Month: October 2025

Haying half done

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It has been a long couple of weeks. I am still covering random night shifts at work so I am trying to squeeze in haying in between the repairs, sleep and rain. I was going over to cut the neighbor’s field when I realized that the stop nut had fallen off of the sickle bar transport bar. It is of course Metric and I do not have a replacement laying around, but what I did have laying around was a whole bunch of cable clamps of various sizes. I clamped one of those onto the bar and it works great as a stop nut! This will now be my permanent fix.

I ended up having to cut the field twice, it was pretty thick, tall and wet so it wanted to push down and avoid the sickle bar mower. Once I had it all down I had to leave it for five days before I could turn it the first time. It is beautiful grass hay but if I bale it wet I am just going to create a fire hazard at our place.

Said neighbor convinced me I should cut his lower field also. It was even taller and wetter than the upper field! It also had a lot of sprinkler heads poking up out of the ground. I managed to get it all cut and only cut off one sprinkler head 3/4” PVC pipe riser.

I had to turn the upper field two more times before I baled it. Even after all of that I had a two sections of the upper field, about 10 bales that I had to wait until I did the lower section as they were just too wet.

Bathroom remodel day 47

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Well it’s that time again, time to actually go back to an old project and try to get it closer to the finish line. The bathroom is totally functional at this point. Never mind that there is no storage or that we cannot hide electronics. The shower has hot water that gets you clean, the sink dispenses water and the toilet flushes, the crucial tasks can be checked off the list. It was going to rain on Sunday so I decided to start in on the custom bathroom cabinet. I bought furniture grade 3/4” oak plywood at a paltry $95/sheet. I was disappointed to learn that it was necessary to trim all of the edges of the plywood to get rid of the damage on the edges. I don’t have a furniture grade table saw so I found this guide rail and put an expensive blade on my DeWalt skilsaw and made the first cut. I then had to go back and tape the edge I wanted to cut and cut through it again to get a clean cut. The first cut still caused some tear out on the laminate.

My goal is to get all of the pieces cut, then sand them all, then assemble them. I will stain it once I get it assembled. I am going to just go with the Tried and True finish. I like it and it tolerates moisture fairly well.

The guide rail did okay but I will need to run the pieces through a table saw. I have about a 1/8” difference near the middle. I need an expensive guide not a $30 guide if I want a perfectly straight edge. I did this a couple of weeks ago and have only managed to get most of the small pieces cut since then. I need some help getting the table saw down and running them through, Gingerman has agreed to help but our schedules have not been coinciding recently. I am working intermittent random nights for the last month with another month to go and it is really slowing down my projects. You tend to want to sleep the next day after being up all night.