the Walnut Diary

Roz starts a post-doc at the University of British Columbia in a couple of weeks, so they’re moving to Vancouver.

I’ve been driving for three days: hauling Charlie and Roz’s stuff “home” from Kingston for storage (2 trips) and running in to Stittsville yesterday after a tap extractor.

Therein lies a tale.

A Porsche 996 will accept roof racks. They cost $350 US and they bolt into specific fittings in the roof which are hidden below tiny doors which fold open to accommodate them. The threads are kept fresh by the insertion of soft metal plugs in the holes, which of course corrode in place, and are so soft that three in four had to be drilled out on our son’s 1999 model.

So Charlie drilled away, tapping new threads in as he went. This is a fussy job because the headliner is right below the mechanism and tight to it. This eliminates the use of penetrating oil or any other lubricant as a strategy when the headliner is made of light brown leather.

Things went well until I came out to the shop to see how it was going. Charlie was talking to me at the time, and thus a bit distracted while removing the tap from the last hole. It bound a bit. He twisted and POP! The tap broke off in the hole.

Nothing worked. He took the car to a machinist in Kingston on the assumption they would have a tap extractor. They didn’t. The idiot made a mess of it until Charlie took the car away from him.

I googled until I found a firm in Stittsville, Newman Tools Inc., which keeps them in stock. 3 hours later I was back and Charlie had the broken tap out. Then he drilled and tapped the hole oversized for an insert left over from the thread-repair kit for the engine job on the 968 he sold to buy this one.

Order restored. Now Charlie can install the racks, load up the bikes, and drive to Vancouver with a carload of cutlery and bedding. The rest he’ll buy at Ikea in time for Roz’s arrival by airplane.

But first, a last weekend at Mosport with the new car (without racks).

Newman Tools Inc.

UPDATE, 2 October, 2012:

The bikes rode well on the new racks and Charlie arrived in Vancouver on schedule, quite pleased with the 996’s performance and the respect other drivers give it on the road. We’re still mailing boxes of essentials which wouldn’t fit into the car, but the epic journey across the northwestern states went well.

No buyer’s remorse yet.

Yesterday’s task involved the collection of a couple of loads of scattered walnut branches from the pruning of a three-acre patch of seedlings. I liked the combination of the HSD Kubota and the narrow trailer. When working alone one appreciates the ability to leave a machine simply by stepping off. The last time we did this task I pressed my wife into driving the Bolens G174 on a 4X6 utility trailer. The trailer was a tough fit through some areas of the nursery, and of course the geared Bolens is hard to get on and off, so a driver was needed.

Unloading branches packed into the box of a utility trailer is a drag. In anticipation I had removed the tailgate from the new dump trailer. I just backed each load up to the compost pile, tipped, moved ahead a bit, lowered and drove away. Beautiful.

But today was the real test. An excavation contractor sells gravel, fill and topsoil from his yard two miles along the county road in Crosby. Our driveway needed some work, so I resolved to walk the Kubota up to Crosby for a yard or two of gravel. I had inflated the tires to 30 lb for the project. The loader operators were careful sprinkling gravel into the apparently-fragile trailer box. I made two round trips. Each took 54 minutes, including unloading. The turf tires warmed up, but the bearings remained cool.

To unload the gravel I removed the bottom pins of the tailgate to make a little dump truck. This allowed the load to spill out while supporting top corners of the side panels against the rush of aggregate. The second load was considerably heavier than the first, nearly filling the box.

The hoist wouldn’t lift the slightly forward-biased load when it came time to dump.

When I first bought the tractor I discovered that the auxiliary outlet tested at 2600 p.s.i. and the book said 1900, so with my neighbour Peter’s help I turned it down to 2000 p.s.i. Today I reversed the procedure, tightening the screw first a quarter turn, and then another quarter turn, until the hoist could lift the heavy load. My neighbour had told me that that relief valve has no effect upon the rest of the tractor, and at worst a hose might spring a leak from the extra pressure.

With the corrected pressure setting on the tipping lever, the dump went well. I see no reason why this little hydraulic trailer shouldn’t see a lot of (admittedly careful) use over the next few years.

It looked too fragile to work, even in the Kijiji ad. I kept looking. But tipping trailers in North America are for the highway, to be towed by huge pickup trucks, cost a great deal of money, and take up too much space.

I needed a replacement for my trusty red 4X6 trailer which had served since 1995 as a mobile workshop, tool hauler, crushed stone and sand hauler, and so on. More times than I can count I took it through the scales at the quarry with upwards of 3400 pounds of payload. It was also narrow enough to back in the long alley at Martin’s house in Kingston, so it had the honour of emptying his backyard on several occasions after his year-long renovation.

Speaking of renovations, that’s why I wanted a trailer this time which could dump. Clotted shingles are a royal pain to unload from a trailer. There must be a better way (this side of hiring a contractor) than forking them out of a metal box.

It was a load of shingles which did Little Red in. The counter guy at Rideau Lumber turned out to be a fine salesman, and before I knew what had happened I had agreed to the purchase of 28 bundles of shingles, which the fork lift operator cheerfully plumped onto the trailer and slid the pallet neatly into position for the trip to Forfar. My tires were fine, but the axle broke on the first corner, plumb rusted through. Determined to prevent a traffic jam, I dragged the disabled trailer to a quiet spot, and then tried to get back to the Rideau Lumber yard with the right tire rubbing against the box to support the weight of the shingles. The tire and wheel gave up with a loud bang a block short of refuge. The Rideau Lumber boom truck responded to my call for help and loaded the shingles onto its commodious bed, and almost as an afterthought, my wounded trailer as well. Little Red made what turned out to be its first final trip home.

I couldn’t find a replacement for a heavy duty 4X6 trailer. They don’t seem to make them any more. So it sat there in the yard, scrap metal, until Princess Auto had a sale on axles, wheels and tires. $400 and a morning of work and Little Red was back from trailer heaven.

But all was not well. Red’s fenders were rusted through. The tail gate required a sledge hammer to open and close. A winter of neglect with a load of salted sand pretty well did the poor old trailer in. After a trip to the quarry last week I had to use a bar clamp to pull the sides together to enable the sledge hammer to do its work. Little Red was past its useful service life, suitable now only for lending to friends who didn’t check for running lights, or for storing scaffold.

So I revisited the dump-trailer ads. A beauty turned up on Kijiji for $3200., everything I could want in a dump trailer, and more. It was the “more” which gave me pause. My old Tacoma can only tow 3500 pounds, and this new trailer could easily haul twice that with its brakes. But a precious implement like this new one would need indoor storage, and that would mean seven feet of width in a 20′ wide building. I could put a boat or a sports car in that space. And the 4X6 is already too wide for some of the trails in the woodlot and the aisles among my 15,000 little trees. So the Hamilton hydraulic trailer would end up a highway vehicle, used about ten days per year.

Truth? I shuddered at the thought of two trips across Toronto in my stiffly-clutched truck. My last trip took an hour and 56 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic and I spent the last half terrified my clutch leg would give out before I could find a gravel shoulder. It’s possible to feel claustrophobia on an eight-lane freeway and I had no desire to repeat the experience.

Perhaps “Almost everything you always wanted in a trailer (in the Ottawa area)” would be a better approach. I called the flimsy trailer dealer again. He seemed confident in the product because he had sold a lot of them and his mechanic has one on his hobby farm. I asked him to explain why the hoist uses one hose only: where does the oil go on the return trip? His answer was basically, “It works. Come and look.” So I drove two hours north with the trailer we built for the Ranger attached.

The sides looked light and flimsy, but as the-mechanic-who-owns-one explained, “Look at the underside. It’s very strong.” He ran the hoist up to reveal the heavy metal underneath. Without trepidation I stepped onto the again-horizontal bed. “I haul 10′ logs out of the woods on it. I just take off the sides and the front and tie the logs on. It works fine behind my 60 hp tractor. I have also heaped it with sand and gravel. To dump gravel I disconnect the bottom of the tailgate so it works like a little dump truck and still supports the sides.”

Perhaps because I didn’t know how I would use the thing, I asked them to load it up, and home we went. Buyer’s remorse could come later.