There you go!
Fall forwards&upwards from failures.
Only real DOers actually fail. So they can later spring back up to improve and succeed.
Regards
Steve unruh
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Recently the 17 HP Lawn mower/ go kart started running poorly and finally quit.
This was over a month of wondering what is going on as it would run on gasoline but was hard starting and then would barely run on charcoal.
Found nothing wrong but a black spark plug. Too much soot = need better final filter after the cyclone.
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Maybe also running on the rich side?? How is the oil consumption?
Hopefully running happy again soon!
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Running good again
I have been plagued with moles, I used a 1/2” water jet to wash 98 hills down and in 1 day had 8 more hills push up.
They love to tunnel under any concrete slabs which then crack whenever a heavy load applied.
So I found a new use for the dark side!
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I then moved out into my 25’ by 80’ back yard and injected a hill near the center and had smoke coming from most of the area.
Later I again washed down all of the hills and will advise on results.
We also used a large fan to ventilate the crawl space and house for about an hour before starting the wood stove.
First time weather has stopped raining and warmed to over 50 degrees. 10” of rain this month!
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Well apparently moles are tough little critters.
I gave them at least 5 min of char gas and I am still getting mole hills.
Sigh?.
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Jasper Carrot once said " there’s only one way to kill a mole , and that’s to blow his F in off ! 
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I never had sucsess with woodgas either for some reason. Sulfur based smoke cartridge work better thugh.
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I tried with bamboo vinegar… they never came to taste it, so must be a good repellant… 
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Hi Michael, my uncle Albert used good old red emergency road flares on his fruit ranch. Light one up, and push it into the hole, plug the hole and when smoke comes out the other holes start one by one plug up the other smoking holes, until smoke comes out only one hole. That should snuff them out. You might need more than one road flare in your case.
Bob
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Bob, l am sure that works but at a high price. Fireworks have some nasty chemicals in them. Its knda funny but with fireworks, the more majestic the effect is, the more toxic they are. Per instance, red is stroncium, green or blue is copper, green is barium… then the cracking stars, containing lead, bismuth… heavy metals, some even slightly radioactive. And we are not talking trace amounts but up to 20% in some compounds.
It only takes a pinch of hevy metals to poison the soil and maybee milions of yeats to get them out…
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Wow, and we can buy them by the box. It just goes to show the EPA says it is okay for us burn them in the USA and pollute our environment. I didn’t even think about my Uncle was poisoning the yard and ground with them, it was probably going into the fruit he was growing too. Yuk. He probably didn’t think about it ether 50 years ago they even used DDT back then that is now out lawed by the EPA.
Well I retrack my statement of this being a good way to get rid of moles then. We have enough pollution going on this plant with out adding to it. Thanks Kristijan for the heads up on this kind of Polluting and expensive method.
I have tried the water hose putting lots of water into the hole to drown them, but it seemed the little critters like to take baths. I also remember my uncle useing mole traps to kill them, it worked well too. There is nothing like ditch irrigation and moles diverting the water from where you want it to go.
Bob
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I have ordered some mole traps
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Pyrotechnics are probably a werry small portion of our polution problems today, the amount of other poisons that we release is beond words. It all boils down to one thing in the end, money… and lifestyle.
But l think people from this site can have their concience a bit clearer, driveing around carbon negative (plus other bennefits).
Bob, the cartridges l use are wery similar in composition to those flares youur uncle used, just without ths nasty stuff.
I shuld probabluly mention here your uncles apples were probably not poisonous from useing red flares under the trees, as strontium (red) is not nearly as bad as some other elements.
But for those who do want to try this, here is a recepie for the mole cartridge.
Mix potassium nitrate, sulfur and sawdust roughly 1:1:1, all as finely ground as possible, roll in a cigar with newspaper and light the end (even better a fuse sticking in the mix). Stick in the burrow and seal it. Best do this when the ground is wet. The cartridge will burn violently releaseing CO and SO2. CO will kill instantly. SO2 will kill in a matter of days because it forms acid in animals lungs. But, the nice thing is soil eutralises SO2 fast, and all the other stuff that gets created with burning is harmless, even beneficial (potasium and sulfur are both important nutrients).
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Except for damaging Michael’s cement slab, moles do have advantages.
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A mole’s tunneling aerates and loosens the soil, which helps plant growth.
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They eat garden pests and are themselves a food source for foxes and other predators. Moles are often blamed for eating bulbs and the fleshy roots of ornamentals, but chipmunks, mice, and voles are actually the culprits.
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Moles are often mistaken for rodents, but they are not related to mice, rats, and other rodents. Their diet includes insect larvae, spiders, earthworms, and lawn pests such as slugs and grubs. They do not intentionally eat plant material.
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To meet their high energy requirements, moles eat just about 24/7. They often consume the equivalent of 60–90% of their body weight in a single day and may tunnel 100 feet in the process.
Looks like they do not like tar. 
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Oops. Language barrier. What Jeff sayd on moles. Those l leave alone. Its the gophers l had in mind. Those are pure evil.
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Same with me, it is the gophers that I was talking about. No language barrier here, just a mistake in identity. And we also have rats and packrats in the orchard next to us. What a mess they make. At least we do not have the wood rat too, like on the west side of the State.
Bob
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Hy Bob mac and all, are they hard too tell apart, are there tunnels same size.? I have skads of tunnel in my yard.I havent tryed reduceing them in 17 years in my sandy yard. They tunnel every ware. under my trailer- acrost the drive way,so many i dought i could eliminate without a nuke.Then i dont know witch kind they are.?
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I run into that problem with naming all the time with people. I don’t think we have moles at all this far north, and if we do they are very rare. But we do have gophers. Richardson’s ground squirrel, prairie dogs in rare locations, and pocket gophers. In arid conditions the ground squirrels can be competition for grazing animals, but by far the greater problem is the pocket gophers. They will selectively eat the tap roots of alfalfa, and breed at a tremendous rate. They leave no open tunnels, so it’s work to find a tunnel to put a trap in. Their mounds of pushed up earth are at the exact height to plug up a hay mower bar. If left unchecked they will shorten the life of an alfalfa field several years. They will make a yard or foeld so uneven it’s hard to drive on, and for their chambers to collapse and settle will take a decade or more.
So the exhaust idea seems very useful to me…
Anyways, drives me to distraction when people are talking about moles when they mean pocket gophers. And this is the majority of farmers… grrr.
Other pet peeve is that if people didn’t methodically kill the badgers, the gophers would be far less of a problem…
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The moles
The gopher
We also have the yellow belly marmot. They are a little different from their cousin the ground hog. they like to live in rock piles and Rocky banks.
Edit…
Note: the Prairie dog is the size of a big rabbit and the gopher is the smaller than a squirrel. The prairie dog is a little bit small than a yellow belly Marmot or Groundhog. There are cute Gophers and ugly Gophers I just seem to have the cute ones.
Bob
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