I have a basement! We were ready. No damage here. I live about 15 or so miles from Carl.
Got a great phone call from my ex-wife last night. My 40 year old son is on dialysis and a brittle diabetic. His wife and sister-in-law both went and were tested for the donor program to see if they could maybe be a donor for a kidney. They both came back as positive donors. What are the possibilities? The sister is the more likely candidate. The doctors were hoping for the possible pancreas also but can’t take either of theirs. I couldn’t donate due to the West Nile Virus. This is top of our list of priorities right now. Ex asked my wife to come down, (San Antonio, TX), to be their medical advisor while all is going on. Wife was a Nurse Practitioner for 20 years in the Air Force. Family uses her a lot for medical questions. Might have to put the gasifier on the back burner for a few. Time will tell.
Take care.
Chris T
ray_menke
(Ray Menke (Lytton Springs, Texas))
#302
Chris, I live in Texas and have a basement. While watching the TV coverage of the Moore, Oklahoma Tornado, they were explaining that some of the schools did not have storm shelters because they typically cost $1.5 Million. It seems to me that some of those ocean going steel cargo containers could be set into a trench a couple of feet deep and then berm up the sides with dirt, and it could not possibly cost that much. The other thing they were saying is that there is a Lottery for a limited number of people to get FREE storm shelters. To me, that means nobody is going to buy a shelter, but instead they will wait for a free one. A tax credit for folks buying or building their own shelters might be a better solution.
The containers would work, just weld up a nest of them and bury them under the playground with a connecting tunnel to the school for safe entry. They wouldn’t have to be buried deep either 6’ would be plenty as long as the ground above is flat and smooth. Somebody is looking to cash in on this one I think.
Hey Wayne, didn’t you recently mention you put one of those ready made fiberglass models in at your place? How expensive are those?
Basements aren’t particularly safe as tornado shelters either. Think about it, it’s a giant hoover sucking up any and everything. After it takes the house it can suck you right out of the hole. The only thing a basement really offers (assuming you aren’t pulled from it) is a margin of shelter against flying debris as you are below grade. Flying 2x4’s (and cows) fly right thru the walls of stick built houses, probably most brick/block houses as well! Most in the mid-west and tornado alley regions of the plains have a secondary shelter within the basement that is totally enclosed. You can enter it from the basement (for safety) and they usually feature a secondary (exterior) exit in case debris is tossed into the basement blocking that entry/exit.
You can tell Carl is a local in the tornado region. He didn’t scurry for shelter, he grabbed the recorder to document it, good on ya Carl. Up here in MI we grab a folding chair, a Hoagie and a drink to watch the show (unless of course it’s right overhead or coming towards us). Way better than reality TV. We just happened to have a tornado in Stockton, CA when I was there back in, 2000 or 2001 - You wouldn’t believe the panic (the geography makes them VERY RARE out there) people were running, screaming, trying to hide underneath and inside of things,… absolute pandemonium. I was out in the parking lot not particularly impressed with what they called a “tornado”. I don’t think it was much more than a really large dust devil, probably could’ve broke it up driving a pickup truck thru it!
Those Oklahoma twisters are no joke though, (we don’t tend to get tornados that powerful this far north) - when one of them shows up, you’d best hide yer arse in a deep hole with a serious steel hatch/lid and not come out until somebody knocks on it. I don’t think i’d want to live out there on the plains.
My storm room / bomb shelter is not fiberglass but solid steel 8 x 14 foot and buried in the ground with the house built on top. It has an emergency exit incase the house came down on it . Also a viewing port that lines up with an air vent in my solid concrete foundation . I can be six feet underground and still see what’s happening outside . If there are tornado warning we may just sleep in the shelter .
I’m sure replacement cost would be heavy but it didn’t cost me much, I got the metal room / box from a friend and used my brothers backhoe to dig the hole and neither would let me pay them.
I get to play Red General against my team mate at an up coming paintball big game this weekend. Should be different… as we know each other pretty good…
On an other note, pictures below.
I have motor fuel falling out of the trees much faster than I can use it. WOW that lighting bolt shook the house this afternoon.
Well I finally had the opportunity to put my truck to “work” so to speak. Of course the work considted of a couple buddies and I going fishing. Had to pull a trailer with an aluminum flatbottom boat with a canoe on top of it. The truck did quite well on wood gas. You should have seen the looks I got as I pulled this rig down the road! On the flip side, you should have seen my smile as I drove past the gas stations!
With just a little training you should be able to have the dog fetching sticks each time you stop. Dogs love to ride and he will soon learn the more sticks the more he gets to ride.
Well everyone but my wife liked the picture…still trying to understand her objection! I was actually just getting things rigged up to go last night. Tomorrow we are fishing in a big private pond. Tomorrow night we go to El Dora speedway to watch the Dream. My sisters boyfriend races late model dirt cars in the world of outlaw series. He is really quite good and actually leads the series in points. I think it would be really cool for my wood burner to be the official pace car (truck)…maybe flare off some gas in the infield between heat races or something. Never hurts to dream right!
I vote for your truck to be the pace car. Yea that would be neat!
On another note I have been working my V-10 hard all week. Yesterday I picked my son up at football practice, 15 miles, trip to the feed store 20 miles, hauled 5 loads of hay and a trip to retrieve a tractor from the hay fields.
I was rained out of the hay so I cut a tree that the lightning struck and hauling it to the wood chucker . Worked untill about dark and then Chris and I did a skype and phone interview for about an hour and pasted out .
the dark center of the tree trunk in your last picture, is it just the core, is it rotten or was the tree struck directly by lightning and this is burned or charred?
Chris Saenz, how about giving the back-fire topic it’s own thread?
It seems you stay busy Wayne!
That’s how it’s been for me the last few months. The garden, the greenhouse, the grass and my business… they all grow a lot in the spring.
I’m really glad I completed my Dakota in the winter/ early spring! I wouldn’t have the time to do it now.
I have been somewhat side-lined by the results of intake backfires. There is a chance that my high-mileage 318 has some compromised valves, the back-fires are quite powerful and consume enough woodgas to render the throttle useless. I have to turn the gasoline on to keep moving… if the engine is still running.
A disturbing side effect of intake back-fires is the abuse it has wrought on my brake booster check-valve!
I had no power brakes on my drive to work a month (or more) ago. Not a good thing, no matter where you are. I removed the check-valve and it was “burned” by the back-fire. I cleaned the carbon off and it seems to work now.
I am considering installing a metal pcv in the vacuum line near the manifold to stop the flame from traveling up to the check-valve.
Another problem is the lid to my “mix chamber” I will no longer rely on the center bolt to provide the spring relief, I’m going to run with springs around the edge like the hopper lid. We’ll see.
I’ve been riding the motorcycle to work and on errands, I have a big trunk and saddlebags to haul all the stuff I need. Still not as big a smile as wood provides!
BBB, Tim J
Yes the tree is rotten in the center at the bottom but these poplar have a dark color core. I decided not to cut the entire tree up for firewood and truck fuel . I got two logs out of it that I will saw for boards . I think the center rott will be a couple of feet in the log so some of the boards will be short. Lightning did hit the tree and split and splintered part of it but not down to the logs.
A quote from our member Dale Hopper.
" I know the energy stored inside the wood and have plenty of it, however I
DO NOT have plenty of gasoline."
Chris, thanks for the thread.
The truck runs great on gasoline, I have gone to great lengths to seal the mix chamber and the advance works as expected. I’m going to go over all my plumbing again to verify there are no leaks.
Thanks for the tips!
BBB, Tim J
Our local farmers’ market last week had a stand for a daughter-father team selling Shrubs, or “drinking vinegars” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrub_(drink) ). They were pretty good but it had reminded me that we’d made some ourselves last Fall. I dug through our “barn” this morning to find the box of them that we’d saved drinking over the winter. Of course, we forgot about our box of shrubbery until now.
I guess I should describe what exactly a shrub is… At least the type we made. We started with our fruit of choice, in our case strawberries from a friend’s farm and blackberries from our yard, and smashed them up. Add sugar to smashed fruit bowl to help “draw out the juices” and refrigerate for few days. Strain the smashed berry juices/syrup, trying to extract as much juice as possible. Mix collected berry syrup and vinegar of choice at roughly 1:1 ratio. Let sit in bottles in dark place for at least 2 weeks for flavors to set.
Get the fancier vinegars! Distilled vinegar will “work” but it’ll taste like cough syrup. Different vinegars will work better for different fruits. Since we were paying near “market price” for the strawberries, we couldn’t experiment very much. Both Balsalmic (very rich, and a bit more biting; more like a full bodied wine) and Coconut (Light and crisp, preserves the strawberry flavor VERY well) worked great for that. I tried all sorts of mixes with the blackberries, most of which turned out well. Unfortunately, I had harvested the berries a bit too late in the season so most of the flavor was gone. (Picture 1)
The shrubbery stand folks were pretty impressed with our shrubs, though we use 2 different types of process. Ours is a “cold pack” method vs their “hot extraction”. I guess they fill a pot with raw smashed fruit, add vinegar, and simmer for a few hours before straining and bottling.
In other news, I decided to try some new woodworking skills. I made a frame for some “vertical gardening” using some scrap fence posts (4x4s) and some of my roughly 3" diameter Red Alder saplings that I’d cut down last August. I made a 90 degree V notch in the tops of the 4x4s with a saw. I then used a chisel to make matching 90 degree corners on the ends of the Alder pole. After fitting them together, I glued and screwed them together. They are VERY strong. I plan on wrapping a length of salvaged chicken wire around the Alder pole and filling it with straw, dried grass clippings, and some soil. I think both strawberries and potatoes will grow nicely in such contraptions. (Picture 2)
