Feed Yourself During Hard Times

Scavenging

2026-09-29T06:21:55.781-07:00

My parents were Great Depression era children, and they had more kids than they could afford; three more. Thus, my four sisters and I grew up, let’s just say, in a VERY frugal household. We wore hand-me-down clothes from neighbors and the church. Meals were simple and limited; no seconds.

As a result, we all learned how to get what we needed without criminal activity, for the most part, but also without jobs. I collected soda and beer bottles and cashed them in at two cents a bottle. A wagonload would get me 40-60 cents in a good week. I also cut grass, raked leaves, and shoveled snow, lots of snow, for a dollar per house. Cash, and all mine.

Once I could drive, stuff set out by the road or curb became my preferred source but dumpsters behind businesses and roll-off dumpsters at construction sites also served me well. The law says that anything thrown out is no longer the property of the former owner, but businesses could, and did, place safety restrictions on going into the dumpster. So, I used a long tool handle I found and attached a metal hook to the end, and I could get most things out that I had an interest in obtaining.

Military bases are gold mines with units stashing excess supplies out in the woods far from the cantonment areas. Then the Supply Sergeant forgot about them. I found many supply dumps over the years full of parts, equipment, tools, etc. I went out into training areas and picked up brass from exercises; blanks that couldn’t be turned in as dross. As I walked around, I found dropped equipment such as sleeping bags, poncho liners, helmets, knives, munitions, magazines, etc. With Soldiers moving every couple of years there was always a steady supply of stuff at the curb in the housing areas. I have a storage shed at my house filled with lawnmowers, shopvacs, shovels, rakes, spare tires, car batteries, tools, etc. I have given all my brothers-in-law lawnmowers and shopvacs. All my boys have a complete set of yard tools; shovels, rakes, axes, sledgehammers, picks, prybars, hedge clippers, etc.

In my garage is a parts bin rack filled with bolts, nuts, washers, nails, screws of all types, wire connectors, bushings; all sorted and labeled. I have a tandem kayak that I found in the woodline behind a house, stacks of bricks and pavers, tubs of construction sand and salt; all left behind by construction and maintenance crews. On my kayak fishing trips on rivers I scan the shoreline and have recovered gas cans, a complete tent in its carry bag, a brand new rain suit (this past weekend), paddles, PFDs, two fishing rods, boat bumpers, an anchor, etc.

Everything was free. Everything was prevented from going into a landfill. Everything out of the rivers helped clean them up.

Kubota B2660 Snow Blower Shear Pin repair

2026-01-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

One of the many annoyances of rural life is shear pins. They are essential to protect valuable, irreplaceable equipment. They are made to break if a load is applied to a drive shaft. We are thankful that they do shear and the equipment is safe. But it never seems like you have a replacement on hand when one breaks. Trip over to Tractor Supply.

You cannot just use any bolt that fits, you must use a bolt designed to break. Shear pin bolts are category 2 or 5 bolts. These are hardened, which makes them brittle. That brittleness makes them break if an unusually strong load is applied, such as when a moving part gets jammed. In my case, I was clearing snow from my neighbor's parking lot and I scooped up a trailer pintle pin, which jammed the blower fan.

The shear pin sheared, like it is supposed to and the snow blower wasn't damaged.

I went online and downloaded the User Manual and then looked for the parts diagram. It showed a shear pin, Part-20, pretty much where I figured it would be.

I was hoping this shear pin would be accessible, and it is. There is a closed gearbox on the outside and I was afraid it would be in there. I used a torpedo kerosene heater to melt the snow and ice off the snow blower so I could see all the parts and have access to this pin location. I have it rotated 90 degrees just to see and measure the bolt size; it is a 1/4 inch bolt. The bolt hole goes through part shown and also the lower part of the orange part, hidden behind the shaft.

Very hard place to get my big hands into. I could only turn the wrench one eighth of a turn at a time so it took a while. But, it is now all fixed up and ready to go without hauling it to a shop and paying hundreds of dollars.

Impact of Snow on Solar Collection

2025-12-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

This past weekend we received five inches of a dry, powdery snow. I was curious as to how much impact snow had on solar panel power generation. Most people with large solar arrays, have their solar panels mounted on the roof of their house and/or garage. Due to space limitations of suburban yards, that is the most logical and perhaps even the only possible place to install panels. But what happens when it snows, I have often thought. Quite a bit, actually.

I have eight 320 watt solar panels in my ground-mount array. Two banks of four panels and they are angled slightly different to take advantage of the orientation of the sun to the panels. One set of four panels is optimized for the morning hours and the other four are optimized for the early afternoon. Under ideal conditions, the maximum output should be about 2,560 watts of power.

With five inches of powdery snow on the panels, see below, at 10:08 in the morning, I was generating 153 watts of power with my main array and another 76 watts with my secondary array. That was somewhat surprising. It was a sunny morning but at ten o'clock in the morning the sun was not optimal.

The snow had started to slide down the slope of the panels but they were still completely covered. Even so, enough light was getting through to generate some power, but only 6% of the rated maximum. Extrapolating to a 20,000 watt rooftop array would equate to approximately 1,500 watts of generated power. That's not nothing, but it isn't much if you are selling that power to the grid. And with rooftop solar, that is all you are going to get until the snow melts off the panels. My experience with my panels last winter was that unless the temperature went well above freezing, it would take three or four days to melt the snow IF it was sunny.

I walked out with a soft broom and in less than a minute I cleared the snow. I went back inside and checked the numbers and my generated power had jumped to 1,820 watts, a more than 1000 percent increase in power. By noon I was well over 2,000 watts.

A ground-mount solar array will gain some additional efficiency via light reflected off the white snow. Bifacial panels will do even better since they get an addition boost of 25-35 percent from the backside of the panels. This array is monofacial panels so I don't get that.

In the winter, the days are shorter and you need to generate as much power as you can in that shorter period. If I couldn't clear snow off the panels, I could not generate enough power to recharge my system's batteries.

Upgrade to my Solar Electric System

2025-10-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

I am a big proponent of solar energy, not so much for wind. With things being the way they are in the world, it behooves everyone to build or buy a back-up energy system. Gas generators is the easiest but you need gas and that will be in short supply when emergencies occur. You can't store gas for more than six months so unless you have the means, and the discipline to constantly rotate out your gas, you won't have power long. Solar is the next easiest solution.

I have a couple posts on this subject and my own experiments and set-ups so I won't go over all that again. This will be about my latest upgrades.

In the early spring, ECOFLOW had a significant sale and I had some credits and coupons for even greater savings. I upgraded from the 11.8 kilowatt hour Delta Pro system to a 24 kilowatt hour Delta Pro Ultra system. I only had four 320 watt panels on the Delta Pro because of its voltage input limitations. The Ultra can take 450 volts on its high voltage input and another 150 volts via its low voltage input. I added four more 320 watt solar panels to my input array. Each panel generates 40 volts in full sun and altogether I will get about 2,560 watts of power on good sunny days.

I bought more of the same panels and built the base in the same way, because that seemed to work well. This is two 6x6x8s cut to four foot lengths and four 2x6x12s. The metal frame is from a company called Signature Solar. It is very simple but a lot of parts so it takes a few hours to assemble.

I moved location on the panel array away from the side on my house. The mountain to my front, and the orientation of my house, meant that my one set of panels were in shade until after ten O'clock. In the new location they get sun as soon as the sun rises above the top of the mountain, which is around seven O'clock this time of the year. This location is 92 feet away from my house and the wires had to be run underground.

I dug the trench six inches wide and 12 to 14 inches deep. I'm not worried about the freeze line for this application. It took me about seven hours over two days and that was mostly because I'm an older guy and it was quite warm and I needed frequent breaks to hydrate and rest. I filled a wheelbarrow with larger rocks that I wasn't going to put back in the trench.

To protect the power cables (I used 10 gauge cables to decrease power loss due to the distance), I decided to run them through 1" PVC water pipe. That was far easier than I thought it would be.

I bought the water pipe the day before I installed it, uncoiled it, and laid it out in the sun to get the kinks out of it so that it would lay flat in the trench. That worked great, I was very surprised. The next thing I needed to do was run a strong string through the water pipe to pull the cables through. I used an old trick.

I tied a small piece of foam to a roll of 50 pound test string and stuck that into the water pipe at the panel end. Then I stuck the house side of the pipe into my strongest shop-vac and turned it on. It sucked that foam through 92 feet of pipe in seconds.

Next up was to tie the power cable to the string and pull it through the water pipe. It was a tight fit and a hard pull but in a couple minutes I was done and could now hook up this side of the cables to the eight solar panels.

Right now, I have to run my power cable into the basement through the casement window so I had to cut a hole in the metal to push the water pipe through. That will protect the cables better than running them over the top like I was doing before.

To finish up I back-filled the trench and drove my tractor over it a number of times to pack it down. The soil is bone dry so it didn't pack down very well but we are expecting rain tonight so I'll do it again tomorrow if we get a decent rain.

The final step was to connect the cables to my Delta Pro Ultra and switch on the power. As you can see, I was getting 2,535 watts of power so everything is working as it should.

Total time for this upgrade, which was done over five different days, was about 14 hours. Well worth it for the additional power I can now generate and store for emergencies. I run my basement dehumidifier solely off of this solar system, keeping it off my electric bill. The dehumidifier uses 536 watts of power 24 hours a day so this is a very big savings for me.

Repairing a Plastic Fuel Tank

2025-01-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

I inherited a 1980s Craftsman leaf blower that I used for a couple years but then it started to leak fuel. The fuel leak appeared, at first, to be a rotted fuel line (caused by ethanol in the gas), which I replaced. But it still leaked. Then I thought the replacement fuel line was too small in diameter and it was leaking around it. But that was not the case. What was wrong now was that the fuel tank itself had split on the bottom seam, which you can clearly see in the image below.

It might be possible to fix this with some sort of epoxy, but I have found in many instances that a surface coating of epoxy won't last long. Sometimes it peels off and sometimes the vibration of the engine just makes it crack in the same place. What needs to be done is to reinforce the strength of the seam and then seal it.

Back in 2009 I found a tandem kayak in a wood line on government property that I had legal access to. I took the kayak home, cleaned it up, and found that some numbnut had hacked into the kayak with a hatchet for some reason. I looked up the kayak make and model on the Internet and a new one was $1,700 so I figured if I could repair it for cheap I would do it. Again searching on line for ways to repair kayaks, I came across a product called a KC Welder (possibly Kayak and Canoe welder?).

This kit cost me about $40 I think. Inside the kit is a heating wand or paddle, some plastic strips (welding rods of a sort), and some aluminum screen material. With this I repaired the big kayak and have been using it for 15 years without any issues at all. This kit allows you to make very strong repairs.

The wand works like a soldiering iron or wood-burning iron. The metal parts get VERY hot (yes, I have burned myself repeatedly) and you use the paddle-shaped tip to do the work. For this repair, I cut up two strips of screen to lay over the crack and then melted them in by pressing the paddle down on top of the screen. The heat of the wand transfers to the screen and the screen melts into the plastic part you are repairing, as shown below.

I move the wand tip around until the entire piece of screen has been melted into the plastic. This reinforces the plastic along the split and prevents it from widening at the split and also keeps the split from getting longer. Once that is all done, I apply filler plastic on top of the repair as shown below.

Ideally, I try to scavenge plastic from somewhere on the piece I am repairing so that there is perfect compatibility on the repair, but there wasn't anyplace that I could remove plastic from this piece. So instead, I used the plastic sticks that came in the kit and melted them and mixed the two plastics together and hope that I get a "alloy" that works. In the many years that I have been using this kit, I have not yet had a plastic "organ rejection". But these plastic repair kits do come with rods that are specific to the type of plastic from which your kayak is made.

So, now all I have to do is put it back together, fuel it, and see if it still runs.

Eat out for Cheap

2025-01-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

Eating out is often the most expensive option and I try to do it as rarely as possible. But sometimes you are out on the road and that is what you need to do. I have a couple preferred restaurants that I pick from, if they are available. One of them is Bob Evans.

Bob Evans is an old fashioned restaurant with many economical choices. One of the best choices is their "Pick 2" item. Like at Panera Bread, you choose a half serving from a selection of sandwiches, soups, and salads. I chose a half Fire Cracker Salad with grilled chicken and a half of a Turkey Club sandwich. With this you choose between biscuits, corn bread, or banana bread (I chose banana bread for a dessert).

The Pick 2 prices start at $5.99, my meal was $8.99 and I had water to drink.

It was a larger than expected salad with plenty of chicken and a tasty dressing. I had one slice of the banana bread for dessert then got a box to take the sandwich and the other slice home for supper. Two meals for $8.99 plus tax is hard to beat.

Replacing a Tachometer Cable (Massey Ferguson GC2400 Tractor)

2024-12-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

The above image was copied from Tractor Data dot com, a great site for looking up the specifications of most all modern tractors and some older ones. I have found it to be accurate and used it heavily prior to purchasing any used or new tractors

A couple weeks ago the tachometer on my Massey Ferguson GC2400 tractor went TU. Not good. The tach is needed to ensure the RPMs are correct for what you are doing. For me, it is far more important in the warm months when I am cutting grass with the five-foot mower deck than in the winter when most use is plowing. Regardless, today I was doing lots of maintenance tasks on other equipment so today was the day to fix it.

The center gauge is the Tachometer. On most tractors, the tach will show at what speed the engine must run to to run the attachment at the pro[er speed. For the rear PTO to turn at 540 RPMs (the industry standard), the engine RPMs need to be in the green zone, 2500 RPMs.

As always, it was not as simple as it could have been if the engineers had been a little more thoughtful. I had to remove the air intake and hoses, the alternator, and the fan belt. It is a small tractor so everything is packed in tight and I have big hands. For the most part, this small tractor is easy to maintain; the filters and fluids are accessible without taking much apart. This was the exception.

In my attached car garage, I have ample workspace, decent lighting, and a pretty good set of tools. I would love to have a separate shop just for working on machinery but right now I don't. An open and organized workspace isn't just convenient, it is also safer to work in. You don't want to trip over stuff on the floor, knock things over, or not be able to access your work area due to a confined or cluttered work space.

The back side of the dash and the battery. The tachometer on this tractor is mechanical, which means there is a cable going from the engine to the tachometer. I am pointing to cable connection on the backside of the tach. The cable comes out the left then runs down to a fitting on the engine. You can see a great deal of wear on the cable there. The cable shroud simply screws on with the knurled fitting.

Apparently the cables breaking is a known problem. When I did my Google and YouTube searches, I saw many complaints. Mine lasted longer than average, I bought this tractor in 2009 so it has a lot of hours on it. Part of the problem is the ridiculous length of the cable. It is less than 13 inches from the tach housing to the engine housing, but the cable is 60 inches long. That requires the cable to be snaked through the engine compartment and the way the factory did it causes several sharp bends that cause friction and heat. My cable broke nearly in the middle.

I thought the cable shroud was worn down from rubbing on something, but it looks like some critter chewed on it really. The damaged area her was five inches long and another damaged area was three inches long. To repair this, I first wrapped it with electrical tape.

Then I put shrink tubing over the tape. Luckily, I was able to slide the retaining fitting up the cable so I could slide two pieces of shrink tube over the end. I am new to using shrink tube, but for the few applications I used it, I like it a lot.

Shrink tubing is great stuff; slide it over whatever you need to cover and heat it up. I used a butane torch but a lighter or a heat gun also work. Once it is shrunk, it forms a neat, tight seal.

The tachometer cable needs to change it direction 90 degrees and to do that there is a "worm gear" inside the back of the tach. Several YouTubers recommended to disassemble the tachometer to clean and grease the worm gear inside. They also cautioned about losing the screws in the cramped quarters so I used a towel as a safety net. It came apart very easy.

    I cleaned both sides and packed them with fresh grease. That should help to reduce friction and thus heat. It was easy to reinstall, there are only two screws and everything lines up easily. Once the worm drive housing was back together I reconnected the cable to the engine mount. The cable end has a ridge on it that fits into a slot, or key-way, inside the engine mount. That was a little tricky to line up but I used a pair of needle-nose pliers to turn it until the two side matched up and it slid into place.

    The next step was to find route to run all this cable but up to the back of the tachometer. I needed to find a route that didn't make any sharp turns and where it would be exposed to too much heat. It took some trial and error but I think I have a good solution. I zip-tied it where I could to keep it from moving around and to keep it away from high heat areas such as the exhaust.

    Lastly, to reassemble all the parts I had to remove to gain access to the engine areas I was working on.

    Once the tractor was put back together I started it up and the tachometer worked perfectly. Conservatively, I saved at least $300 by doing this repair myself and the tractor was only out of service for two hours instead of several weeks.

Preparing Garden for Winter

2024-11-10T18:58:00.000-08:00

When my dad was gardening, and he gardened from childhood to age 91, once frost killed the plants he was done. He didn't set foot in the garden until spring. He didn't clean it up, weed it, mulch it...nothing. Then in spring he had a whole lot of work to do getting the garden ready for planting. That seems to be the norm for most gardeners. By the end of fall, they are tired of it all and just let the garden go. Since I did most of the manual labor on our farm, yard, and campground business, I got stuck trying to get the garden cleaned up and everything put away, in the spring.

So, I vowed to not do that with my own gardens. I find that it saves a lot of time and effort to take care of things in the fall, as much as can be done anyway. I like to change the sheets and put my garden to bed so that it can rest, rejuvenate, and prepare itself for the next growing season.

This all starts with cleaning out the garden of all plant material. The roots of a plant, especially legumes, should always be left in the soil where they grew. This is because they have established a deep collaboration between the plant processes and the micro-organisms that live on and around the roots. Those micro-organisms are critical to healthy soil, they are the life that converts organic materials in the soil and what comes from the roots, into ready nutrients for plants. If you rip the dead vegetable out of the ground, all that biology gets destroyed. I snip off the plants at the surface of the soil and let the roots decay in place, which continues to feed the soil organisms.

I use a leaf rake to rake up and remove all the leaves and whatever else is on top of the soil. Many of your plant pests over-winter in this layer. Then I use a garden rake to rough up the top two inches of soil to disrupt any pest egg case and grubs. I leave the garden like this for a couple day to let the birds come and scratch around and eat anything, mostly bugs, that they find. It's free.

While that is happening, I dig out all my compost bins and run the compost through my sifting screens to sort out the big chunks that haven't decomposed yet. The fine material falls through the screen into my yard wagon and I set that aside until I spread it on the garden beds. Once I clean out the two bins, I then fill them with fresh material, which will compost down over the winter, spring, and summer.

I tow a mulching lawn vacuum behind my riding mower to collect freshly cut grass and fallen leaves. My yard is four acres so I get plenty enough material to fill two bins that measure 54"x54"x48". I've talked about my composting system before so I won't go over that again.

Compost from the previous year, which has been screened, gets spread over all the raised beds, usually about an inch deep. That is plenty in my case because I have been composting these beds for over twenty years. On top of the compost I add a four inch layer of fresh mulch. This mulch keeps the beds warmer and moist so that biological activity continues until the very coldest weeks of winter. I want the soil creatures to start feeding on the compost and taking it down into the soil. (Below is one of the beds. I cover them with wire to prevent the many feral cats in my area from digging up the garden to use as their cat box.)

The soil organisms will also start breaking down the mulch, which is very finely chopped making it easier for the soil bio-activity to work on.

I thin out the raspberry canes, add compost, and add mulch to help them get through the winter. Healthy canes in the fall and winter leads to more cane growth in the spring. My raspberries fruit on second year canes so getting the old canes pruned out gives them more light and air flow.

I also put a heavy layer of mulch around a couple rooted cuttings that I did this summer so that I can transplant them in the spring. I used the air-rooting method to root two apple tree branches and three ornamental trees. Air-rooting is my most successful method of propagating trees.

Many people neglect watering their gardens after they harvested the last of their produce. But the soil still needs regular watering. If the soil dries out, it gets hard-packed, which limits air and water infiltration. The soil organisms also need the moisture or they will die. It is far easier to keep life going then to regenerate microbial and bacterial populations later. The soil is alive, not just the plants (which are now gone). So, once the garden is all ready for winter, it gets watered.

Your garden doesn't stop living just because it is winter. You need to clean it up, feed it, water it, and protect it from extreme temperatures. Do this and you will have a much easier workload in the spring AND your garden will be more fertile and have far fewer weeds. Happy Gardening!