Sharkey's blog

Not all of this project was sweat-free intellectual exercise. The next phase or two involves hard physical labor, not something of which I am overly fond.

My reliable and energetic friend Mark came down from Portland twice in Fall of 2015 to help route and install the yellow poly penstock pipes that I had purchased a year earlier. Mark is a veritable human dynamo, and he's seemingly unstoppable on any task.

If this project was going to get off the ground in a serious way, I needed more water to be delivered down off the hill.

One day while cruising through an auto wrecking yard down in Reedsport, I spotted a big stack of 1¼" yellow polyethylene pipe. There were about twenty coils of the stuff, each 500 feet in length, still secured (mostly) by the original strapping. I inquired about this, and negotiated to purchase four coils (2,000 feet) for a reasonable price. I would have to come back with my trailer to pick it up, which I did a day or two later.

In an effort to add some completion to these six-year-old blog posts, here's the speed-of-light update on what happened with the Ford 2N tractor.

I did get the tractor running and the hydraulic system functional. Rebuilding the carburetor the first time didn't help it idle very well. Neither did the second rebuild, nor the third. Eventually, I just decided to accept the fact that the tractor had a lumpy idle, and only really made power with the choke pulled out a little bit, and moved on.

Time out to put some punctuation at the finish of this project.

First, an admission: I was Solar Guerrilla #6, back in Home Power magazine issue 73.

For 14 years, I had been selling my solar generated electricity to the utility by spinning the electric meter backwards during sunny days, effectively offsetting my consumption overnight. Nobody ever noticed, and with the modern electronic inverter that I was using there was no hazard to line crews, etc.

There was a hitch along the way when the utility installed a digital watt-hour meter, this is described in the first of the pages in this series, and was the seed that the load control project grew from.

I had rather thought that I'd post a few more upbeat blog entries before launching into this, but a message from an old Bus Barn friend reminded me that this site was originally instigated by a desire to share my mobile habitation with the world. It's perhaps fitting that one of the first communications of the resurrected site would be an update of that original urge.

The truth is, for the last five-plus years, I've been living more-or-less like a 'normal' American, in a regular, framed dwelling, and not a particularly tiny one at that.

Yesterday, on the shore about 3PM, just before heading back over the dunes 1.7 miles or so to the parking lot:

So yeah, it's been a long time gone.

On March 1, 2013, an IT administrator conducting an audit on the network of a large corporate broadcast owner's system discovered my little hobby site existing as a zombie on a discarded server sitting buried in a rack in a radio station that I once worked in. His response was to shut down the IP address on the network to the server, effectively killing my site. He wasn't very gracious about the situation, and wouldn't turn it back on even for a short time so I could get a backup of the database. I knew I had been running on borrowed time, riding on the coattails of this corporate giant. Shutting off the connection was their method of shaking me off.

Within a day or two, I held a private "wake" for my domain, played a few pieces of appropriate music, burned a candle and some incense, and pretty much made up my mind that it was the end of MrSharkey.com, in spite of my having just renewed the domain name for five more years.

Feb 1 The saga continues, however slowly...

Last time I had the tractor running, I fiddled a bit with the PTO. This tractor has a rear hydraulic lift for the three-point hitch which is powered from the PTO shaft. I wasn't sure which direction the PTO shift lever needed to be in to engage the pump, so I brushed up on my research and applied that to this application. No action from the hydraulics in either position of the shift lever, not even a twitch from the lift. Back to the internet for more advice.

Jan 14 Over the past couple of days, I've put a little effort into getting the tractor running. Not so much that I've attempted to start it, but doing a few things that need to be taken care of before I actually try to fire it up.

It's not like I have any shortage of unfinished projects, things that will probably never get done. Most people who need something just go out and buy one of whatever it is, a new one of it. Not me, I have to find some derelict and dig it out of the hole it's been sitting in forever and restore it to functionality, if not original condition (or something close to it)