[mitchmaine]

hey carl, you could do that a couple of ways, five feet ain’t that far, longer line spreaders on the hames will get them out there, and moving the crotch line up your mainline will help, and if that don’t do it, a longer crotchline would work. any changes you make, keep an eye out for problems with buckles catching somewhere in the harness. sounds like you have plenty of work to keep you busy without inventing more, good luck there with your farming and remind your dad that tractors don’t make fertilizer.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

i like this too. i remember seeing a similar one where two horses were hooked to the same tree without an evener, and were free to swing out or in as wide as they wished and i thought that was an interesting hitch with lots of subtle advantages, and wanted to see more about it.

[mitchmaine]

just heard the sound of a dozen or two framing squares coming out of tool boxes all across new england. mine included. not as bad as i thought it might be. i’m ahead by about 1/8 in two feet. looking at it, it appears the heel of the mower is afloat to some degree there. hooked to the evener, and fast to the wishbone brace and the leveling bar. so is there some movement there? ahead with the strain from the horses, and behind with the weight of the mower and the grass. any adjustments we make are influenced by several forces all at the same time. seems more of an art than a science.

[mitchmaine]

thanks donn, that makes absolute sense. the pitman and knife must want to line up as well, true? i’ll run a square and see how they look.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey george,
i took an old pitman and rebored it to fit. bad move. it broke after about a half hour. but it was in bad shape in the first place. i went over to the mill and made three brand new oak blanks and sliced and bored the drive end and left the other end go. took the best grained specimen and cut it and fit it to my new length. i worry that there is some balance issue that i don’t know about. anyway, waiting for some hay weather. i’ll let you know how it works out.

best wishes, mitch

[mitchmaine]

at the risk of jinxing things, i’ve been dodging bullets up here and have made some pretty ok hay. not much, and i think i’m getting better weather than you guys (for some strange reason). anyway, its always different tomorrow and you’ll all be making fine hay and i’ll be the one complaining. its a long summer and who knows what it will bring. i’m getting about 2/3 to 3/4 crop up here. covering lots of ground for not much action. good luck all.

[mitchmaine]

i have an amish friend, daniel, who was cultivating corn with his two row cultivator. i said it looked tricky, and he told me they plant with a two row planter set up exactly to the cultivator, and he just watches the right hand row and the left row takes care of itself. unless you come back into the corn a half row off. you do good on that right hand row but the left hand side disappears. he said there have been some years when his corn was a little thin.

[mitchmaine]

i’m right handed and like a right hand plow, and i think it comes from the walking plow but i noticed today that the best side of my sulky plow is the lefthanded side. so i’m leaning with carl about the plow set up. at the riskofpointing out the obvious, i know you know this and i know it too, but when my plowing job is not working, its usually the evener hasn’t slid over to the beam all the way. i usually take it for granted its over there and easy to overlook sometimes. good luck there

mitch

[mitchmaine]

you might try discing it first to upset your weeds, roots up to kill them, and every week or ten days when another crop of weeds show, lightly disc them, and do that for a month or so, and kill a few crops of weed seed before you sow your cover crop ed.

[mitchmaine]

we are done too. pulled buckets this past weekend and poured off 250 gallons sap. judging by the syrup we were making it would have been pretty good syrup, but we just ran out of steam. stll we had a good time and made a bit of syrup.
hey bill. everybody hates the new grading system. it sucks. the funny thing about a democracy is that everyone can criticize what ever they want as long as they want and it happens anyway. I still have about five years of old grading stickers left and I’m not changing until they run out.

[mitchmaine]

ditto here bill, sap in our pails thawed enough yesterday so I could grab the whole years run to date. 110 gallons 2.6 sap from 330 buckets. I have another 150 but will probably not tap them this year. we are on schedule to repeat last year almost to the day. so I may also already know the results of this year as well. our season never seems to go beyond the 15th april so it better get going if its gonna. snow in the woods is deep still and covering the base of the trees. lots of snow on the woods roads but the fields are starting to mud up over the frost. good sugaring bud

[mitchmaine]

excellent mulling carl. you hit every nail on the head. I try to understand capitalism but all I see is a giant pyramid scheme. based on wage earners spending the lion share of their earnings backinto circulation. I look around and see yard sales every week reselling some of these treasures, and then storage units taking over the landscape housing more of these treasures we couldn’t live without, makes you wonder how much stuff we have and how much more stuff do we need and what will inevitably happen when we just stop buying. I think about it too. it is difficult living on the fringe. no one ever got hurt falling from a forty foot ladder when he was only on the third rung.

[mitchmaine]

I had two crawler tractors in the woods, and the joke was that you would bolt a coffee can to the cowling, and paint a red spot on the tracks, and everytime the red spot went by, you dropped a dime in the can. that way, you had enough money to replace the pins and bushings when you had to do the undercarriage. I never noticed that there was much gain in out put with the crawler over the horses. except for the end of the day, you just ran it up on a stick of pulp to keep the tracks from freezing down in the ice, switched it off and never gave it another thought til Monday morning.

[mitchmaine]

regardless of how fast a tractor could pull a trailer mower, it is still ground driven and needs to turn in relation to how much distance it travels rather than how fast it travels over that distance, true?
I was making a ground driven forecart out of a no. 9 mower, and had to find out how fast it was traveling. I jacked a high gear off the ground and counted the pitman revs compared to one turn of the drive wheel and it was 28 to one. the regular gear was 26. not a whole heck of a lot of difference really. I guess I expected the difference to be greater

[mitchmaine]

jay, did you ever think about making a few spiles? we used to make them as kids from sumac shoots. a hot piece of wire will ream a hole through the center and you whittle a point and cut them to length. we could get a dozen or so six inch long out of a shoot. you can do it pretty quick with not much effort, and we even tried making some rolled tin ones that didn’t look too bad and worked pretty good. sam and Erika are correct,and mark knows six spiles we become sixty without much effort and you can always add one more to any number. watchout!
mitch

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