the Walnut Diary

During the height of the Covid lockdown our granddaughter, a kindergarten student, wanted to attend her classes by Zoom, as offered by the Ottawa/Carleton School Board.

Access to a laptop and an iPad were easy, but her dad decided to bring her a large apple screen/computer unit and wireless keyboard from his office to further the classroom experience. Bet found a shaker chair upstairs which had proven too small and low for any adult, so it had been consigned to a corner of the upstairs hall under the sloped ceiling. For a desk we selected a two drawer cherry hall table which matched the chair pretty well, but lacked the necessary knee room.

Ada’s first class was to begin in an hour, so modifications to the table were hurried. A live-edged 2 1/2″ cherry plank gave up a few inches of its length . On the band saw I quickly made four substantial pads which more than covered the 2 1/8″ square ends of the table legs. Before I fastened the feet into place, I noticed that the shape of the feet made an ironic contrast to the veined ball and claw feet on the cherry coffee table in the same room, built when I had unlimited ambition and access to a Fine Woodworking subscription.

So I left the bark on the tapered edges of the feet, and oriented them toward the room. Then came Ada’s glue gun, one of her favourite tools. She placed a substantial gob of glue on the end of each leg, and then we pressed the feet into place and landed it on the floor before the mess had fully set. Everyone had a good laugh at the comic effect, but knee room under the table was now perfect. In came a computer monitor to cover most of the surface of the desk. Over the next few weeks we took turns hiding just out of camera view to watch the kindergarten classes.

My job today involved taking down the tree and setting the little table back on its original legs. One foot had fallen off during the Christmas shuffle, but the other three were still quite solidly adhered. I had mortised-and-tenoned the table together in 1985, added a coat of minwax, but then was interrupted by a call from Bet from the emergency room where she was receiving a cast for a broken wrist after a rink expedition. So the finish on the table never did receive any more attention. It just bravely took its place in a series of halls, holding gloves, phone books, and so forth.

I selected a medium chef’s knife and a hair dryer as the tools. While a chef’s knife has ample leverage for prying apart beef ribs, it had no effect whatever on the gobs of hot glue separating the three legs from their feet. The hair dryer as well had little effect upon the dry cherry until I used the knife as a heat sink to transfer energy to the glue. That worked, though slowly. Over the course of the session I developed a new regard for hot glue. Hide glue on antique furniture would have succumbed far more readily to the hair dryer than the transparent glue sticks.

I crept downstairs this morning to encounter the busy swish of a robot square dancing with the kitchen chairs.  And here I thought things would be very still without Ada to provide that little bit of chaos we so need for a holiday celebration.  Robo seems to be enjoying the stage on his first anniversary.

He just chirped something and made a dash for my feet, ducked around me and clunked into his roost behind me, and went to sleep.  

Who needs a pet?  Ada arrives about noon today, practiced for the task of unloading the contents of another tree.  Co-grandparenting.

We hope your morning is progressing well.

Rod and Bet

Lifetime DIY fan decides to attach heat pump to oil furnace in 1837 stone farm house.

I first got the idea to do this when the government announced a three-year-window on the carbon surtax on heating fuel for rural Canadian home owners, on the assumption that within that interval owners would install heat pumps and reduce carbon emissions.  After some thought I located a local heating guy and asked him to stop by to see if such an idea were feasible.

I left a voice mail but received no response.  I mentioned this to Les, my retired electrician friend.  He knew the guy and liked him after he had improved the performance of his heat pump.  Les offered to get after Joe and arrange for him to call me.  At length the call came through and Joe arrived in a minivan to look at the prospective job site. 

I didn’t expect much, not after a trusted gas fitter from an earlier house discovered that he had to drill five feet through the stone wall in order to run the line for the new “commercial” range.  I had deliberately steered him away from what I thought was the thick part of the wall, the additional three-foot ledge to support the kitchen hearth. 

When I replaced the doors and windows in the house, though, I narrowed the wide Georgian door in the basement to a more standard size, leaving room in the casing for a sturdy wooden cavity from floor to header, faced with a 1” pine board on the outside and a 2” plank on the inside, with loose fibreglass insulation between.  It had worked well for vents for the central vacuum, the main floor bathroom vent, and miscellaneous data cables over the years.  Joe looked at the panel and decided that it would work fine for the hoses and 220 volt feed.  The control box would screw right onto a bare spot in the middle of the panel.

From that point, Joe made a lot of sense.  The 1” flexible copper pipe is pretty versatile, and we planned how it could snake around the various obstructions attached to the heavy timbers in the basement until it got to the furnace.  The return pipe is made of easily-worked 3/8 copper pipe.

I asked for a quote.  It was reasonable, so I sent him a deposit and waited.  Les had a look in my basement and found a pair of heavy stove cables running along the timbers which were no longer in use.  He suggested I combine the lengths and move the existing dryer cable to an unused 40 amp breaker in the panel (They changed the specifications), vacating a 30 amp for the heat pump.  The shut-off switch I bought at Rona struck me as dangerously shoddy in construction, but Les assured me that that’s how they all are, and it would be fine.

I picked up a trailer load of gravel at the quarry and positioned a quarter of it under the rear deck of the house for a base for the outdoor unit.  One of my favourite toys is a 17 hp Bolens diesel 4wd tractor with remote hydraulic feed.  Years ago I bought it a matching dump trailer with folding sides.  The whole unit will back through a 48” door with a load of firewood, so I decided to put a quarter-yard of gravel on it and back it up the slope to the nine-foot deck and a good point to dump the load so that all rake work would be downhill.  

But first I had to get the gravel out of my 4X8 utility trailer.  I removed my truck from the area, leaving the loaded trailer sitting on its fold-down wheel.  Those safety chains must be strong, eh?  I clipped the large carabiners at the end of each chain to the hook on the loader of my TAFE tractor, removed the trailer’s tailgate, and lifted.  It worked fine, leaving a pile of gravel on the driveway.  Then it was a simple matter to load up the little trailer for the reverse trip up the slope to the job site.  There was just enough room under the deck to dump the gravel.  Hydraulics are great!

Joe arrived the day after Labour Day.  He opened the van door.  The outdoor unit’s box looked huge.  I asked how much it weighed.  “I don’t know.  I loaded it by myself o.k.”  I mentally ran through my toys for handling heavy objects until Joe dropped a heavy hand cart onto the driveway.  He and a silent assistant headed down the hill beside the garage, manhandling that cart, and moved it into position below the house.  Then came the stand.  I was pleased to see that it’s sturdily made of powder coated square tube, and can be adjusted during assembly. 

The intended site seemed ok for grade, but Joe asked if I had a concrete slab, so off I went with the loader to free one from a mat of weeds.  This was the hardest work of the project for me, but I eventually drove the tractor up to the site with two slabs in the bucket.  One plopped down on my stone-ringed pad and required very little levelling.

From there on I decided that it was up to me to stay out of the way and not mess up Joe’s job.

This was not particularly easy for me.  Les pulled rank (as a former tradesman) and got the coveted pipe-unwinding job.  He actually got to stand on the pipe at one point.  I managed to hold the big copper coil when Les had to help bend pipe, but that was the most responsibility I managed to earn.

It turned out the indoor unit needed the space over the burner in the oil furnace currently occupied by my much-calcified humidifier.  Out it came. That triangular tube-thing was rather fascinating.  I took a lot of pictures of it before it disappeared behind a sheet of thin steel on the side of the furnace.  Joe precisely marked and cut holes for wires, two tubes, and a drain.

Things went very well until it came time to pump all air from the welded pipe and in-furnace unit.  It wouldn’t maintain a vacuum.  Joe suspected his pump after he had easily found and corrected a leak In one weld.  (I call it a weld because he uses a small oxy-acetylene torch and silver solder.  I wondered why there was no flux.  He said it’s in the wire.)

The following morning Joe was back with another pump and the system vacuumed out easily.  Then Joe released the coolant and oil which are stored in the outside unit.  Then he installed the thermostat.  Earlier I had run the eight-wire cable down to the furnace by attaching it to the old thermostat wire.

The unit works as promised.  It cools and it heats.  Joe, Les, and my wife made it clear that I was not to use any of my burnt-fingers experimental techniques on this device, especially the Internet accessible thermostat controls.  Les further forbade me from hooking the 220 circuit into the generator panel, because “Your generator’s power isn’t refined enough for this expensive unit.  In a power outage, just run the furnace.” 

O.K.  I had recently burned out a new angle grinder by not bothering to adjust the hertz level of the power for a quick job cutting off some rebar a long way from my meter.

Today at my appointment with an eye surgeon I had a small tear on my right retina welded back into place with a laser. This sounds quick and neat. In practice it sounded and felt like any other heavy welding job: noisy, very bright, and repetitive. Whenever I groaned, the surgeon would let up for the eye cool down a bit. Regardless of what he said about the quickness of this procedure, it certainly takes some time from the eye-owner’s perspective. It’s hard to keep track of time when one’s whole being is a single point where an inferno of blazing, rasping green light rapidly builds up the heat and pressure inside the egg.

But it works. No follow up instructions, just a call back in a month. My sister’s detached retina last year likely started with a little tear like mine. The difference was the early diagnosis.

The floaters, which I likened to a handful of algae in my right eye? “You could have them drained out of the eyeball and they could come back, or you could go blind in that eye. Live with them.” Because this was the answer I expected from my reading on the subject, I was O.K. with that.

But I figured I deserved a freebee for the pain of the operation, so I asked, “Why is it that the more drops in my eye that I receive in an optical procedure such as this, the less I notice the floaters? Is there something I can take to duplicate this effect?”

“Dilation of the pupil diminishes the relative size of each obstruction, so your vision is a bit clearer. But your vision is also blurred, so continued use of drops would provide no benefit.”

By the time I was clear of the office, the pain was gone. On the way home I asked my chauffeur to detour to a tractor supply place to pick up parts. After an hour’s drive I was ready to do some work on an ailing tractor, and then drove it around the property to chase a pair of marauding bucks away from my apple trees, then drove around, spraying the trees with deer repellent.

In for a nap.

By any rational measurement, our day at Hotel Dieu went very well, and I am back tapping out another blog entry.

Today I announced to my wife that there would never be a better day to find and repair the hole the squirrels made in the roof to take over the attic in the brick wing last winter.

Bet couldn’t argue with that. The problem is that my shaky balance has kept me off roofs for the last five years. At my age I have a hard time standing up in a dark room.

Nonetheless I set about the project this morning, with my wife ready to do backup as needed. The logistics of the task sound easy: crawl out a second floor window onto a moderately-sloped (4:12) verandah roof, walk to the other end of the house where it is joined by the addition, and climb up under the overhanging soffit of the 2 1/2 storey brick Victorian to where the soffit intersects with the roof of the 1840 stone cottage. Its roof is a steeper 8:12 pitch.

The devil is in the details. The stone house originally had one dormer, but three more were added during repairs after Hurricane Hazel in 1953. The east end dormer is the original, plumbed as a bathroom. The narrow gap between the dormer and the brick wall on the other side is more than covered by an 18″ sheet of corrugated steel roofing, with accompanying nail heads protruding from the ridges. My unwelcome task was to climb twelve feet of steel roof — without enough headroom to stand up because of conflicting soffits — on hands and knees to where the squirrels had found a way into the attic of the brick house.

The only reason I had worked up the nerve to do this was because last week I had purchased a set of eighty-dollar Milwaukee heavy duty knee pads for a flooring job. Normally I am averse to kneeling because of the arthritis debt which comes due the following day and persists for weeks. With the layers of armour and gel in these sci-fi props, however, the knee pain never developed after the last session. I figured the protruding nail heads on the steel roofing would give that armour a workout, but I was hopeful.

Armed with a flashlight, I tentatively crawled up the slope. The pads weren’t comfortable, but they did the job. Then I poked one of those open concept wasp nests. Turns out there was an occupant, so I retreated for a can of spray. In retrospect, I would have been better off going hand-to-gland with the bee than what the spray did to my footing. For the record, bee spray is a fine lubricant for corrugated roofing and asphalt shingles. Instantly, the only traction I could get on the steel was when a screw top dug into the plastic on the knee pads.

The real problem with the repair involved cutting a piece of wood which would block access under the soffit of the brick house. The coping against the brick came down eight inches at a 45 degree angle, where it joined a flat piece of chestnut 12″ wide to extend to the 9X1″ fascia board. The plug was easy to draw in the shop after I transferred the angle from the soffit where I could reach it. But that was at a 90 degree angle. What happens to that coping angle when it intersects with an 8:12 slope? Short answer: it becomes about a 15 degree angle. Cut two inches off the fat part of the angle and you’ve about got it.

In three tries on the same piece of plywood, I had it. I pushed it up the slope with a floor broom. It would fit if I cut away enough on the other side of the plug to let some flashing from the other roof do its thing and leave room for a heating cable. I ripped a 9 foot 1X2 off a piece of cedar in the shop, screwed it as a handle to the half-inch plywood plug I planned to screw into place, using the leverage from the roofing below it to force it up against that portion of the soffit which vanished into the unpainted darkness.

The plug in place, I screwed the handle down to a ridge on the roofing underneath. So far, so good. Turned out I got up there with the cordless drill by climbing the handle. Everything else was still slippery. In went some fifty-cent roofing screws, and I removed the handle’s screws from the plug and gratefully slid back down it to the verandah roof, where I removed the remaining screw and re-inserted it into the steel to fill the hole.

I should mention that by this time I was walking back and forth on the verandah roof without hesitation or loss of balance. Over the last few years of variable health I had forgotten my muscle memory. Getting in and out of the window became much easier after the first debacle when I remembered that I had removed the top half of the single- hung window, as well as the lower half. Then I could step through.

The 2004 pine siding we built for the rear dormers of the house needs some maintenance and paint, and after five years of worried reluctance, I’m looking forward to the job. Today I remembered that I’m not really afraid of heights.

I’ve always been one for grabbing windows of opportunity in the weather when they present themselves, but yesterday our son suddenly announced that he would be along to pick up his M2 in two hours. Building a winter hide-away for this automobile was the rationale behind last fall’s renovation of the-garage-with-the-antlers which slouches beside the western end of the stone house on the property. Of course reality and fancy got in the way of historical accuracy, but I insist a twenty-panel, five section, hemlock and pine overhead garage door is only remuddling if you don’t admire fine cars and the convenience of remote controls. The oak man-door built to a similar pattern wasn’t intended to be ostentatious, but I didn’t have anything but red oak from which to make it. But I digress.

Charlie came to work on the car for eventual delivery to a business in Ottawa, but then all of the sudden he decided to take off, smooth track tires and all. I pushed him past the house enough for him to build up some momentum until he came to the sanded road over the hill, and from there on it was bare and dry for the short trip to Ottawa. Last fall he sent me video of a lap at Mosport where the telemetry showed this car at 142 miles per hour on the uphill straight after the hairpin turn. The same tires were not very effective on the ice of the driveway, today, though. He has winter tires for the car, but the rims won’t fit over the massive brake rotors on the front.

The text came at supper. “Would you mind bringing my truck to Ottawa tomorrow?” I agreed and suggested a time we could meet before looking at the weather forecast. Then I had to revise the arrival time to take advantage of a window of our own: clear roads until 11:00 a.m., according to The Weather Channel. Then came the follow-up note: “The front tires need air, and could you bring the air pig from the car trailer?” Like a fool…

At daylight the thermometer read 35 below F. We needed to leave in a half-hour. The old Tundra fired up just fine, then limped its front wheels over to the shop for several minutes of airing up. Then I struggled back through the snowdrifts to the car trailer, filling my boots until I discovered that the door barring my way to the air pig was frozen beyond opening without major tools and structural damage.

I struggled back to the truck empty-handed, only to find Bet all ready to go, with the Lexus idling in wait. “It started o.k. then?”

“At first the dash lit up but nothing else, so I shut it off and tried again, and then I heard the engine come on.” And so off we went.

The Tundra is a nice old beast, extensively modified for overlanding, and thus a bit heavy as a winter vehicle. It offers a cushy, relaxing ride, though the unfamiliar heater controls were hard to read in the early light. The 4WD indicator was flashing, though I had selected 2WD. Eventually after an hour or so of driving, it managed to shift out. The gas gauge was making significant progress across the dial, so I signalled a stop in Smiths Falls for gas. I pulled in and clicked the $150 button. It clicked off somewhere in the last third of that amount. Then I spotted Bet, sitting there in the idling Lexus. What about filling it now rather than later? I gestured her over to the pump and she pulled up on the outside, next to a diesel pump with a single gas dispenser. Fine. She shut off. I put sixty bucks into it and then Bet reported: “It won’t start! The lights come on but the engine won’t budge.” I intervened and things only got worse. Each retry produced less reaction from the car, until it completely ceased responding. Our Lexus had become a brick, a third of the way into an intricate journey, on the coldest day anybody can remember. I suddenly realized that my parka was nowhere nearly warm enough for the wind chill. The cold was hitting me with physical blows, numbing my mind and leaving me shaking. I dashed for the convenience store which is part of Drummond’s Gas. The next hour was a panic. The car was bricking a diesel pump, but the owner had closed it because the heavy fuel wouldn’t flow properly in the cold, so she wasn’t particularly bothered. Nice lady. A tow truck pulled in. I had called his dispatcher, but he was on his way to two other jobs and only needed gas. Nonetheless he had a look, holding his boost box with its cables. The brick had had its hood open before it solidified, but there was no way into the trunk where the 12 volt battery which powers the computers lives. The recovery guy couldn’t find anywhere to hook his cables, so he left. We hopped into the Tundra to warm up and get home to good internet to solve this mystery. The You-Tube videos from three continents confidently explained how to find the charging point for the positive cable. Any engine bolt would do for the negative. Confidently I came back with a large screwdriver and popped off the two fuse panel covers where everyone said there would be a funny sliding plastic thing which covers the brass contact plate which revives the brick. Nope. Juddering from the cold now, I retreated to the idling Tundra. I called the towing firm again about picking the brick up and taking it home. The lady said that they were slammed, and could I call another firm which might be able to come? I did. The lady said twenty minutes.

This guy came walking confidently across the parking lot with a jumper box. I popped the panel covers. He agreed there’s nothing in there. Then I mentioned that I had pried the hidden key out of the fob and found a place in the trunk latch where it will go in, though there had been absolutely no mention of that in any of the videos I had seen. He slipped it into the indicated space which I had tried, but failed to produce a result. His thumbs were stronger and warmer than mine. A wrench to the left, and the trunk lid opened. He touched his cables to the battery behind a little plastic lunch box in the right corner of the trunk, and the brick once again became our beloved Lexus. He had seen this feature often on BMW’s.

But the hood wouldn’t close. I told him I would deal with that, gave him forty bucks and gratefully sent him on to his next call. His thumb strength had saved our bacon this day.

This is the third time that hood latch had given me trouble, and I actually think I lubricate it regularly, because the consequences of neglect are so unpleasant. It wasn’t going to loosen up in this biting wind and I knew Bet shouldn’t drive it this way, so I sent her back to Forfar with the Tundra, and, gritting my teeth, I commenced the long journey home in an annoyed, nagging, Lexus.

The thing is, the car normally has a very hospitable and pleasing dash. When the hood is unlatched, though, alarms go off, no other data is available, and the car makes every effort to get you to stop driving it by making loud noises and flashing lights at you. I am deaf, but it was still wearing on me by the time we got onto the highway, and I was too frightened by the din to drive over 50 mph, so it was a long trip.

Bet ran the massive Tundra down the highway, over the hill, up the icy driveway, and then perched in the cab for long minutes, texting her memoirs to her son.

I booted the tractor out of the auto shop and ran the car in for hood and rear battery repairs. Brake cleaner got rid of the crusted grit and oil, and the hood latch functioned like a bank vault again. The battery was another matter. The car was pumping 14.6 volts into it as it idled, but it dropped to 12.1 when shut off. I tried a charger, which got it to 13.2, but a half hour later it was dead again.

So it’s time for a small AGM battery for the Lexus. This proved amazingly hard to obtain on a Saturday afternoon. So that will be a job for Monday morning, and I guess it’s time to stretch the Tacoma’s legs after a long rest. I moved it last week to plow the parking place and it lit up at the first touch of the key and idled smoothly.

From the day’s misadventures I rediscovered the value of a warm parka. Bet was a bit smug about her Canada Goose model, but at least she kept warm. Maybe I should buy one of them with what I didn’t pay out in towing fees and dealership charges today because I ran across a couple of fine, helpful people in my old home town of Smiths Falls.

UPDATE, 7 FEBRUARY, 2023. Problem solved.

Yesterday we drove into the service bay at Kingston Lexus and I had the parts guy load a new AGM 12V battery into the trunk. I paid $606 CDN including tax for the exquisitely packed Panasonic, a clone of the one I removed. The vent plug worked. Three, 10mm nuts came out and went in again. I hit the start button on the dash. The screen scrolled: “Installing program. Do not disconnect.” Then the full screen lit up but it would not go into park. On a hunch I tapped the start button again, and backed out of the garage. No problems whatever. I hope it lasts another nine years. Perhaps the high price is not for the electrical power output, but for the debugging which makes it work properly right out of the box.

In May of 2019 I rode the train to Hamilton to meet a fellow who had a 2014 Lexus es300h he wanted to sell. I was delighted to get access to this scarce car, and I drove it home later that day. The only difficult part was removing and replacing the licence plates in a sweltering parking lot. The car was and is great.

But a month or so ago, my neighbour Grant Stone, who has a mechanic’s eye for these things, commented that the left inner tail light, the one on the trunk lid, wasn’t working. I put it out of my mind until my friend Les took it for a drive this week and I saw the light out as he entered the garage. Funny, that bulb blew on the previous Lexus, the 2005. It was the only bulb to blow on the car in 14 years of service. And now this one.

I looked up the bulb so that I could be sure I had the right one before taking the liner out of the trunk to access the socket. I tried to do this right, so I called Kingston Lexus, parts department. I died on hold after ten minutes. Next to RockAuto.com, a reliable American catalogue of auto parts. It didn’t seem to know, and assumed all of the likely bulbs are amber-tinted. I called the Napa in Smiths Falls. Those guys are pretty good. The fellow on the phone couldn’t make sense of the same listing that had confused me. “You’ll just have to take the bulb out and bring it in.”

So there I was on a drizzly day, in the auto shop at the farm, with the trunk open, trying to figure out how to remove the twelve plastic plugs which pin into place this soft but stiff blanket which lines the trunk lid. It looked as though a screw driver might pry the top loose, or rotate it 90 degrees to free it. Nope. Broke the top off that one. My phone suggested using an upholstery tool, and the first one I found was one of those red prying things that come with a set of premium Mastercraft screwdrivers. I jammed it under the plug and wrenched it out without mishap. O.K., ten more. Of course I peeked after four and found the two halves of a wire coupler floating around in there, not connected, but I thought I should check the other side first, just to be sure. Then I came back, connected the couplers, and fixed the problem.

Maybe they don’t list tail-light bulbs for the car because they never fail. No kidding. Once I had the 2005 es330 to an indy shop in Kingston to repair a power steering leak. I had examined the evidence on our hoist and concluded that it needed a hose which cost something like $1100 at Lexus or Toyota. I decided to bite the bullet, but to have a pro look at it and make sure that was what it needed.

Actually, my wife insisted.

The car went onto the hoist and Brian, the shop owner, drove over to the Lexus dealer for the part while Derrick, the other guy, looked carefully at the repair, discovered it was the low pressure return line with a hole in it, snipped the bad part out and used some copper brake line and a couple of clamps for a perfectly effective repair. The golden power steering line went back into storage at the dealer, and the whole repair cost $200 in labour and shop supplies. The guys said that some parts are priced extremely high because the dealerships have to stock one, but they never get used.

It’s coming up to our fifth year of ownership of the hybrid, and this is the first thing to break, and it might have been the result of enthusiastic trunk lid slams over the years. The hood latch does require oiling, however, or it will put you right out of the car with a flashing warning signal indicating that the hood is not fastened. It is quite alarming. Lexus needs her few drops of oil on the hood latch, every six months, or else.

I had insisted that Les take the car out for a test drive because I was convinced he didn’t believe my mileage claims. So away we went with me coaching him to loaf and coast, and press the accelerator as if there was an egg shell under his foot. He was tolerant, and quite amused by the graphic display indicating just when the car was on battery power. I switched to sport mode so that he also had a tachometer, which often reads zero during gentle driving intervals. On our round trip he averaged 4.8 litres per 100 km, which was somewhat better than my claimed 5.1 for this route through quiet country roads.

The bonus is that all Toyota/Lexus hybrids burn regular gas.

Because of family schedules, Bet and I spent both Christmas and New Year’s days by ourselves this year, so we used the time to pursue less festive activities than the norm. Today’s task for me was to revive the motor in the photograph, and elderly Delta 3/4 hp 220 motor from a 6″ General jointer. Its user claimed that it would still start the jointer, but when the wood arrived, it would not cut it. I suspected an expired capacitor, but none was to be found. Instead, when I removed the end plate, I found this:

It was a combination mouse nest and shaving accumulation, but the poor motor was plugged. So we took it apart and cleaned it out. Reassembly took longer than the cleaning, but the old Delta was well made from good materials, and it tolerated a good deal of foolishness and still started up when asked. We had to learn the way of thinking of the motor’s builders in order to assemble it. The brushes were like new in a motor older than I am, but putting them back in was a head scratcher until we figured out the point behind a peculiar loop on the wire joining each pair of adjacent brushes. We found that loop was perfect to hold the brushes away from the commutator as we slid the assembly over the bearing. Then on subsequent attempts we discovered that the brushes can be jammed in the “up” position, to be released later to fall into place by a probe through the service ports after the unit is in place.

But replacing the two screws you see on the end of the motor was enough to drive a deacon to drink. The screws had twisted out of a pair of sleeves rather resembling empty .22 cartridges which slotted into their places on the inside of a large washer. Getting them into position and keeping them there was the problem. I decided that a bent and worn fibre/plastic insert was obstructing progress and deserved a visit to the shop floor. Then the assembly went together.

The worst thing about old motors is the length of the leads to the switch box. Connecting wires in tight quarters was aided by good lighting, but my old fingers just aren’t up to the traditional mar connectors with a bronze sleeve and screw, covered by a bakelite protector. Eventually I gave up chasing the little brass screws around the floor and twisted the more recent mars I found on the bench.

Two lengths of uninsulated wire connected the four brushes. I made sure that the long screws which hold the motor together were not touching these wires. Then we took deep breaths and hit the on switch. It started right up and ran smoothly, even though the end plate was a little off. A couple of sharp taps with a hammer rectified that.

Instructions in manuals list the motor installation as the reverse of the removal. We decided that #12 Robertson screws had not been available the last time anybody worked on this jointer, and that was why they used 1/4″ carriage bolts to sandwich the motor feet and two layers of 3/4″ plywood to the thin metal floor of the stand. Four screws and washers pinned the motor to the pad. We carefully tipped the jointer up enough to drive four more screws up through the slots underneath and into the plywood again, providing a satisfying level of tension on the belt. Then I hoisted the heavy cast iron belt shield into place, determined that it did not rub against the pulley, and bolted it into place. The thing was largely done.

John Ivison writes for a right-wing paper, but I like his work. For the most part he is well informed and fair, but in the following article he seems not to know what he is condemning on the part of those who drew up a banned list of guns.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/john-ivison-for-sake-of-national-unity-liberals-should-drop-hunting-rifle-ban

When he used my trusty Remington 870 “automatic” as an example of a banned firearm, I knew something was amiss. I have owned this reliable and versatile pump shotgun since I worked half the summer in Genge’s Red and White grocery store in Westport in the summer of 1965 to pay for it. I can state with confidence that it is not an automatic. That is the Remington 1100 of comparable age.

The original article rather strangely classified some antique firearms as restricted. The guns illustrated, including an ancient Parker side-by-side double barrel shotgun, definitely should not be fired with modern ammunition for safety reasons, but any experienced gun owner already knows that Damascus twist barrels cannot sustain the forces of modern shells. I have a bolt action 12 gauge shotgun which I have never fired because I have been told from the time I was six that if the barrel has a twisting pattern in the steel, it is only for display. Somebody gave me a fancy double barrel with one barrel split. I used it in my hunter safety classes.

Either the government committee decided to legislate rather than educate, or the opposition members are deliberately misreading the available information to attempt to embarrass the government.

The single shot Ruger lever action rifle is an unusual case for restriction. This is the rifle of the veteran hunter who is a marksman. I suppose the rifle has potential as a sniper’s weapon because of its ability to kill at very long range, but I can’t imagine anyone choosing it over almost any other rifle. The man I know who owns one of these rifles is about as Conservative and gentle as he can be, but banning this symbol of his pride will only annoy him.