CycleKart

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Kelsey

Rotten kids have been back to school for one whole week and they have already brought me a virus home and let me have it. Rotten kids!

Meanwhile, I have been looking at old Ford Model A’s on the classified site and decided that getting one would be awfully expensive and would not necessarily get me much in the way of returns on the money put into it. I think it could be great advertising, don’t get me wrong. But while I was looking around, something came to my attention that would be a ton cheaper, and looks really fun.

CycleKart.

What is a CycleKart? It is a vintage inspired race cart that one has to build for themselves from the ground up. Good reason to learn welding! Once all the parts are sourced for the rolling frame, the cost should be around $2,000. The engine is limited to 200CC and the weight also limited to 250#. This should produce a vehicle that tops out around 45MPH, and due to its wheel and frame requirements, should resemble something you would have seen racing in the 1920’s. They can be raced. But honestly, they just look like a hell of a lot of fun. And it has style.

See the Gallery Page here.

As a vintage stlye sport, there are rules to keep it a bit of a gentleman’s sport as well. That is welcome in this world right now. Plus, I have a field, so why not? Maybe I can see some of the people around here get interested if I do one. There are lots of people in my area that are the type. Perhaps they just don’t know about the possibility. Either way, it looks like a fun alternative to a GoKart. It fits my love of the vintage. It could help me learn some skills I need to pick up. I cannot think up one good damned reason not to. So there’s that.

I ordered a set of frame plans off Etsy from the guy who manages the Arizona CycleKart Club. I can get a better assesment from there. It is after I examine those plans that I will decide if this is the thing for me. I know where to source just about everything else I need.

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A New Word Invented in California

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Kelsey

There was a new word invented in California. The word is Hurriquake. It is an amalgamation of two words: Hurricane and Earthquake. While it is not entirely accurate because California was hit by a tropical storm yesterday, it was also struck by a M5.1 earthquake. The tropical storm was Hilary, a hurricane that made landfall in Mexico on the Baja Peninsula, and lost power as it drifted into California as a tropical storm. Still, it dropped a lot of rain on the state, especially in the high desert.

I could not help myself but to think when I found out about it an hour after it happened that that’s California. Go big or go home! There’s no messing about with just having a very rare tropical storm. Why not ice the cake with a quake? But luckily California seems to have weathered both events quite well, and while there is a muddy mess to clean up, there was little affect from the quake, and people were mostly able to just move on. Might have been different if there was something above a M6.0.

The Epicenter was near Ojai, a beautiful town in the mountains above Ventura that I lived in in my early twenties. Meanwhile the rain in Death Valley was equal to a year’s worth in a single day, apparently.

But that was yesterday. I got the mower deck back together today and am ready to put it back on the mower and try it out tomorrow. One of the bolts sheared off and I suspect that is entirely to do with the spindles being of cheap Chinese quality. I am going to just run with it having three of four bolts holding that spindle on. Fingers crossed that it is enough. The other highlights of the day were helping Missus out in the morning and running to get hay with Dylan in tow and stopping in to get street tacos at La Unica for lunch. I unloaded the hay myself this evening.

Tomorrow Missus has a private appointment in town and after it I have an appointment to meet a septic installer here at the house. I have called most of the licensed installers in the county, and some “do not do that anymore,” or “really install a separate product, and need to have an excavator hired separately.” Some don’t answer their phone at all, or never call back when they have been contacted. I was running out of options when this one fella answered his phone and sounded excited about the project and said his schedule opens up in about three weeks. Who knows how much of that is genuine, but I sure do need it to be. The house needs it!

I have a couple of weeks open up in my schedule soon. I will need to fill them with firewood gathering. I am nowhere near ready for the winter yet. I also need to try to build that woodshed I have started lining up pieces for. Even if only a little one, I need to get it framed up and ready to take on some wood, if it is covered with a tarp rather than finished. Whatever.

In addition to firewood, I need some wood to turn on the lathe, and plenty of stock for the shop, too. There is no end to the wood I need in there. Where I am gathering it at the dump, most of what is there is poplar. It is not an ideal wood for everything I want to make, but for learning to make, I think it is alright.

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Meteor Shower and the Fire in Hawaii

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Kelsey

I got up for the usual reasons last night at 2:30, then went out to look up and see if the sky was worth watching during the meteor shower. I didn’t see much, so I went in and spent the next hour learning more about where to look and be sure I had the location of the Perseus constellation worked out. I got the girls up at 3:30 and then woke Missus up so she could start her day. The girls and I set up out front of the house and watched for falling stars. I think we must have got to seeing a falling star once every minute or two. We also were spotting satellites at nearly the same rate.

We decided the planet we were looking at in the southeast sky was Uranus, so that made orienting some of the streaks pretty entertaining in an elementary form. We are not amazing at our sky map, so we had to use some basic markers and places on the ground. The shooting stars were just about everywhere in the sky.

My oldest daughter kept saying how she saw the shooting stars out the corner of her eye. We decided then that the All-Seeing Eye has nothing on the Corner of Her Eye. The Corner of Her Eye seems to never miss anything. If you are worried about Santa’s elves watching you, well they ain’t got nothing on Kiry’s Corner of Her Eye.

Wel, it’s going to be a hot one this week. We are going to get to the mid 90’s. While it has been a fair dinkum warm summer, it has not been the hottest here. It has been hot, but it has not set records.

Watching what has happened in Hawaii has been heartbreaking. As of this morning there are 93 confirmed dead. Some of the video and some of the stories of survivors have been harrowing. We used to look so far back into history to learn about the London fire. I hear Moscow used to be built and rebuild from wood and burned down a lot. But it seems like we are getting doses of historical events as dense as all of our known history now. Of all the towns and cities I have heard of burning down, half of them have been in the last five years. The news is saying there are still a thousand people unaccounted for. Is this the way of the world now?

I leave it at that. Time to get my day started.

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Easy Solution to Wood Requirements

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Kelsey

I had a log on the mill that had a split in it that made it a bit undesirable for anything like furniture or otherwise. I was done with it at the time I left it. Today I needed a piece of wood for the top front of the trailer I use to haul firewood home on. I broke it on accident on my last wood haul when I pulled a log right through the front of the trailer with the winch. So this was a chance to put a heavier board on the front to carry the weight of the logs as they come into the trailer as the board is the one I put a snatchblock onto to reposition the pulling rope to a better angle for the logs as they come into the trailer on the winch.

I checked the log against the measurements I needed and there was enough there to try a cut from it. One pass of the sawmill, and I had a good two inch board with a straight line on one side and a live edge on the other side. So I took it to the shop to finish it.

In the shop I used a hand plane to better straighten the straight side of the log to a more finished edge than a rough cut. It was not quite perfect, but close. There is a dip in one end. It was amazing to take a curved edge to a straight one with a scrub plane and a jack.

After finishing the edge, I used the jack plane to put a good finish on the faces of the board. Most of the saw cuts are removed. There are a couple of dashes, but not a big deal where this board will be used. The only place I used another power tool was on the ends, where I used a circular saw to cut the ends straight. The finish is a five foot long, two inch thick poplar board. It was lovely to work, and has a beautiful finish that makes it easy to envision similar boards made into a heavy table. I think a great option would be to get practice in by building a potting bench for Missus.

It is liberating to have a need, then sort it out with a log from a tree rather than a pricey board from a hardware store. It makes me eager to get at it some more!

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The Neighbor’s God is Angry

Posted on August 6, 2023 by Kelsey

I don’t keep a god of any kind, so I know this was not meant for me. But at just about six this morning lightning struck the field just behind our house, reminding that the storm does not have to be close by.

The map above shows all the lightning nearby. The little information mark shows our place. The red dot next to it is where this morning’s loud crackle of thunder originated that woke me and at least one of the girls right up from our sleep.

This second image is the close up on the strike. Assuming now that the system that detects strikes is pretty accurate at the least, that spot is about 725 feet from the center of our house.

The rest of the lightning strikes measured on the map are over at Franklin, which is five miles away.

I did double check the field to make sure there was no tractor or cow laying in the field after. Lucky the field was empty. There was a herd of dairy cows there just last night.

That electrifying moment beyond us now, it is time for coffee. Looks like I am awake for now.

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It’s Another July

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Kelsey

Looks like it has been nearly three months since my last post. I have been distracted. I hope things are settling down now, but we’ll see how far that wishful thinking gets me!

I did get the sawmill put together and up and running. I had a little trouble throwing blades for a second, but I thhink I have that sorted out for now. Of course, I still go slow and worry that I am going to throw the blade, but so far, since getting proper tension on the blade, it has been travelling fine.

We are on the cusp of trying out living on our own businesses as we get set up here. There is a lot to do still to get the house situated, and the shop cleaned up and ready to go. It’s July, and the heat is oppressive. I am about to cave and buy an airconditioning unit. We need at least one room that is reliable to work in. We put one in the craft cottage, but it doesn’t seem to have the welly for it. I think we will have to get insulation in there to make the heat and A/C work properly and get our money’s worth out of them.

I am just sat here thinking thoughts that I think every July. It is an unsettled month for us. We never make it through the month without dreaming away on Zillow. I can imagine reasons it always feels like I need change in July. We never do just go for it though. Well, so be it. Just get through another year as things are.

Well, I better hurry up and finish here. Missus needs help cleaning up out on the front porch before it gets too hot out there to do it today.

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Getting Going!

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Kelsey

The new camera did not show up today due to reasons. It doesn’t really matter. Even so, I am excited. Tomorrow will be a fine day for it.

I spent today with our youngest working on her report on Cone Snails in the local public library. We got help using the computerized car catalogue, and found no books on her topic, but I showed her that even so, there were adjacent books that had little tidbits of information for her, such as a book called Venom, which included a little bit about the Cone Snail for it being one of the more dangerous animals on earth, and another book about Mollusks which had two and a half pages of photos of different Cone Snails and their individual species names. That gave us some good direction to go forward on Google if nothing else. For a small local library whose religios section is much bigger than its science section, we at least got that much after the librarian herself gave up on finding anything on the shelves to help us.

Also due tomorrow is a new range. We really could use it. It will have five hobs rather than four, with two being a combination that I will be able to put a griddle on. I am super excited for this upgrade! A decent cook surface for the griddle and three hobs! Look out world! There is a double oven, too. As we have a wall oven across from where this is going to go, this too is super exciting! The oven arrangement consists of a small pizza-like oven on top, and a full oven below. Put this with the other, and we going to be cooking fools this year!

Okay, so that is materialism covered. Onto the things to DO with material goods. Especially as things never last. I have some cleaning to do in the barn as soon as it dries out in front of it. I also have a few things to move into it to clear space in my shop. Once that is done, and I can get some cleanup done in there, I think I need to organize my tools and start off the shop work with a few photos with the new camera. I’d like to immortalize what I think it is supposed to be arranged like, then after a year or two of use, do it again with a bit of wear and tear on it, and things arranged where use has shown them to want to be. Also, I want to really see how photogenic my handtool workshop is. I have a thougth that once I get thigns going in there, I will be taking some photos of projects in process.

The fields around the house are draining out. Hopefully that will produce dry land in our yard soon, and the mud will finally go away. I have a sawmill that wants setting up so I can get to work on collecting wood and getting it into the drying rack, and some green wood into the shop. I am very eager to get the year’s firewood collection going, and logs for sawyering. The tractor is going to make such a huge difference on the heavy work! The one thing that is going to possibly present a challenge is that I could REALLY do with building sheds to put the firewood stacks into to dry. Let’s see what we can get to saw into long-ish beams to build with!

So that’s about where today and its excitement sits. It is extra exciting over the last time I got set into a new camera back in England. Then it was a Nikon with a DX sensor, at about 12MP, and I got a lens that I thought would hold me over till I could get a decent one. You know, a low end kit type lens. I did pick up a couple of relatively inexpensive primes over the years, but I never got any real decent ones. Not this time, buddy. One does not fool around like that with a 45MP FX camera. There is no room for it, as any imperfection in the glass is going to show. So I have a small compliment of lenses coming that will cover 14 – 200mm. The top zoom lens is a little bit of a compromise as it will only stop down to f/4. But I am 2.8 all the way below 70mm. Also, one of my old primes is a 50mm fx, so it will compliment the camera nicely. I think it is a 1.8. Oh yeah! Now, a fella could be left wanting at this point, but not for much, and he could make a living with what’s in the bag. So watch for some results coming soon! I still have that robust tripod from my Hasselblad days, and lights to work near power with, when needed, such as those woodshop photos. I also have a beauty dish that has not got many miles on it. There’s things to do!

I’ll leave it for now. But the thrill of the ride of life is going up this year, I think. With the years ahead shortening, it is good to think I can up the throttle a little bit. Maybe make a living off this stuff!

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The New Camera

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Kelsey

The new camera is due tomorrow. The new website associated with that was created today:

https://www.kelseybaconphotography.com/

Missus says I better use it. I hope that at the level this thing is at, I make some money with it! Give me till the end of the week or so to get used to it, and to get a few photos to put up.

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Setting Up a Tablet, Again

Posted on April 20, 2023 by Kelsey

I am once again set up on a tablet, ready to start posting. Something usually goes wrong, so let’s see how long it takes. The new keyboard feels nice. The screen looks satisfactory. While thi snew tablet is not perfect, it seems decent enough. Previous tablets had the optional keyboard that no matter what, seemed to shrink, making it difficult for the pins to connect and input from the keyboard to the tablet.

And then there is the me, issue. The last tablet I had went away just down the road, after I drove off with it on the side of the truck bed. I went back and found it again. It had been smashed! That’ll happen after some six hours of laying in the road, though.

The real test of if the tablet is going to be good enouhg to do whatI want it to do is if I can post a blog post with a photo included, no fuss, just shoot while I am posting.

The New Potter’s Wheel

Well, there it is! A photo I just took! Now all I really need this thing to do is keep working! Do that, and we will become old friends, dear tablet!

One thing I really miss is a decent offline blog editor. There used to be one in Windows Live Writer, then Oopen Live Writer. But it is not well supported, and it does not download and use the blog’s formatting like it once did, allowing the user to see exactly what they were going to get while writing and editing, and before uploading! Those days are long behind us! Now one has got to be online while writing, so for me, I have to be in range of a WiFi point. I muched preferred to be able to go on the road, say on my bike, and make a post at a rest stop, then upload it after a final edit at home.

Time will tell how it all goes. You will know without me even saying, as I will no doubt update more, and the updates will include more photos. Give me a half way decent tablet, and I will give you a more active, also half way decent blog.

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The Lumber Mill

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Kelsey

I was checking my e-mail today when the notification of shipment finally came through for the lumber mill. I say finally, but I only ordered the thing a week ago. When I did, the website said that everything could be shipped within a week. Great! Then I saw that it could take twenty-four to forty-eight hours for the tracking number to become active on the carrier website. No worries. That is still great news! That’s what I thought till I decided to go ahead a run a track on it anyway. When I did, it said that it had left Portland, Oregon and gone through Salt Lake City and was on its way to the destination terminal, which I know from experience to be Pocatello, from which things usually ship to Idaho Falls, where it catches a ride via Salmon River Stages to my house. Typically, that could be either Tuesday or a week from now based on how this has gone with other items in the past.

I’m not ready!

It snowed!

There is a trailer where I expect to put the thing temporarily, and there are piles… Mountains! of snow where I intend for it to live permanently!

Then comes today. I don’t feel well after lunch and wonder if it was the chicken.

The weather is on the down right now, and it won’t be till Tuesday that decent weather comes again. Mind you, Cache Valley decent is still below 40F. But I’ll take 39!

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