Good idea bobmac my hopper condensate hardly works, the tank is too close too the heat exchanger, now i know it has too go underneath, i need the space up top anyway. I wonder if a thin sheet of insulate behind cooling tubes would inprove the cooling even better.
Hy mike gib, you sound like you been driveing with wood for a while, just wondered if you had tried black locust or is it just too hard cutting.??
Here on the wet side of Washington I have never seen a black locust tree
Except for ornamental trees about all we have are hemlock, Douglas fir, cedar, alder, and maple and cottonwood/ willow
100 miles South or on the east side of the cascade mountains there is some oak
Almost all of my DOW experience is with cottonwood and Douglas fir
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Thanks for you responding, i have good sourse for cotton wood. After reading some charts , it suposely has better coals than the eastern white pine that i think i have been burning. My older brother was asking, i gess he has some of them trees on his land in kansas.and he was thinking about building gasifier. Now that i think that may be the wood that sparks when cutting.hell on blades.
cottonwood typically doesn’t spark. The hardened sap from diseased trees can spark and is tougher to cut. Mulberry is one of the fun sparky ones that grows fast.
I must be lucky the mulberry tree I trimmed on my lawn didn’t give me any trouble like that. We had some elm and maple trees on the edge of the road when I was a kid that you couldn’t cut the where like stone we always figured it was all the road salt over the years.
I never had an issue cutting up mulberry. It is a fun light show when you burn it though. It grows fast and can be coppiced.
I have cut a lot of dead elm, which has died from the bark beetle/elm disease, and you are supposed to burn or bury the bark. (I charred it.) If you do it first, it saves your chain. Splitting it with an axe sucks though. 
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I had my i on some black locust thinking it might not take so long too dry out, as i herd it was low on water from the stump ,around 30%.any experiance on drying time with black locust?
I finally welded something today, I feel so much better now… 
While learning to make corn tortillas, I was researching the best tortilla presses. Aluminum is too light, plastic is a joke, cast iron is brittle, wood ones are expensive and very large. Then I thought, well I’ve got enough steel to make one without even thinking twice… 3 hours later, this monster was born:
Most presses are 8" diameter. This one’s 12". I dare you to break it.
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Chris, do you step on it with your foot to get them extra thin.
I like it. Fresh tortillas are yummy.
Bob
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He probably just drives over it!
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Chris i thought you were an experianced welder,or were you jokeing on your welding experiance ? My older brother made his own electrifier and claims it kills germs in the body and makes him feel much better. Dont drive over it the welds look good. He he ha.
I’ve welded plenty. What I meant was, I’ve been out of the shop for quite a while, and now I feel a lot better having done a little welding again. Scratches that itch, you know…
The lever you see there gives plenty of force to squish the tortillas down. Although I’m sure I could drive over it, they’re flat enough by hand.
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Now you broke the ice on welding again, looking forward to you getting back on that little gasifier project you started last year at about this time. I’m sure the gasifier is lonely out there in the shop not being worked on.
Bob
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The weather gods are not my friends.
I’ve squeezed firewood delivery to other people in while working every day for 10 days and we have had very nice weather all that time. When I finally have a few days off and start my own firewood prepping, what happens? Rain and slosh. Saw, conveyor and splitter all rigged and only an hour into the work, just when I’m getting in to the flow, they decided to dump half the Atlantic ocean on my wood piles 
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…so I decided to feed my two addictions, ice cream and DOW. Wife said she could make the milkshake and I voluntared for the DOW to the store. Win-win Made a few extra miles detour.
Not the best weather for sightseeing, but here it is:
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Thought I would share a video at my new work place. Move over construction here comes solar tech David… It really is where my heart lies.
I’m the pudgy one in the middle video
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JO; Tack for the ride. Always enjoy seeing more of your country. The weather looks about the same there as here. Woke up this AM to 1 -2 inches of snow-- by noon it was gone then had rain and mild snow thru out the rest of the day.
I saw one area that had many round bales of hay in plastic baggies. Is that a dairy farm? And that area just where you shut off the video, with all the street lights, was that a residential area or a shopping area? One more question. In another video you posted I saw a house that looked like they had purchase a load of “pulp” logs which the cut into fire wood and split. How long doe they cut pulp logs and do they have them laid cross ways on a truck or length wise? Your roads seem so narrow, I can’t imagine one of our log trucks on one of your roads. Again, tack for the video. TomC
Mr.Tom,
Hay rapped in plastic foil, green or dry, both are used. But as you know dairy farms are rare now days. The farm you saw does beef only.
Talked to a guy a couple years ago. He inherited a dairy farm that supported a big 25 people family, incl aunts, uncles, grannies and so on 150 years ago with a couple of dozens of cows. Now this guy was alone with a fully automated robotic milking aquipment and 150 cows. He went bankrupt. He was ashamed he couldn’t make the farm support one person and had to shut down.
The area with the street lights was a parking in front of a school to the right and a residential area to the left.
Pulp logs. They are cut in 10’ to 18’ lengths here and laid length wise.
I mostly choose small country roads for my sightseeings and log trucks may do the opposite
However for loading trucks may have to enter smaller roads and this is how it’s done
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OMG!!! What a job of driving. I drove a truck with a tank on it and pulled a pup with a tank. I flipped the pup over in the yard trying to back it around a corner. Our log trucks with a pup like that, when backing up, have a way of locking the swivel on the pup and then the rig backs up like a “long” straight truck — skidding some of the tires as the truck turns. Then up here, I had to back hay wagons with a load of hay into the shed. That is just like backing a pup, and with a load of hay, you can’t see where you are going I would hold my breath and back a ways, then jump off the tractor and run around behind to see where I was pointed.
We cut our pulp logs at 100 inches and stack them cross wise. 100 inches is the max width of a vehicle here Saw logs are cut to any length and stacked length wise.
Are you planning on doing any sawing? My friend with the portable band saw mill, who was going to come over and cut some logs into 2x2’s so I could chunk them has not mentioned it lately. That’s how that goes when people offer to help and you count on them, it gets forgotten. TomC