebar, mixing concrete and troweling stucco in the heat. I grew plenty of suntan last week.

It can't be worse than the leaky old cast iron stoves I've seen coal in. Also I guess some coal is worse than others, but I have no clue which type I was subjected to. Living in the desert now, I don't think about it. Heating isn't the life-or-death experience it was in Minnesota etc. But air conditioning?...we live and die by air conditioning.

Not slow, but Dead stopped, all three times. Parked in front of a gas station once, and twice at a stoplight on the main drag.

LOL...A Midnight Discount eh? I got rear ended in my old Ford, and I had my MG transmission wedged tight in the trunk so it wouldn't shift around. I had just re-built the whole thing (which cost a fortune) & I was taking it to my Dad's garage to install it when I got hit. The guy who hit me couldn't figure out why I was jumping mad, desperately trying to claw my bent up trunk lid open & cursing like a madman. I was just sure the trans case had been cracked in the impact, but it survived unscathed. That Ford was cursed and in the 3 years I owned it got rear-ended 3 times.

One on one I'm not afraid to take a goose barehanded and break his neck. (Grandma taught me to wring a chicken when I was little.) But these geese are landing in flocks & they will come after you en masse, so I figure maybe a Street Sweeper would be more appropriate.

OH, I thought you wanted the frame wider from your comment. Yes tandem seating makes the most sense on a trike.

Game wardens are no danger. It's the PETA people who would try to maim you. The game warden's only gonna give you a ticket unless yer a smartmouth. But PETA people have no sympathy for humans who eat geese or breathe oxygen.

Golf club? No way! I wanna 12 Gage. Them damn geese fight back!

Tandem seating is narrow, one front & one rear like a bicycle built for two. You want side-by-side seating, right?

LOL we have those big Canadian honkers flying over our house all the time. They gather at all the local ponds (recharge basins actually) & I see flocks here frequently. I'm dying to go out and shoot some. I haven't eaten a goose in probably 30 years or more. Not legal shootin' 'em in town at all though, but out on the west side there's plenty of goose hunting.

LOL you guys... I lived in probably 30 different houses in my life all around the country, and they had different heat everywhere. We had coal at my grandma's in Covington KY, oil in Belfountaine OH, all electric in Moses Lake WA, oil in Duluth MN, propane gas in Baudette MN, electric in Phoenix AZ, oil in Gloversville NY, gas in Cape Cod, electric when I first lived in Fresno, Wood and propane gas when we lived out in Fresno County, & Natural gas in Clovis now. When we lived in an old townhouse in Covington, we had just a gas kitchen stove and a Franklin stove in the parlor. That house was built with reed board inside and shiplap on studs & had no insulation. For about 6 mos when Dad was in Dong Ha, we lived in a garret in Covington which had only a gas cook stove for heat, and indoor plumbing had been added around 1900 by building a floor over the garret floor, so with the already low ceiling of a garret, it was a bit cramped. The garret was the 3rd floor and we had some hillbillies living on the ground floor. I remember coming home from school and wondering WTH was that smell coming from their front porch. I'd never smelled anyone tanning a coon hide before and they had them strung out there on willow twig stretchers to dry. (Down another rabbit hole, huh...? I wrote all that just because I wanted to mention that I hate the smell of coal, and hope I never have to deal with it again!)

LOL But I do believe that's a bumbershoot, not a bumpershute.

Tear apart some old computer hard drives if you want to find some small strong magnets. Here people toss them out for recycling, so they're easily found.

It's probably pretty humid there, huh? (I hear the State Flower is Mildew...) Likely just condensate then.

Clearly Bill is a man who likes to build things. I have the same disease & so it's easy to recognize. With that regard, no other justification is necessary.

I see water coming out the tail pipe, which either means the muffler is still cold and has condensation, or maybe the head gasket is seeping. I don't want to contemplate anything worse yet. A seeping gasket could certainly cause a missfire. Has this engine been losing coolant? Have you torqued the head? If the engine was re-built and then sat, it might never have been re-torqued.

A heavily worn pilot bearing or input main bearing is also a common cause of flaky shifting. Changing the trans fixes the main input bearing, but if you haven't replaced the pilot bushing and throw out bearing, I'd surely replace those at trans swap time. 20 years ago I bought a Dodge flat-6 with trans from this guys cobbled up Desoto sedan. He said the engine ran great, but the clutch was shaky & the trans was slipping out of gear & was shot. The trans internals were all serviceable, but what was shot was the pilot bearing. The dang thing was wallowed out nearly all the way to the flywheel Also the throw out bearing was pressed on the collar rather crooked. All that was probably making his clutch foot vibrate like a Mixmaster.

It's a tough roe to hoe....

Yes, I'm afraid that neither my Cal-Term crimper, my K-D crimper, nor my Globe Tools crimper were ever calibrated to anything at all, ever. I never did much professional electrical work, but we made a lot of double flares and crimped a lot of hydraulic hose fittings at Manlift Inc, and those dies were checked and replaced routinely. My '69 Evinrude outboard has one of those big multi-pin rubber plugs for the whole harness, and I went through that thing from both sides, one wire at a time, de-crimping and soldering on new wires. What a PITA that was.

Regarding terminal crimping: I gave up on crimped terminals decades ago, and now any wiring I do on anything mobile get soldered. Yeah, I know that every factory terminal is just crimped and they have been doing it that way for 100 years. I just don't seem to get a good crimp 100% of the time, and I can solder 100%. Maybe it's the quality of the crimper, or the precision of the terminal or the exact position of the wire, but they just don't seem really secure to me. Anyhow, crimped terminals can vibrate loose, corrode easily & they look cheap, and frankly I just like to solder.

James, my original P-15 trans did the same from time to time. It would slip out of gear or I'd have to fiddle with the shifter to get it all the way into high. It turned out I had 2 problems. The 2-3 shift fork was worn very thin on the fingers. The forged steel there had lost over 1/3 of it's thickness. I brazed it up and dressed the fingers down flat & smooth. The second issue was the needle bearings between the input and output shafts, which are at the 2-3 syncronizer. They were shot, and the bearing surfaces on both shafts were brinelled. I dressed those surfaces down and turned out a custom bronze bushing to replace the needles. I replaced the bronze syncromesh rings with new ones, as well as the detents on the 2-3 syncro hub. I put another 20,000 miles on that worn old trans before I bought my OD trans, and it always shifted like a dream.

My car did not have the bumper jack with it, nor would I ever use a bumper jack if there was any other way, including digging a hole under the flat tire to get it out. I used to carry (2) 1.5 ton hydraulic jacks, chocks, and a few bits of 2x6 with me. My chocks were bright yellow USAF chocks from Hill AFB, with the GI pull-ropes attached and stenciled with black block letters Nowadays I carry folding steel chocks with teeth.

Wow! nice fab work! As for the basket o' snakes design, well IMHO there is no cooler looking exhaust system in all of motordom (unless maybe you can plant dual turbos on top? ) A complex, twisty, entwined style is almost more important than mere fluid dynamics theory though. Style, and clean fab too (which you got both in spades there bud.) (edited, because there is no e in motordom)