First impressions of a used 4-passenger Mule
February 6, 2014
Today I stopped by the local farm equipment dealer to have a mid-winter look around. It’s a Kubota/Kawasaki dealership, and I noticed some extensively-used four-passenger Mules on special. The sales guy told me they’re back off lease. All of the returns are 2013’s. The one which interested me has 725 hours on it, blue/purple paint, not too many dents on the box, and a year left on extended warranty. The price caught my attention.
I drove it around. The EFI engine started well on a sub-zero morning. Electric power steering helps. The 20 hp Mule felt gutless after my much lighter 18 hp Ranger, which is eager to get to its 25 mph top speed. Mind you the sales guy says these engines are all about low-end torque.
Basically the Mule is ugly but highly functional, with belted, rollover-protected seating for four people.
They rent the Mules to the installers of solar farms, so there are a lot of them on the go right now. The only trouble they’ve had with them has been in fall when the mud balled around the drive shafts the day before has frozen hard. Then the operator jumps on and tears off in the morning, occasionally snapping a 1″ axle.
Downsides? The extra-seat Mule seems long and cumbersome. It’s polite and quiet, but slow. It’s not my Ranger. I caught myself wondering if it would do the little u-turn at the end of my driveway when I drop off the garbage on Wednesday mornings.
I think the Mule’s hampered in an initial test drive by its lazy 20 hp engine and considerable weight. Online I read that the suspension travel’s not great, in the order of 3″. Ground clearance is 7.1″, less than my 2WD Ranger’s.
Of course Kawasaki claims only that the Mule starts well, uses little fuel, and pulls strongly at low speeds. The shifter looked to me as if it would stand a lot of forward-and-reverse work while plowing snow. The Ranger’s shifter to me feels too fragile and notchy for such an application.
I watched a video of a Mule equipped with a good plow fighting with a foot of heavy, wet snow. It wasn’t fast, but it moved the snow pretty well. In another video I watched a Mule try repeatedly to climb a steep, sandy hill. It seemed to run out of power or traction, or driver ability, but to my surprise it didn’t make it up a slope I thought my 2WD Ranger would climb.
The Mule’s more tractor than sports car, but it might be a good machine to own.
Serious snow removal
January 27, 2014
For the last week I have obsessed about UTVs in the manner of someone gearing himself up to buy a new one. Of course I prefer the used market, but there’s a scarcity of worthy machines for the compulsive tire-kickers of Kijiji to examine.
The few UTVs which are for sale generally have plows attached and look as though they were equipped on the dealer’s order books as ultimate-snow-removal-machines-for-country-properties. That role in Eastern Ontario belongs to a 75 hp, 4WD farm tractor with loader and 7′ snow blower. Anything less is a toy.
I wandered over to You Tube to look for videos of Polaris Rangers plowing snow. There were quite a few, but each video featured a Ranger scraping along a driveway to remove three or four inches of snow. The videos never show the important parts: the beginning and end of each run. Where do the guys put the snow? What happens when the drifts get big? or the township plow completely fills in your driveway?
Snow storage isn’t part of the job; it’s the whole job. I can’t see how a small plow can help.
A couple of years ago I explained to an uncomprehending friend that the purpose of a homeowner’s snowblower isn’t to blow snow, it’s to take the snowbanks created by passing plows and pile them in places higher than the owner can reach with a shovel. For that reason alone the blower is worth garage space: it lets your driveway continue to operate at nearly full width until spring by finding creative places to store snow. The top of a hedge is a reliable storage place: usually your neighbour won’t catch on until he tries the same thing from the other side and discovers the space is already full.
Around Forfar we don’t even bother with snow until it gets up over six inches, and what would one of these expensive, light plows on a Ranger or Rhino do if it encountered the four foot drifts I had to deal with this morning?
Even with the tractor-mounted snowblower I’d had my work cut out for me. Fortunately the cab on the TAFE kept me dry while the blower tossed the snow up in the air, after which the wind whipped it away to become some other township’s problem. The first trip out the 600′ driveway wore out a 7/16″ shear pin, though. The new one held for the rest of the morning’s job, though as I broke for lunch the white stuff was drifting rapidly back into the gap I had created.
When the township plow goes through on my side of the road I’ll get to do the whole thing again. A tractor’s designed for the constant shifting and rough use it gets moving snow. Repairs to old tractors are relatively cheap. Rangers are wonderful machines for light hauls, dog-walks and people-moving. I just think repairs are too expensive to abuse these machines with snow removal duties.
Weaponized bitumen?
January 14, 2014
Looks to me as though the Alberta oil patch guys want to ship the bitumen from the tar sands out untreated because they want to send the pollution involved in processing the stuff downstream, as well.
Maybe it’s time for a new meme. How about “weaponized bitumen”? North American business extracts its revenge on China for cheap exports by strangling the country with emissions from its bitumen refineries.
And we thought smallpox blankets and the opium wars were unethical.
OPSEU – funded film: Is this an attack ad?
January 6, 2014
I found this video on Rabble and screened it in anticipation of a cheap attack ad directed at Tim Hudak.
Here’s the link without spoilers. You decide. Comments welcome.
Poorest Hamilton neighbourhoods vanish from new census.
January 3, 2014
This is too important to ignore.
Who is Valerie?
January 1, 2014
She appears on my TV screen as a rather timid woman not far from middle age, a pleasant person who may be a bit down on her luck. She tells of her desire for a career and how she got to take a mechanic’s course with a four thousand dollar grant from the federal government. Then come those execrable green arrows and the Canada’s Economic Action Plan logo.
So I decided to find out who “Valerie” really is. I got nowhere. The Action Plan website is all flash and no substance. I’ve seen sources better documented on entries to the annual Legion Poetry Contest. “Valerie” is nowhere to be found.
So I must conclude that the Harper Government has so come unglued from reality that it has now made up a fictitious character to fill a fictitious job funded by a fictitious $4000. grant from a non-existent program.
This “Valerie” character is a less-heroic knockoff of Winston Smith’s “Comrade Ogilvie,” a character he made up one day as part of his job revising history at The Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four.
My fondest hope is that the next government of Canada will draw its inspiration from a more nuanced source than a dated sci-fi novel taught in grade 11.
UPDATE, 23 January, 2014:
Today Employment Minister Jason Kenney uttered the following in a press conference about his jobs grant: “I don’t understand why it’s not widely accepted.”
Think, Jason. Could it have something to do with the $14.8 million of our money you spent last year on ads about non-existent grants for non-existent jobs? Normal people call that lying and it annoys them.
2013 in review
December 31, 2013
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
The days aren’t getting longer quickly enough!
December 28, 2013
I’ve been waiting anxiously for December 21st so that the days would get longer, but yesterday my wife called me on it when I allegedly said, “Wow! It’s 4:20 and it’s not dark yet!” for the third straight day.
So I asked Google and found a blog devoted to sunsets. Astro Bob explained that it takes about ten days for the sunsets to come later after the winter solstice. Something about elliptical shapes and straight lines. Interesting, though.
http://astrobob.areavoices.com/tag/sunset/
Anyway, there’s hope. By Valentine’s Day sunset will be at 5:34, an hour later than it was yesterday afternoon.
Here’s a chart:
Review: The Spark, a novel by John Kenny
December 23, 2013
The Spark
By John Kenny
Incendiary Publications, 2013
Donny Robertson probably sees himself as an underdog even though he has risen within the Toronto Fire Department to the rank of Captain. Newly placed in charge of the crew in a historic fire station in downtown Toronto, he allows his more outgoing colleagues to make the small talk while he hangs back. He does, however, show a tenacious sense of duty and he keeps digging into the circumstances of a recent warehouse fire which killed his best friend and left him scarred.
So Kenny’s character makes his way through The Spark. As he doggedly searches for the truth about the fire, he comes in for more unconventional injuries than a Dick Francis jockey, and he’s no better with his fists than Bennie Cooperman. For example when Donny at one point trades pot-shots with the villain, his flare pistol’s first blast glances harmlessly off a wall and gutters to darkness on the floor. The second sets the boat on fire. Donny’s eclipsed in the reader’s mind by the villain of the piece, a twisted killer-for-hire who goes to elaborate lengths to perform simple assassinations.
Perhaps Kenny became too fond of his villain in the writing of this first novel – it’s an easy vice for a rookie. After all, the main character is pretty flat, driven by his knowledge of the world of fire fighting and his conviction that he’s not good at marriage. Hardly sexy stuff. While Donny’s courageous to a fault in fire fighting sequences – these are highly interesting, by the way — he seems quite uncomfortable in the presence of his new probationary employee, Susan, and his backhoe-operator-girlfriend.
Kenny is careful to blame NSA for all of the spook stuff in the book, even though the “gausometer” was mentioned in Signals Intelligence retiree Mike Frost’s 1990’s Canadian tell-all The Spying Game. For why should a fire department procedural not take off into the spy genre in its second half? And why not on water? Donny-the-failure-at-marriage has a good sailboat and Kenny uses a plot twist to send him up the Trent to Tobermory for the climax of the novel.
Mysteries often degenerate into run-and-duck’s by the middle chapter. Clive Cussler built a lucrative franchise on far-fetched plots, seafaring action in exotic boats, and the willing suspension of disbelief of his many readers. Kenny keeps the pages turning quickly with a combination of action sequences, semi-comic romance, detailed looks into the world of emergency services and toxic chemicals, and a very luxurious yacht.
I hope we see more of Donny Robertson and his crew in subsequent novels.
You can find The Spark on Amazon.com in Kindle or Hardcover.
Lexus Service
December 20, 2013
The heater fan on our 2005 Lexus ES330 was noisy on its highest setting and I had learned to live with it. But lately it seemed as though its output was diminishing so I looked online for fan prices and videos on changing it out.
The job promised to be a lot easier than on a Volvo. I remember taking the entire dash apart on the 1984 wagon (including steering wheel and speedometer removal) in order to extract the very expensive fan. I don’t remember its cost, but it was enough that I tried to repair the old one.
The Camry/Lexus fan seemed cheap online, and the video showing the replacement procedure ran for only 15 minutes. Because Toyota parts are often surprisingly inexpensive at the dealer, I called Kingston Lexus for a price on the job. Service manager Tammy had charged me a very reasonable $850 for a timing belt job, and hourly rates slide lower on older models, so I figured she was worth a try.
I stammered my explanation until Tammy broke in and told me to remove the cabin filter and vacuum the cavity behind it clear. Then reach in and fish the maple leaves out of the squirrel cage. She suggested there’s no need to take the fan apart and that my heater would be fine after cleaning.
When I removed the glove box and filter (I’d watched a video on the process the day before) I discovered a plugged cabin air filter and a squirrel cage beneath it which was about as well-stuffed as a foam pillow with bits of maple leaves and miscellaneous fibrous material which made me suspect the actions of a mouse. Indeed, the top of the filter seemed to have been chewed a bit, though the fine gray fibres may have been filter material rather than mouse hair.
My coarse vacuum hose wouldn’t go into the air box so I blew the material out to the vacuum with compressed air. Everything went back together as it should. Heater fan action improved immediately.
The fan repair’s total cost? Twenty minutes of effort in the shop.
Not bad.
the Walnut Diary 