gogmorgo

Cast iron does weld, but you need to preheat and post heat, peen it, reweld... bunch of work and the engine needs pulled and torn down anyhow, possibly machined if it got warped. There’s also a system where you drill and tap to put in a tapered plug just past the end of the crack, drill and tap another one slightly overlapping the first, and repeat until you’ve covered the entire crack. But again, it would be engine out anyhow just to get clearance to do the job. Considering though this is the second time I’ll have the engine out in as many years, and that it’s got some ticks to it, it burns some oil, etc., I think I’d rather make sure the engine going back in is going to last a while longer. The plan is to pop the second engine apart to make sure it’s kosher, replace what needs replaced, then drop it in. I’ve already got an entire gasket set sitting in the parts cupboard and bearing sets aren’t hugely expensive. I’ve also got the original engine out of the truck sitting (in pieces) in the shed if this one isn’t great. It just needs some machine work, but it ran nice and quiet despite the melted piston. I’m also questioning how well repairs would hold up. You can watch the crack open up when you hit the gas and the engine torques away from the motor mount. I don’t think stop-leak or anything else would hold it.

I had one of our older trailers in the shop this week with non-op brakes. Home-built, questionable initial wiring, lots of questionable repairs, you know how it is. Blew the brake fuse in our test rig immediately. I found about a half-dozen problems in two minutes of a basic once-over, before deciding it was best to tear it all out and start over. Had to drill out every single fastener for the wiring clamps, etc, it was a major pain the @$$ and I spent an entire day on the job. As soon as I got it all hooked back up I plugged in the breakaway battery and it immediately started cooking the wires off the breakaway switch that I hadn’t touched other than disconnecting and reconnecting. I must have reversed the wires to it, and now the dead short was on the power side instead of the brake side. Five minute fix to the problem I spent all day “repairing”. But at least the brake wiring is no longer questionable, which I guess is good. I do this too with my MJ if I’m in the city, unplug the ballast resistor but leave the wire sitting there on top of the spade terminal so it’s not obvious it’s unplugged. It’s definitely caught me out more than a few times.

Sigh. Noticed a coolant leak the other week, coming off the back of the engine. Not great. Got it up in the air last night to try to see if it was the head gasket or a freeze plug. Nope. Turns out there’s a third option... and it’s worse. Guess my $300 Kijiji engine combo was in fact all it was cracked up to be. At least I got two engines off the guy... but also... do I trust the second one?

New place. I’m trying to get into ski touring, just to be able to get out and explore more in the winter. This is pretty much the default beginner spot with low avalanche risk, and this trip was more about getting familiar with gear than finding good skiing, which was alright because the longer days in the sun now are making for not great snow conditions... or so I’m told.

Somehow I live in a radar dead spot. Just out of range of three stations. We get the storm warnings but no guarantee they’ll hit us, or any way to tell where they’re going. Course I don’t know if it would make much difference here in the mountains, weather will hit one, bounce off and blow up the valley next to it, maybe it’ll go the other direction... almost unpredictable. A couple years back I was up hiking and watching a thunderstorm absolutely hammer town ten miles away from about 5000 feet up, under a glorious bluebird sky. Just as I was heading back to the Jeep a cloud literally rolled up out of the bottom of the valley and as soon as I closed the door it was like a sheet of water dropped out of the sky, so much the wipers were useless. Had to wait it out. And you want to see some clueless driving? Tourists in rentals on summer tires when it dumps a foot of snow on us in July...

As far as mask wearing goes, honestly I’m pretty happy walking around looking like this: I don’t wear the goggles around town, but I do have a matching tuque to complete the outfit.

I would hardly call the weather extreme and it’s hard to call a cabin “camping”. It dipped down to -18°C/0°f overnight but it got up to -10°C/15°F during the day. Far cry from the -40 weather we’d had a few weeks earlier. As far as the snowshoes go, I’m told the modern snowshoes are pretty good, although I’ve never taken much of a liking to them. That said, I don’t own a “good” pair. On the left I’ve got a modern set. They’re similar construction to a good set, but they’re essentially Walmart-grade. I bought these when I needed some in a hurry, and they’re a little small for a guy my size. It’s an aluminum tube frame, with some sort of flexible plastic “webbing”, and the strap system is similar to an early snowboard binding. There’s big aluminum cleats for traction. I haven’t used them much, pretty sure I’ve loaned them out more often. On the right we’ve got what I think is US army surplus, but I was never 100% on that. The bindings on them aren’t as good as what the Canadian armed forces use, at any rate. As you can tell they’re a more traditional style. The frame is solid magnesium, with what looks like epoxy-coated stainless cable webbing. These are the ones I use. They’re big, heavy, don’t necessarily “float” as well because the cable cuts through the snow, but I like them better because I can throw on a heavy pack and stomp around all day, smashing over buried undergrowth, trees, logs, etc., without feeling like I might damage them. They offer slightly less traction without the big cleats the modern ones have, but if you find yourself on lake ice or a very hard-packed trail, I find the modern cleats are pretty uncomfortable to walk on. I also like the long, thin tail on the traditional style. It means you’re not actually picking up the whole snowshoe on every step, instead just dragging it along, and it’s a lot less likely to get caught on things than a rounded frame in the back. The bindings on both sets are hinged to allow for this, but it’s definitely an advantage to the traditional style. Not having to lift your feet as high or lift as much of the weight goes a long way towards endurance. I’ve done a few 20 mile days on them, but most of our party on modern snowshoes was hurting after our trip. Truth be told, the snowshoes weren’t especially necessary for us. We hadn’t had much snow lately, and the trail is well travelled and pretty packed down. There were a few spots they were nice to have, especially on the way out – we got some serious wind the second night and there were a lot of heavily drifted sections – but most of the party either started the trip out without them or took them off partway back once we got past the worst parts. You could’ve done most of it in running shoes without difficulty. I left mine on because I didn’t feel like carrying them. Here’s a couple shots from the ski hill the other day. The sun’s getting higher now, makes it easier to get shots up the valley to the south. These are taken in more or less the same direction, but the second one is taken from partway up the ridge in the first shot.

Ski hill’s still open. Masks are mandatory in public places and spaces, and you will usually be called out if you’re not wearing one correctly. Most stores will also insist you use their sanitizer as well which is a bit bull$#!& because a few of them have it laced with some godawful smelling moisturizer of some kind that I need to immediately scrub off my hands the second I get home. I carry around and will gladly use my own sanitizer at those places but it depends on which staff member sees you walk in the door. But you can’t really get mad at anyone for it because everyone is just doing their best to keep everyone safe with whatever ressources they have. School opened back up province-wide at the start of the school year but closed back down again in November because cases started spiking way high. They’re currently doing a staggered spring break, with different areas doing it at different times this year so they don’t have huge surges of people at the ski hills, which are pretty much the only places open right now. Bars and restaurants were closed to sit-in dining back in December, and they’ve reopened, although you’re not allowed to sit at a table with someone from outside your household, enforced by the honour system so not at all. Outdoor gatherings had been prohibited but they’re now allowed with a ten-person cap, so we’ve been having fires and beers with friends a few times a week in the yard, despite it having been below -20 out for all of February, sometimes pushing -40.

What I do when I encounter this (you can tell in the thumbnail when it uploads) is open up the photo in whatever your prefered photo editing software is – on my iPhone I just open up photos and hit “edit”, but even MS Paint would work – and rotate it through 360°, then save it. Fixes it every time.

Couple more from an easy hut trip I just did. Snowshoed in about 8 miles. Winter glamping for sure.

Even for us, freezing after green-up is brutal. We had one early spring a few years back, everything started budding out in April. We had a winter storm at the end of the month, freezing rain halfway through May, and another big dump of snow in early June. One storm would’ve been fine, but all the fresh growth freezing up a third time destroyed everything. It was one of the few years we had problems with bears. There just wasn’t any wild food for them that year, no berries, no fruit, no nuts, nothing. We hardly even had wildflowers that year.

Couple quick little excursions after I got the fleet running today.

-35 again this morning, which is of course when the municipality decides to evict everyone from the street for snow removal. The Jeeps fired up just fine as always, but this POS that’s been sitting long enough there’s bare pavement under it, not so much. Two hours to get it going. Yay carburetors. 🙄

It’s good they’ve got that damaged-box program and that it can be used. A lot of their returns or undeliverables just end up in the trash.

That was almost an accident as I was walking back up to the truck. I’d gone down to spot where a couple rivers come together to try to catch a good shot of the mountains that I’d got a couple summers ago, but once I got down there remembered how much carefully picking my path over rocks I’d done to stay dry and with a couple patches of obvious open water I decided it was best not to walk too far out onto the river ice.

It’s tough to get photos when it’s this cold. Lithium batteries really don’t last long.

I’ve seen a fair bit of rain at pretty near 0°F. It’s no fun at all. Turns all the roads into curling rinks. Perfect dimpled surface, no traction at all. You’ll be driving down the highway at 10mph fighting not to slide down the camber of the road. If it rains hard enough you’ll get enough ice buildup to bring down trees and power lines. Once you’re down to -10°F or so it freezes before it hits, which isn’t great either but at least it doesn’t turn the world into a beautiful death trap. It hit -39°C here the last couple mornings. -38°F. I don’t think you really get used to it, you just learn to deal. But the snow doesn’t really melt, it just blows off, and you don’t really start seeing the accumulated participates from the air until spring.

Gorgeous morning today, although a little on the chilly side. Coldest morning so far this winter. With it being so clear though I managed to get some shots to the south before the sun was high enough to interfere, just from within the yard at work. And for those wondering, possibly a bit jealous of the views, today’s forecast includes the phrase “frostbite in minutes”. It only got down to -36°C, but with a windchill warning of -40 to -55°C. I’ll let you guys do your own math on that. It’s not quite the lower extreme of what we’ll get, but it’s not warm. Felt pretty bad for my 2.5 this morning. Parked it across the street a few days ago and wasn’t inspired to start it just to get it into the driveway to plug it in last night. It did fire right up but it sure wasn’t happy about it.

I’d say it looks young, but yeah, it’s hard to tell.