2002 Polaris Ranger 500 after 1650 hours: Review
November 15, 2012
My friend Tony ran across an elderly Ranger 500, a recent trade-in at the dealership where I bought my Ranger TM some years ago. He asked me to have a look if I got the chance.
We drove to Carleton Place today to see how much worse (or better) the vehicle in question was than our 2004 two-wheel drive TM. My first impression wasn’t good. The solenoid wouldn’t even click when I tried to start it. The booster battery didn’t work either. Then the sales guy remembered to touch the brake while starting, and it purred to life. Polaris put on a safety interlink which allows starting in gear. Once started, the engine ran very well. Bet was impressed by its smoothness and its quiet.
Two different guys at the dealership told me about the two Ranger 500’s at the Carp landfill which have run all day, every working day, since they were bought in the early 2000’s. I don’t know how they’d measure such a high number on an hour meter, but one’s supposed to have almost 17,000 hours on it. No motor job on either yet.
This test vehicle’s a trade-in from a farm with a maple sugar operation. From where the mud is caked underneath, mixed with bits of hay and bark, that makes sense. The clutch take-up is still smooth, so I don’t think it has ever towed a heavy trailer. On a farm there’s a tractor (or four) to do most heavy jobs. A large dent in the front plate indicates that somebody hit a rock or solid stump up front. That can happen. The radiator is untouched after a considerable impact from the front and below. The choke cable hangs out of the dash. It’s stiff and needs to be replaced. The torn seat bottom has been replaced by a borrowed one, but it still needs the heavy rubber grommets which allow the front of the seat to snap into the frame.
I didn’t check the oil or the air filter, but the machine looks to me as though it has had normal use around a farm over a long period of time. Farmers take care of stuff. Possible trouble spots? Old cable and leaking tires, upholstery. It needs new wiper blades. As nearly as I could tell the drive train works properly, as do the brakes and suspension.
I understand the engine received a rebuild a few years ago. The 500 cc single is smooth, quiet, and powerful in comparison to the detuned 650 cc twin in my Ranger TM.
The cuts/scratches on the right side of the plastic box likely came from an encounter with a barbed wire fence. The box is in better condition than the one on our TM. This one’s nice and straight. Ours droops over the axle a bit due to what I assume was an outrageous load before we bought it. Similarly, this roll cage is still solid. Mine needs a bit of welding. The TM’s “roll bar” is much less sturdy than the 500’s.
One reason why the 500 is set up to start in gear with the brake on no doubt is because of the involved procedure to get the thing into road gear. Shift from N to L to another N to H. Or shut it off in H and drive it that way until you need to back up. The separate shift for differential lock is the same as on the TM. AWD engages with a rocker switch on the dash.
The roof and glass windshield (with wipers) are desirable features, but I expected dust and exhaust fumes to make their way up around the box and into the cabin. I wasn’t disappointed. I understand a second windshield to close off the rear of the cabin is necessary for proper protection against weather and fumes. That said, I could likely get by with the slightly smelly air as the exhaust from the little engine wasn’t that bad.
After fifteen minutes of driving in a large flat lot I didn’t see or feel anything about the Ranger to ring any warning bells. I think this 2002 Ranger 500 is exactly what it appears to be, a solid machine traded in on a new one of the same model after 10 years of service.
I would own it.
UPDATE: 4 MARCH, 2013
The dealer replaced the choke cable and the front ball joints before he released it for sale. Turned out the joints were very bad. A session with the mechanic taught me the trick with the oil changes on a dry sump engine: after the sump is drained there is still a cup of oil in the engine block. Remove the spark plug and flip the engine over a couple of times to allow the pump to empty this residual oil out. Then add two litres and start. If the dip stick still reads high there’s a vapour lock, so squeeze the soft rubber vent tube from the sump to the engine and try again. This will usually allow the oil to pump through. When the dip stick reads properly, the job is done.
I put the 500 into my shop and went to work on the little things. The rear lights needed bulbs, but the wiring was intact. The wiper motor’s connection was weak. Tire pressures needed adjustment. When I retired my sedan cruiser to the corner of the back field I removed the vinyl side curtains from the expensive stern cover. They had sat for years in an equipment bag. It was the work of a couple of minutes, two spring clamps and a couple of feet of red duct tape to put a temporary rear windshield on the 500’s cab. It has served so well in that application — even with a couple of trailer rides on the highway, that it’s likely to stay there. The cab/windshield/rear screen is surprisingly comfortable against winter’s blasts.
AWD makes a huge difference with the Ranger in winter. While I wouldn’t take it out on the lake in 10″ of snow, it can go very well in six inches with occasional drifts deeper than that. The 500 has proven amazingly agile when climbing over obstacles, powerful enough to push through heavy snow and slush, and capable of sustained, 30 mph speeds over distances.
The 500’s engine starts very well in winter. There was a phantom electrical fault which drained its battery a couple of times, but we have traced that to a sticky light switch. The thing always smelled strongly of gasoline. Replacing the gas cap didn’t help. After a couple of weekends it quit starting and dumped the contents of its fuel tank onto the ground by way of the carburetor overflow whenever we operated the starter.
A call to the dealer revealed that it was a needle valve plugged with dirt in the carburetor, so off it came — a simple job except for the cables, which were tricky. It went back on minus one of the two screws which hold it in place. We’ll find the screw in the spring, with any luck. The engine runs very well once more.
The odd electrical glitch and crud in the gas line are to be expected from an old machine. Apart from that, it’s a surprisingly capable and pleasant UTV.
Tending the rambunctious garden
November 10, 2012
Author Emma Marris posted the following twitter comment two days ago:
Emma Marris @Emma_Marris Sitting down to write a piece about hipster hunting. Are the hipsters near you taking to the woods with (vintage) shotguns?
Today Emma Marris’s young brother-in-law Vanya Rohwer showed up at the farm with pal Martin Mallet. Clutching vintage shotguns, they pressed Charlie into a photo shoot to illustrate Emma’s forthcoming article in Slate, the online magazine.
Quite a bit had already gone on this Saturday. Tony had stopped by early to use the hoist to put on his winter tires, so I backed Charlie’s 968 out and we put his car up. That went well until we bogged down trying to find the oil filter on a Lexus IS350. No luck. Finally I checked online. Unlike my ES which takes a conventional spin-on filter, the IS has a replaceable internal cartridge filter. Problem solved. Impressive car from the underside.
By then Rob had arrived with his Jetta for a brake job, only the service station which repaired a flat tire for him a couple of months ago hadn’t given him back his little wheel lug key, so he had to run back to Kingston to get it.
Meanwhile Charlie’s Audi pulled in with a bad miss. While the cars scurried around, Tony and Roz contented themselves digging carrots and beets from the garden. Between meal preparations Bet and Cagney worked their way through a pile of pine and spruce boughs, arranging the outdoor Christmas decorations. My mother conscripted me to an hour of curtain hanging in her upstairs bedrooms.
Rob returned with the recovered lug nut key and worked until his brake job ran up against a VW stud shaped like a torx screw, only with 14 teeth. No way to get a wrench to fit something like that on a weekend. Rob’s car went back together and off he went.
Charlie and I grabbed computers to diagnose the problem with his faltering Audi. I found the trouble code with my trusty reader: P0171. Something about the air/fuel/crankcase vent. Armed with similar information from an Audi forum, Charlie beat me to the car, traced an air line to a broken plastic valve, duct taped it into place and solved the problem until he can get a replacement part. No surprise then that I had shattered the handle of the dip stick on this 2003 car when I replaced it today. Audi plastic seems to have an expiry date.
Then Martin and Vanya arrived and the photo shoot commenced. Everybody loaded everything (including several changes of clothes, various firearms, a bag of frozen squirrels and a random cow mattress out of the shed) into the Ranger and headed for the woods. What bugs me about ex-skateboarder Vanya is that he can step into the back of the Ranger. I can barely climb in over a tire.
Dressed in his bright orange windbreaker, Charlie took charge. Roz played the role of BOGO, essentially a mobile shadow to keep the sun off the camera’s lens during shots. Martin and Vanya wheeled out various props, the most impressive of which had to be the vintage Browning 12 gauge automatic Vanya brought. The entire barrel cycles back when it fires, an impressive sight, though there was no ammunition in evidence on this “hunting” trip. Martin made do with an elderly single barrel twelve for the vintage shots, but brought out his ultra-chic camouflaged Italian semi-auto at first opportunity. It is a fine shotgun and I would be proud to own it, too.
So the hunters became models while Charlie posed them at the edge of a field of corn and in front of an old walnut tree. Endless shots, setups and discussions ensued. The crew got away from me when they drove the Ranger to the other side of the woodlot to catch the setting sun and I came back to the house on my little tractor. Well after dark they arrived, grinning and hungry. Martin and Vanya reportedly spotted a large clump of oyster mushrooms halfway up a dead maple, so the modelling deal was off until they had finished collecting bags of these huge fungi. The oysters are very large this year.
I asked Vanya about the sister-in-law who is writing the article in question. Roz mentioned that Emma had spent many years as a staff writer at Nature magazine and currently has a book out. So I looked up Emma Marris, discovered that Amazon still had ten copies of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, and I ordered one. If she is as good a raconteur as her brother-in-law, the book should be a treat.
<a href="” title=”My snapshots” target=”_blank”>
Here are the professional shots:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliecroskery/sets/72157631978729754/with/8173946563/
From W.J. Markerink’s Website, 1995
November 5, 2012
I’d forgotten about a series of yarns I’d let Wilhelm, a blogger in the Netherlands, have back in the ’90s. Here’s one in memory of Dr. Douglas Heron, a good friend who passed away this summer.
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Jallopies
Someone once published a bumper sticker which said, “Never trust a man whose car cost more than his boat.” Some of the people at the Dock have obviously taken this to heart.
Rod has a very nice antique mahogany cruiser, upon which he lavishes time and expense. His car is a different matter entirely. He never seems to get around to taking out the tools and paint supplies accumulated in the trunk during spring launching, and Rod’s summer is built around attempts to get his most recent clunker to run well enough to make one more trip.
He drives elderly Volvos, which seem to have made their way to him because the previous owners left the country rather than deal with the electrical glitches in their cars. A man of infinite patience, he cajoles these otherwise solid crates into working for a few more years.
Rod claims that these cars run faithfully all winter, but that they seem to hate the grass on which they are parked at the Marina. Mornings are often punctuated with the grinding of the starter, followed by the hiss and smell of some ignition spray or other which Rod has found in his trunk. One spot on the road is notorious for tripping up Rod’s cars. One time Reggie was riding with him and was surprised when Rod suddenly pulled off the gravel road and waited. The car’s engine slowed, stumbled, and stalled. Rod got out, wiggled some wires under the hood, restarted the car and continued the journey. Reggie asked, “Why did you pull over there?”
“Oh, it always stops there on hot days,” was Rod’s reply.
Each car has had its idiosyncracies. The first had an annoying habit of lighting up every gauge and indicator on the dash, and then quitting. This required some wiggles to the wiring harness. The second’s fuel pump required occasional sharp impacts from a wrench — no mean feat when the pump was under the car, inside a housing. The last one has been perhaps the most taxing. Suffice it to say that, after three years of careful observation and interrupted rides, Rod discovered that an ice pack wrapped carefully around the distributor would restore the car to health and strength until the next time it quit.
One time we watched for six hours while he and his 12 year-old-son, Charlie, took the starter housing apart, soldered a wire from a battery cable onto it, and reassembled it, while leaving the main part of the starter still installed on the car. Why not take the starter out and replace it? Didn’t have a hoist, or a wrench big enough.
The funny thing is, this guy isn’t poor. He just likes the challenge of driving jalopies.
Rod’s patience is second only to Orville’s. A wealthy attorney with an exquisite cottage on Newboro Lake, Orville has the world’s ugliest boat, a battered 14′ runabout with an 85 hp. outboard he picked up from a colleague. In the last three years it has sunk twice, and had most of its exterior trim torn off by hostile encounters with docks. One strip of rub-rail hasn’t yet made it all of the way off, and lies twisted over the windshield.
This boat replaced a 16′ aluminum skiff which leaked so badly that all visitors to Orville’s cottage took to wearing farmer’s rubber boots. This one met its end one day in early spring when it bucked Orville out and took after him at full throttle for several hair-raising minutes. Orville dove repeatedly, and eventually got to shore, but he had lost his boots, and this was too much. The hull went to the dump, the outboard to a rental outfit.
Orville’s pride and joy is his Cessna 172 floatplane. Apparently he and his partner Kirk picked up the plane for a song, and then got another junker for its floats. They put them together and discovered that it would fly, if they could get the thing off the water.
A 172 has a notoriously lazy engine, and on floats it becomes strictly a two-seater, and that is if the passenger hasn’t eaten any breakfast and the tank is empty. Orville’s takeoffs have become legendary. At first we thought he liked to race us when we were cruising across the lake, for he would taxi up behind us, engine racing, and splash through our wakes. Then we realized he was trying to bounce off the waves and into the air. Another trick which would impress even a loon, I’m sure, was his tactic of bouncing ONE pontoon off the water, and gaining airspeed to get the other one up on the next set of waves. These cockeyed forced-marches across Indian and Newboro Lakes were more a source of merriment than inconvenience, until the day that Orville’s wife forgot to bail out the pontoons.
Orville and his wife had always seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time out at the Cessna’s mooring, pumping with an hand bilge pump, but no one thought too much about it until one morning someone saw that one wingtip had sagged down to the water’s surface, and the Cessna seemed doomed.
The rescue crew sprang into action. Wayne climbed into a skiff, started the engine, ran out to the mooring , where he promptly tangled his prop in the mooring chain. So much for Wayne. A couple of us in dinghies managed to disentangle Wayne and get him back to the dock. Then came the Cessna.
I guess the general thought was that, if it was sinking, the thing to do was to get it out of the water. But that’s not so easy with an object that sits on pontoons and has a board 35′ wide tied to its head. We hadn’t thought about the wings when we headed for the boat-launch ramp.
People on the dock quickly saw the problem and started moving boats to make way for the starboard wing, but nobody had the guts to move the oak tree on the port side. What to do?
Harry was in favour of cutting the wings off. Irwin wanted to let the thing sink, down in the bay, to let mud into the floats and seal them up. Orville was in court somewhere and not to be found. Saner heads prevailed and up the launch ramp it came, sideways, until it hit bottom. Then everybody lifted on the stranded pontoon, and up she came some more. There the Cessna sat, rather elegantly, actually, lording over the docks, fuse panels, carts and swimming area, this aluminum thing which didn’t fit the space.
I wasn’t around when the service crew came to pick up the Cessna. I understand that they pumped out the pontoons, somehow got the wounded bird into the air, and flew it to Constance Bay where they grounded it and rebuilt the pontoons at astronomical cost.
Not everyone on the Dock has been as patient as Rod and Orville. Reggie bought a slightly used Passat, and all went well until one day he ran out of gas. Something went wrong, and it wouldn’t start once fuel was added. Fuses started popping. Now Reggie is a Scotsman, and nothing if not careful with a dollar. He took to repairing fuses. This was amazing. He took a stray wire off a wrecked trailer, and bit strands of wire free from the others, then threaded them through the fuse to make the connection. Meanwhile he got madder and madder. Eventually the car started, but Reggie had already vowed we would never see that car again. The next week he had a new Nissan.
Then there was Veronica’s Fiat. Veronica is a new member of the community, and everyone admired her restored ’79 Fiat Spyder, at least until on a Friday evening a wheel fell off it (ball joint) when she backed down the twisting hill to the loading area. Great consternation swept the docks. You’d think these guys had never had a wheel fall off before. Then came the problem: what do you do with a ton and a half of disabled sports car on a 20 degree slope when there are six other cars waiting to unload and twenty more on the highway?
Wayne, the owner of the Dock, is nothing if not ingenious. Down came the lift truck. Under the car went the forks. Up came the Fiat, just like an errant runabout. Out to the parking lot. Block under the wheel. Veronica carefully locked the car up. We assured her that it wasn’t going anywhere, at least temporarily. A local mechanic had it going by the following Tuesday.
The trouble now is that everybody is buying SUVs. Rod’s 4Runner, Justin’s Pathfinder, Bill’s and Dick’s Explorers, Jeep Grand Cherokees’s too numerous to mention, have taken the fun out of fixing jalopies. At least the boats still misbehave…
A lesson from the Storm
October 31, 2012
Some of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s ads ridicule Barack Obama for never holding a job apart from the low-status role of community organizer.
But when New Jersey floods and catches fire, the New York subways are flooded, the Stock Market shuts down because it’s under 3′ of water and electrical transformers explode all over Manhattan as salt water corrups the power grid, the path to recovery runs through the office of the American President.
This week Americans face the question: whom do you want in a disaster, a highfalutin venture capitalist or a lowly community organizer?
Look at the steady hand Obama has shown in the early stages of the emergency. He looks as though he was born to do this.
CNN has painted Romney as increasingly irrelevant to the immediate needs of Americans. His negative comment about FEMA in early days of the campaign has come back to haunt the Republican candidate. George Bush bungled Katerina relief and deeply damaged FEMA’s reputation. We’ll see how Obama handles the storm’s aftermath.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may have tilted the election with his outright approval of Obama’s support for the people of New Jersey, but if ever there was a time for pragmatism in America, the time is now.
It took World War II to restore the North American economy after the Great Depression. Hurricane Sandy has provided the consumption of a major war, only without the loss of life. There will be reconstruction jobs for Americans over the next year.
Where’s Canada?
October 23, 2012
Last night I watched the third American presidential debate on foreign policy which pitted President Barrack Obama against his challenger, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Lacking a genuine context for the viewing, I opted for an American sit-com approach to the show and started a drinking game. I would listen for the key word “Canada.” It was a long, scoreless night.
It’s easy with a steady diet of CBC and National Newswatch feeds to inflate Canada’s importance on the world stage. Hell, we own a lot of land, a huge chunk of the Arctic, food, energy and minerals galore, and perhaps the only weather in the world which is improving with climate change.
But does Canada count? To judge from the foreign policy debate last night, the answer is a profound “no.” So why are Canadians so caught up in the political and economic struggles of the elephant to the south? We don’t want to get rolled on in our sleep, or blown away by a sneeze? Because it’s a great show?
I gravitate to Obama because I agree with his point of view, but like many who would vote their aspirations against their interests, I realize that he doesn’t give a damn about anything except his own country.
So what’s it going to take to change the position of the restless, sleeping elephant? A Canadian leader who is not a doormat? Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave Obama the finger when the President coyly winked to the north and blocked the Enbridge pipeline until after the election. But no one south of the border bothered to notice Harper’s grand gesture. A pipeline through the Rockies would just wreck B.C.’s salmon rivers out of spite. With some of its of surplus cash China would like to colonize Canada. But where would we be then?
Mitt Romney’s a lifelong summer cottager in Southern Ontario, but he’s also a big coal man. Oil sands acids are bad enough, but at least they flow north and they’re a long way away. Coal-fired Rust Belt industries blow their smog right over my woodlot in Eastern Ontario. Obama pays lip service to the concerns of the Sierra Club and Hollywood because there’s a lot of soft money along the coastlines of the United States, but I suspect he would cheerfully drain Lake Michigan down the Mississippi if it meant a block of electoral votes in Arkansas.
My favourite’s Martin Sheen for American president. He’s highly idealistic, appears well grounded in the classics, and on the many back episodes of The West Wing he is surrounded by a staff who genuinely care about striking a balance between power and the desire to do good. And they have that Total Crackpot Day once a month when all of the staffers have to listen to people who would otherwise be ignored by government. Canada would have a real chance to be heard on Crackpot Day.
Princecraft Starfish 16′ DLX SC review #2:
October 16, 2012
A reader confronted me: “I tried to find my way around your blog and couldn’t make any headway. I was looking for your series of reviews of the Princecraft. Where are #2 and #3?”
Blushingly I admitted that I hadn’t written them.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“I guess I’ve been more interested in producing content than curating a library.”
So here goes Review #2, wildly out of chronological order. Call it a flash forward or something.
The boat’s currently in the yard, hauled in advance of a promised storm which turned out to be a shower. But therein lies a tale. A couple of weeks ago I pulled a muscle in my leg and it grew steadily more painful until I took to bed for a week or so to let it heal. Calling upon his immense experience but little actual observation, my Portland G.P. insisted it was a hamstring pull. Paul, a physiotherapist at the Athens clinic, explained it was an adductor tear, and quite a nasty one with a lot of bruising.
Adductors enable one to raise the leg for steps over objects. I wasn’t looking forward to hauling a boat with limited mobility. Bet agreed to crew, so I backed the trailer down the ramp beside the slip, set the brake, and limped over to the dock. Stepping down into the boat wasn’t all that bad. I had the tall seat and a dock post for balance, and the wide step on the starboard side provided a good target for my lurch down into the boat. One more weight shift over the stiff leg and I stood on the floor of the boat at the stern, still balanced by the seat.
I released the stern safety rope which snaps into a towing eye, then reached over and twisted the key as I sat down. The engine purred to life. Bet tossed the two bow lines into the cockpit. The boat gently eased backward to where I could release the final stern line and I was away.
Did I mention it was blowing whitecaps in the bay? I realized I would have to run onto the trailer with a strong cross wind and occasional drifting patches of weeds. Oh well. Normally hauling a 16′ boat just involves taking aim and shutting off when it gets to the trailer. This would be a little more difficult.
I remembered a time-honoured boating adage: Good seamanship is never getting into a situation where you need to use it. Well I had a bum leg, an audience, and a strong cross wind, so I guessed I’d better raise my game a bit, anyway. Early on I’d installed a couple of tall PVC tubes at the corners of the trailer to protect the hull during capers like this. I decided to use the wind, so I raised the motor a bit to clear the silt along the shore and began to drift toward the trailer. This seemed controllable at low speed, so I slid the nose in quite close to the upwind post, just touching it, then gently nudged forward into the gap between the posts until the boat stopped. Bet hooked the winch into its ring and started to crank. I shut off and reached across to hold the upwind post to centre the hull on the trailer. That worked, so after she’d attached the safety chain at the bow I raised the engine a bit and asked Bet to drive ahead.
The part of this I had dreaded most was my departure from the boat on the trailer. No way was I going to jump today. But the step up out of the cockpit floor and the wide port gunwale allowed me to drop the bum leg over onto the trailer fender. The handhold on the cockpit bulkhead turned out to be ideally placed for this. Another step down the side of the fender and I was on the ground.
I’d always detested climbing over the side of the old Springbok when it was on its narrow trailer. The new trailer allowed me to make the climb with an injured leg. Bet and I realized right then that the Starfish and its matching trailer have a few ergonomic touches worth their weight in gold for someone with restricted mobility. It’s a great geezer boat.
Felix Baumgartner and an afternoon of excellence on the Internet
October 15, 2012
Like many others, no doubt, I watched online while the balloon inflated and the flight got underway.
The streamed transmission in HD worked splendidly on my MacBook Pro. During the time that not much was happening, I kept watching for the occasional bits of movement: what’s that guy doing with the lift truck by the crane’s back wheels? Those guys holding that big air hose must be getting tired. Are they ever going to set it down?
My immediate praise went out to the crane operator for his flawless handling of the launch. Everything rode on his timing and control. As the massive bag of gas swept up he drove the capsule down the runway underneath until the tether was vertical, and released it without stressing the thing in any way I could see.
From there Red Bull and Felix set up the story line as a legitimate piece of space travel/research, complete with Old Joe on the microphone. The subtext was that Joe, who set the records in 1960, was bringing along a successor. His kindly mentoring was flawless throughout the script. His voice was a welcome and unifying substitute for the babble of radio traffic and static I remember from radio broadcasts of early launches from Cape Canaveral.
Photography took quite a leap with clear images from over 40 miles away as the ground crew followed the craft. The jet stream now makes sense to those of us who were along in that capsule. We watched the displays: interesting how it gets cold, and then warmer as the balloon goes higher. It hovered, then took off again, no doubt due to the sun’s action on the bag. How much can it inflate before it bursts?
The jump was flat-out terrifying when we saw the image start to spin as Felix hit the sound barrier. Then after a beat, magically, he was stable again and we were back into our space-fantasy storyline.
Perhaps the classiest part of a very well done Internet show was the decision to open the parachute seconds before breaking the longest-freefall record. Nothing was said of it (classy again) but Old Joe will go to his grave with his record intact.
Red Bull has pulled off a major coup in sponsoring this event and telling the story the way they did, and I’ll never look at a Glad sandwich bag in quite the same way again.
Replacement Windows in a Brick Victorian
October 2, 2012
While trivial workshop stuff is a sitting duck for the blogger, large projects can be so all-encompassing that there’s no room for journal reports. I guess that’s the way it was with the windows in the brick house. It has taken a pulled hamstring and a day of boredom in bed to let the ideas coalesce into a report.
The most conspicuous evidence that the project has progressed beyond the first stage is the little pile of bits for my impact driver which has sat untouched on the kitchen counter for a couple of days. For a week they made the trip from one pocket to another, everything coming to a halt if one of them was lost.
The green Robertson fitted the screws which held the seventeen aluminum storms in place. The red Robertson drove the 2” screws out of the big plastic jar which followed me around, first to secure the new windows in place and then to fasten them permanently. The 1/8” drill with 3/8” countersink got me through one layer of vinyl at the bottom of each window so that the screw wouldn’t interfere with the window mechanism. Phillips and flat bits were largely passengers in my pocket, though they were pressed into service occasionally to remove old screws in window trim which were too firmly attached for the chisel and mallet.
When it came right down to it, the window installation was pretty simple. Remove the storm window. Pry off the interior trim. Lift out the bottom window. Chisel out the ½” separator between the two halves of the window. Remove the top half. Measure for the base adapter and the side fillers. Machine them in the shop. Caulk everything. Set the 11 degree base piece in. Tack in the 7/8” by ½” pine fillers over the caulk beads with 2” galvanized finishing nails. Drop the window into the space. Screw it in with six screws, taking great care not to over-tighten. Foam a bit. Let dry. Check operation of windows. Foam some more if it’s o.k. Clean up.
I should emphasize that this flurry of activity wouldn’t have gone smoothly without a few preconditions:
1. confidence that the new replacements from Marlboro Windows in Ottawa would fit;
2. easy access to a well-equipped woodworking shop;
3. abundant scaffolding and ladders of various sizes.
Brian Doherty of Rideau Lumber in Smiths Falls came to the house and in an hour produced his list of dimensions. He told me he allowed ¾” for side clearance (measured from the vertical surfaces after the chiseling was complete) and ½” top-to-bottom clearance (measured from the window sill to the highest point in the window frame the tape could reach). This is accurate to the best of my recollection. On the estimate, however, he ordered windows 1″ shorter and 1″ narrower than the rough openings listed on the invoice. A few windows were out of square, but Brian’s generous space allowance was just right. What I would infer from this (now that all of the windows have fitted perfectly) is that window measurement is an art, and it might be a good idea to have an expert do the measurements.
There was space for foam, but not too much. I did, however, decide to add ½” fillers to the exterior stops after the caulking bead on the first window shrank and let go on one portion of the joint. This was a ground floor joint and easily serviceable, but for nine of the windows I would be up petty high, and I didn’t want to make any return trips for leak repair in the middle of the winter.
On the first window I also put in too much foam. Even the low-expansion stuff will jam the window if squirted in liberally. This is where the burnt-fingers technique with its constant feedback loop works well: as the window grew tight, I tightened up the screws and added a few more to push back on the foam. That worked. Having learned my lesson, I extended the foaming over three sessions from then on.
And so the windows went in without much drama. The double hung white vinyl Marlboro product was what the owner had promised when I visited the factory in Ottawa before making the order. They were dimensionally accurate, solid windows with good hardware. As Brian Doherty had told me, “Installers love them.”
The other variable was my woodworking shop within easy walking distance of the project. The 8” General jointer with its 3 hp motor proved very important: the adapter plate was an 11 degree taper where I cut a piece of 2” pine down to a wedge 7/8” thick on the narrow side. The jointer cheerfully chewed through a lot of pine to make the wedges. Because I have made beveled panels freehand on the jointer for many projects over the years, I could make these beveled pieces easily.
The 10” Rockwell Unisaw did the ripping without fuss. I quickly realized that the filler strips shouldn’t be one-offs. Too much time would be involved, so I ripped up a few 7/8” clear pine boards and then planed the strips to the proper thickness, thereby providing a jointed surface and predictable dimensions for a bunch of material.
What I hadn’t anticipated was that the window installation would be only part of the project. The first window sill which came apart in my hands changed all of that. I suddenly needed 4” material for a new sill, so out came the clamps. I felt very glad I’d bought 300 bd. ft. of dry pine and planed it to 2” and 1” before the project started. Lumber yard 1 ½” plank would have required a lot more work to get ready to make a sill. With a 9” X 48” x 4” blank glued up, I reconstructed the sill from the pieces removed and dropped 25’ to the ground (the ground slopes away steeply from the south side of the building).
But the sill’s just a 4” thick piece cut on an 11 degree angle on both edges, sized to fit the space. Ripping 4” material on a 10” saw is a pain, so I just chewed the 4X9 into place with the jointer. I took off about an inch.
I put a couple of coats of white exterior stain on the sill, then tried setting it into place. Never did take it out again. It was fine. I foamed and caulked, then put a wider adapter plate over the top to cover the joint between the sill and the interior sheeting. The other plates were 3 3/8″ wide. This one was 5″. Then I dropped in the window. The repair cost me a day or so, but the work wasn’t difficult.
Gradually I was coming to realize that the real work of the project would be at the painting stage. In the late fifties or early sixties the aluminum storms had gone in over a wide bead of caulk which had hardened in most cases, but on the north side of the house remained gooey enough to confound sanders and scrapers. Fortunately the sun on the south-side windows had baked the caulk to where it would chip off.
The only new tool for the project was a Mastercraft 12v cordless sander/scraper I found on a half-price sale at Canadian Tire for $70. With a thin stainless steel blade it dislodged the caulk on the upper windows, but produced a rough, unpredictable surface. So I recharged and went at the window casings with 80 grit sanding pads and the same machine. This worked. The very light tool proved well worth the purchase price as it fitted into my back pocket for the long climb to the second floor. Battery life with the suspiciously small lithium power pack was considerably better than I expected. On the lower windows I wheeled out the Dremel 120v equivalent and gloried in its abundant torque and noise, but the lightweight portable detail sander has done a fine job so far.
Next:
Dealing with bees, scaffold, caulking and dust.
Jason Kenney’s Creepy Email
September 24, 2012
OTTAWA — An email extolling the Conservative government’s record on gay rights has some recipients wondering how Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney knows their sexual orientation.
The email from Kenney’s MP’s office sent Friday trumpets the Conservative government’s initiative to help and gay and lesbian refugees, particularly in Iran.
The message was titled “LGBT Refugees from Iran” and was addressed “Dear Friend.” It referred to efforts by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird “to promote basic freedoms around the word, to take a stand against the persecution of gays and lesbians.” It also provided links to media reporting on the Conservatives’ efforts to protect LGBT refugees.
The email appears to have been targeted to the addresses of people who are openly gay.
Ottawa Citizen writer Glen McGregor suggested in his story that he would like to know how Kenney’s office got the list.
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Yep, it would be really interesting to get an answer from the PMO or Kenney’s office on how they made the selections for this mailing list.
Let’s see:
-Signals Intelligence monitoring Internet and cell phone traffic? Possible, but highly illegal and lacking deniability. Potential trouble with the Cousins (Britain and U.S.) over security breach.
-Police and other officials jumping the gun on Vic’s surveillance legislation? Probable, but so unconstitutional as to get the courts in an uproar. Serious demonstrations fodder.
-Mailing list purchased from vendors serving the LGBT community? Legal, but embarrassing for the victim and a sure vote-loser.
-RCMP files of university students who attended demonstrations? Very ’70s and illegal even then, but the Mounties aren’t known for their strict adherence to the straight and narrow path.
-Photos of Gay Pride parades coupled with facial recognition software?
-Trojan horse question on polls identifying LGBT sympathies, sold to PMO.
And the answer likely is:
-Census data: same-sex adults occupying a dwelling.
And the real question is how much money extracted from the tithes of social conservative Canadians has been spent to cozy up to the LGBT community?
Any others?
Glen McGregor posted an update. The names and email addresses were “plucked” from an online petition.
Richmond had never directly emailed Kenney’s office, she was one of nearly 10,000 people who electronically signed a 2011 online petition supporting a gay artist from Nicaragua, who was then facing deportation.
the Walnut Diary 