Shabumi

Sorry I haven't been able to do much more than lurk for a while. Wow, everyone has been doing some great stuff. The weather's been nice so I've been too busy to do much in the shop, but with a few spare minutes a day for the last few weeks I've managed to put together a paper template, cut out the pieces from some older scrap steel siding. No galvy that I've seen, and it was rusting through in places, but I put it through a burn pile just to be safe. BLO blackened a piece to see if I liked the contrast from the black and brass, which I do, and am nearing a dry run to be sure it will all fit together. So far the holes line up *fingers crossed*. Next on the list is to make the tip of the beak out of some spare brass sheet I had from a class last year and to make the ~100 brass rivets out of a bunch of 1/4 inch long pieces of 16 gauge brass wire to put it together. I also need to get some "cooling" herbs to stuff in the beak to protect me from the miasma. Oh and I found out with a bit of web-fu on sizing rivets that the diameter of the rivet shank should be somewhere between the thickness of the thickest piece in the grip and 3x the grip (grip= total thickness of the pieces being riveted together) I hadn't seen it mentioned yet on IFI so I figured I'd throw it out there. Hmm, I'll post a picture when I figure out how, I reduced the size to 278kb and it still won't load.

That's wonderful news. Glad to hear your doing better

Thanks. I appreciate the support. It might be a few days for the next instalment. I've got something bigger planned, I just have to get the template right with paper before I put it on metal.

No I hadn't, and thanks for the great read. Though I certainly don't agree with the political views of Mr Heck, I must say that was quite the endeavor to try and breed his way back to an extinct animal from multiple related species. I could probably go on forever on this subject, but I realized that I hijacked bonnskij's thread so I'll leave it at that.

I squared, octagoned and rounded this triangle, and no matter how I spin it, it always ends up doing a 180 Being a California square, I resemble that remark. But as long as we're on the same level, I'll let it hang

I have no tolerance for people like that either. We've had a few Pyr with our sheep before, but they weren't strong enough for protection when a pack of multiple neighbors dogs got into the field. Which is why we now have the Anatolian/Akbash's. That and they don't have all that hair, which gets full of foxtails and hich hikers and becomes miserable for the dogs all summer. The gaurdian breeds are quite smart, they can tell the difference between a threat and a mistake. We have a cultural center right next to our sheep field and I have "saved" a few of the attendees pets who made it through the electric fence and can't get back through. The guardians barely looked up at them except to let out warning bark and kept themselves between the pets and their sheep. But if a predator got in, then nothing could save it. I've found 2 mountain lions and a couple handfuls of coyotes who tried to get a sheep or lamb while they were on duty. The local bears respect the electric fence too much to even try to get to in.

Haha, I knew I was leaving myself open, but I couldn't think of another way to describe it. Less triangle doesn't have as good a ring to it. And probably wouldn't ring as well either

I know I've been lagging on my goal, so here's #13. A request from a friend for an Oroboros triangle. The angle of the picture and the ridges of the tin roofing makes it look less square than it really is.

She's gorgeous. Your right about that being the hardest part, but I'm glad to hear that you let go, for her sake. I've lost more dogs than I'd care to admit, and it never gets easier. If it does then you should be worried. I grew up hearing a saying about running a ranch, but I find it fits into all aspects of life. To be successful you need 3 things, the brains to know what to do, the grit to do it, and the heart to feel for it afterwards. I'm glad to see you have the heart

Sounds like you've got a special one there. I'm sorry to hear her flame is flickering. The brightest candles burn the quickest. I've felt the balloon your talking about, which is why we donate a few puppies each year to make a wish and wounded warrior. Depending on if we have any available when they call. Completely free of charge. The fact that the puppies can make that big of a difference in someone's life is payment enough.

Ok I'll throw it on the oven for a bit to temper it. Great looking hammer and scrolling fork CC and JHCC

Hey, if you hadn't said anything I never would have looked. It can be very impressive watching a good dog work stock. We had one red border collie "Butch" who my dad won the Klamath Falls cowdog competition, which is one of the biggest on the world, in 99 or 00. I believe the top 5 every year past that all had his blood in them, even last year. He was truly impressive. You didn't have to tell him anything, he knew his job and he did it well. We had a bull on the fight, not wanting to be loaded up. So we sent Butch out and told him only one word "hold" which is his command to not let anything past him and when the 1800-2000lb bull broke from the group, 55 lb Butch just walked calmly up to the bulls head and stared at him. When the bull put his head down to try and take Butch, he jumped on top of the bulls head and bit like crazy before jumping off and stepping back, still staring down the bull. The bull tried again and Butch jumped on and took half the bulls ear off before stepping back. The bull bellowed and ran straight for the trailer, but before he could get there, Butch grabbed a back foot and pulled it out from under him, just once, to show who's boss and walked calmly back to us without even looking back at the cows. After that, all that bull had to see was any kind of dog and he calmed down and went to the center of the heard. Butch was a special one. One of the few dogs I've seen that were born alpha, he never had to fight for it. All the other dogs knew it from the time he was born. One of our females who didn't like any male dog, rolled over and peed when she first met him as a 8 week old puppy. This made him one of the toughest dogs to train. Herding is controlled hunting, and the alpha controls the hunt so you MUST be alpha over your herding dogs for them to do what you want. My dad was the only one to manage to be alpha over Butch. I'm a fair hand when it comes to working dogs, and I knew all his commands, but Butch completely ignored me when I tried to work with him. I was below him, and I accepted it. I could work the other dogs if I needed to.

I haven't got that far yet, I still need to cut the top die to size. I may leave this one natural so I can see how long it takes to mushroom too much. I have enough left of the rest of the spring I can make plenty of other dies. I did normalize the spring when I had straightened it out. I brought it up to orange red (in outside daylight), hammered flat then let air cool. Should I still stick it in the forge to normalize the whole thing? I didn't preheat before welding, but the auto quench could only be from air cooling, which would bring it back to the same state where I started welding (I think), but this welding is all new to me. If I should normalize again, what color should I bring it to before air cooling? Or should I cool slower in an ash bucket?

The stickers say 75-25

It turned out to be 75-25 in the tank of the welder. So after I found and pulled out a welding hood from my uncle's stuff. I cleaned a bunch of galvy (I ground it off with and angle grinder outside away from my normal work space, masked and standing upwind) and rust off a small piece of 2x4 welded wire fence I welded (again outside and upwind) it to a frame that's been sitting in the barn for a hammer rack. I also ran a BUNCH (5 layers deep, along the whole piece)of beads on a piece of 3/8 truck spring before making this guillotine tool with the next layer of the spring. I cut 1 piece in half lengthwise for the sides, then full sized on both faces top and bottom, on top of a full size piece from the center where a bolt holes is so I can push the bottom bit out of needed, welded to some square tube for the hardy hole. I clamped it tight with 2 layers of newspaper around the moving pieces. The spring was at the thickest end of the welders capabilities but I've hit it a few good times with a hammer and it seems to be solid. It's still a little tight, but I can take off some more scale from the bits to make them slide better. This picture is after I hit it with a wire brush on an angle grinder to see the welds.

You could make one heck of a treadle hammer with that log

The liger is a male lion with a female tiger. In lions the females pass on the size restricting gene, while in tigers the male passes it on, giving the size discrepancy to the ligers and tigons. Funny thing about ligers/tigons is that they can produce offspring, unlike most true hybrids like mules. Showing that lions and tigers are more closely related than horses and donkeys. Lions/tigers and cheetahs can't reproduce even though they are from the same continent, but pumas and cheetahs can even though they are half a word apart. Large cat group vs small cat group I remember hearing about the foxes bred for temperament. If I recall correctly they took "wild" foxes from fur farms with the requirement that the fox showed curiosity or indifference and no signs of fear or aggression (those that didn't cower in fear or attack). Then through selective breeding of that temperament they found certain traits that may be linked to domestication like spots, curled tails and a "bark". The problem I saw witht the experiment is that the foxes weren't wild. Though there wasn't any selective breeding, they had been bred in captivity for their fur since the 20s. With pictures in the 30s of foxes with similar marking from some of those same farms they chose from. So the genes were already there in receive form in a restricted gene pool, they just pulled them to the surface. The hybrid pigs can be noticably larger, but thats only if they get the right mix of genes, you can also get some that wont ever get as large as either parent breed, so its kinda a crap shoot as to what you'll get. We've been breeding pigs most of my life, and we prefer hybrids to pure bred stock, but we use pure breeds when introducing outside blood. Our current sows are red wattle/Gloucester old spot/Hampshire crosses (with some Yorkshire and large black way back in the bloodlines as that's what we started with). Our next new boar is going to be a heritage Duroc, we will cross him on to our best sows. We have other pig breeders with similar bloodlines to ours, so a son will go the them and we will get a son from them the next year and this is who we will use for the next generation of piglets for breeding. Our next 2 outside blood boars will be Hampshire and red wattle to pull them back to what we like (~4 and ~8 years from now, respectively). This will add outside blood and hybrid vigor but still be close enough bloodlines to keep our consistency, which to us is crucial. We'd rather have 8 consistently good piglets vs 3 great ones, 6 good ones and 3 poor ones, which is more likely with outcrosses. Until we get that crossed boar we will use the Duroc for terminal crosses (those we won't keep for breeding) so we can still have pork. The Duroc puts on great muscle, grows faster and has great marbling, but we don't want to keep too much Duroc blood as they are known to have nasty dispositions and aren't great mothers, but the piglets we will get from the cross bred boar will be more like their mothers temperament. The first requirement we have to keep any of our animals is a good temperament, mothering ability is also shares that spot as both are heredable. No use keeping a nasty sow who won't mother her babies. We keep a similar mindset with our Dachshund lines, though our outcrosses come from breeders with no related blood because you can't sell a pure bred dachshund with some whippet in the background. Sorry this post became long winded, it wasn't my intention, but once I started typing I couldn't stop.

We teach them to bite at the head as the terrain we gather our cattle in is steep and extremely brushy open range, so we can send them ahead to stop the cattle instead of chasing them into the brush where we can't get to them. The Huntaway is trained to find the cattle and bark when he's found them, so we wait on a ridge top and wait for the barks. When we start moving the cows, the Huntaway follows and the bark helps move the cattle along with the borders at the flanks keeping everything in a group, ready to get ahead if they need to. A heading dog can heel very well, but a heeler can't be a header. We have a 3rd border collie who isn't strong enough for heading cows, but she's great for sheep and she does fine pushing the cows and backing up the others if they need it when we gather. We also send the Huntaway ahead to bark and hold certain roadways that we don't want the cows to go down

There's an old article from our local paper that is posted at some of our local businesses. It is of Twain doing a lecture early in his career in 1866 in Grass Valley, the town next to mine. It states that Twain would do great feats of sleight of hand after his lecture, which turned out to be to make 6 shots of whiskey disappear and to leave town without paying his hotel bill.

Thank you for your concern, though if the bad guy wanted to get in he'd have to first get through an electric fence, then our sheep and 4 Anatolian/Akbash crosses, a 6 ft welded wire fence, then a pack of Dachshunds, another double fence, then they'd have to deal with our 2 European standard dobies and 4 house Dachshunds. If we're really worried we can loose the 2 border collies who are trained to bite the heads of bulls who are on the fight to get them in line and the New Zealand Huntaway who doesn't have much bite, but has a huge bark that can be distracting. And that's all before we would even think to grab a weapon, which are plentiful on this old ranch. But if they are determined enough to get through all of that, then they can have whatever they want. I didn't think to see what kind of gas was in the bottle. I noticed some stickers on it but I didn't read them. I did check on the pressure in the hose and after 4 hours of the gas being shut off after priming it it hasn't gone down at all, so I don't think there are any leaks in the hose.

I agree completely. Fortunately I was (I think), so I'm going to put the sign up anyway. Besides, based on his general attitude and the fact that he hit THAT pothole makes me think he's not from around here. It's a big enough hole that locals use it as a landmark when giving directions.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. Maybe he had a rough morning that put him in a bad mood. I know with my mild form of asbergers I've had a few of those. He certainly was having a rough day once he got where he was going and realized his welder was missing.

Thats a good looking first try at a spear. Keep it on the wall as a reminder of everything you can do better now that you've had some experience. There are no native new world pig species, so all wild pigs are feral in the Americas. They can change drastically from being domesticated to "going wild" in 0 generations. If your pig got loose and you see it 2 years later you almost wouldn't recognize it. They grow more hair, longer tusks and get much meaner dispositions. Some people say they get longer, but it's more that they are skinnier so they look more stretched out. It also goes the other way too, you can catch a very young feral piglet and keep as a domesticated one and it wont have as much hair, be much fatter and can be warm, affectionate farm animals who will eat you the first chance they get. Just like any other pig. They won't produce as much meat as domestic stock because nature selected for survival instead of meat production. No DNA change that I know of, but I believe that there are studies that suggest RNA can change with environment. Though I'm not sure if it changes in the base animal or in further generations. The Russian boar DNA has made it to the states which makes a larger animal, but that's more from the hybrid vigor than anything else. It can happen from crossing 2 domestic breeds as well. The first generation of unrelated crosses can be, but not always, much larger than either parent breed. Think about the size difference between a lion, a tiger and a liger (though with the liger, a size limiting gene is missing). Every generation past the first thats crossed into either parent breed will be closer to normal sized for that breed until the hybrid vigor is gone. If your crossing 2 hybrids, the reductions will be slower but you still lose some vigor. Last I checked, the evidence showed that hogzilla was just a domestic pig that went feral and had gone through the change because his DNA didn't closely match any of the wild groups in the area.

I was just going to do a sign saying "Found welder on the side of Tyler Foote Rd. Call to ID." If they can't ID it with at least 3 ID points from that then I'll know it's not theirs. The truck was a late 00's early 10's ram, which is at least 20-30 years newer than most of the thieves in the area drive, though I have been wrong before. The funny thing is that when I got behind them I was remarking to myself how much I'd like to have a welder like that. I guess ask and you shall receive

This almost made me roadkill today. While driving into town for my bimonthly shopping trip I noticed the truck ahead of me had it's tail gate down and in the bed of the truck was a welder. When he hit one of the major potholes in the road, the welder slid to the back and fell onto the road and slid for a bit before the tank fell after it. The tank bounced and almost took me out. I sped up honking and flashing my lights to get his attention so he would know what happened, but all I got for my trouble was a one finger salute, so I went back and picked up the welder from the side of the road. Still in decent condition, it has some minor scrapes on the side, 3 missing foot pads, the side panel won't stay closed and the tank has some bare metal on the bottom where it bounced and a layer of paint missing where it rolled/slid. I don't see anything bent or broken, I plugged it in and it hums. The cords and hoses don't look like they took any damage at all. There is gas in the tank, as it will pressurize the hose, and no leaks that I can find. It will hold pressure after the tank is closed. I'll leave it closed to see if/how long the pressure stays in the hose. The wire feeds smoothly. Haven't tried an actual weld yet though I think they must've bought it used not so long ago because it still has a price tag of $225 on it. I'm going to do everything I can to get it back to them, but it would be a lie if I said I wouldn't want to keep it. I'll put up a sign at the local gas station, store and feed store in case they want it back, and I'll leave the signs up until a couple weeks after the stay at home order lifts. From the way they treated my good samaritism I won't feel bad using it until they claim it, once I feel safe that it won't blow me up or electrocute me. Is there anything I should check out that I may be missing?