New Engine

This is just a short post to update our progress. Not much exciting has happened the past two weeks. I've been waiting for the rubber pieces for the outsides of the tires that will straddle the chain in the middle of the track. We also got a new engine donor with a newer better engine. I think we'll use the newer engine. We spent last week testing out the new engine to make sure it works.

Tonight we measured the tires for the rubber pieces. I have a friend at a tire recycling business that told me he found the stuff. He just needs the dimensions.

Next week we should make some progress that is picture worthy.

Halftrack Axle Mounting Brackets.

I missed posting our progress last week, so I'm covering two weeks with one post here. Last week we cut out the angle iron to make the brackets that the axles will attach to. This was the first real useful job for the new Chop Saw. It's worth every penny I paid for it. The cuts are so much more precise that I was ever able to do without it. Bubba and I got to make the cuts, while Jo took pictures.


Last night we welded the brackets together. That's my 5-year-old Bubba welding with an AC stick welder in the picture while his 8-year-old sister looks on. He's just burning a rod over a 3/16" diamond plate in the picture. Jo is actually a pretty good little welder, but the picture of Bubba turned out better.

These brackets are going to take a lot of stress, so I decided to do the welding. Later if there's some non-structural welding I may invite the kids to do that.

Halft Track - Night 2

This is the second try for this post. I managed to post the first try on SWMBO's blog. The power tools and rusty machinery just didn't look right against a pink background.

I'm running late so I'll just post some pictures with a few captions...

Here is the Google Sketchup version of what the half track is going to look like... Tonight we removed the second axle from its donor mower...

The bolts were being very stubborn. At one point I was swinging a 10 pound sledge at a cold chisel, and Jo suggested we use a vacuum. I let her go for it just to see what she learned. Sadly enough the vacuum and the sledge hammer had about the same effect.

In the end it was the sawzall you see in the background by the vacuum that won the day.

I did spend the first money on this project when I gave $10 for the mower that donated this second axle.

Half Track - First Night

I got permission from SWMBO to spend one night a week with my kids, ages 6 and 8, to build together. Our first project is a Half Track vehicle. Tonight is the first night, and we will probably take about a year to build it.

The first order of business was to get the engine running. I got this engine along with a turbo charged lawn mower that I bought from a guy in Kaysville, Utah a while ago. (I've since sold a few parts for what I paid for the whole bunch and traded the turbo mower to a guy for a box of big bearings.) We had to dig the engine out of the weeds and add an ignition coil. Bubba and Jo helped me pull the coil off of an engine that had a cracked block, and they installed it on the new motor. We test fired it with a little bit of Gumout sprayed in the carb. I don't think Bubba expected it to run on the first try, because he jumped about a foot in the air when the thing fired up and ran. After drying a few tears and handing out ear-muffs, we tested it a few more times and moved on to the axle. I have to point out that Jo was rather excited that the jackstands are orange and pink.

The axle is an old Peerless transaxle out of a MTD riding mower. It is the only one I've ever seen with 5 forward gears and a reverse gear. This one will be the drive axle. I'm planning to use another transaxle for the idler axle at the back of the track. Using a transaxle allows there to be a differential. Jo helped me undo the bolts to pull the axle out of the mower, and once it was loose, both kids helped pull the axle out from under the mower while I lifted. If you look closely in the picture, you can see the axle donor (red mower carcass) in the upper left of the picture.

The final task tonight was to do some fit testing with the tracks. The picture shows Bubba on the left and Jo on the right demonstrating just how "easily" the track is going to roll. We had to do the fit test to measure the track for future design purposes. The track set up like this is 4' long, 20" high, and 9" wide. The transaxle will make the two tracks 3' wide from outside to outside.

That's all for tonight. we worked about an hour and a half, and so far we haven't spent any money. All the parts we've used so far are left over from other projects that have since paid for themselves.

How Did I Not Realize This!!??

My wife sat me down to watch a YouTube video about Genetically Modified Foods that someone posted. Though reluctant at first, I sat and watched. I didn't even make it through the end. I was speechless. I was moved. So moved in fact that I'm blogging about my experience even though I haven't blogged anything for months.

Here's a link to the video... Future of Food There's some real touching footage. Aerial Bombs = Nitrate Fertilizer; Tractors = Tanks; Insecticides = Nerve Gas. I about cried when I saw the dying cockroach. Who'd have thought that "higher yields, increased food production, cheaper prices, and greater availability" of food could be such a bad thing. It threatens all we hold dear and sacred. I was shocked that farmers so willingly dowse their crops with costly chemicals. I thought that all farmers were like the hundred or so that I can name personally and could probably tell you who I am too. They are extremely cautious to use any chemicals unless they have to. (Keep in mind that it may cost you $20 to weed-and-feed your 1/4 acre lawn, but a farmer with 1000 acres would need $80,000 at the same per acre cost. Do you honestly think he's going to use any more chemical than he absolutely has to.)

I was so moved, in fact, that I started looking for what other gross malevolence lurks behind the auspices of good and wholesomeness.

I found this little video about bread: Dangers of Bread
(I'll warn you after about 1:40 it digresses from the original message.)

That bread video is even more credible and uses even more sound logic than the GMO video. Granted the bread video didn't have some guy with a beard and glasses looking very scientific like and very distinguished and credible nor did it have the touching film footage of starving Africans or dying cockroaches, but the trains of thought and use of obvious facts is just the same. There must be some link since a lot of wheat is genetically modified and bread is made out of wheat. I even have a niece that gets really sick if she eats anything that even has a small bit of wheat in it. THAT PROVES IT!!! Wheat bread will destroy the world long before Genetically Modified Foods will. I'm not even going to bother with putting anything away for retirement. We're all doomed!!

I got to looking around even further and found this little tidbit right from my hometown of Idaho Falls which is full of scientists. (We have the worlds premier nuclear research facility just 50 miles away and most of the employees live in or near Idaho Falls.) Apparently there is this chemical called Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) that's in all kind of pesticides and poisons, and it kills more people every year than all other hazardous chemicals combined, and Idaho Falls was the first city to attempt to ban it thanks to an ambitious student in a science fair back in 1997. No kidding!! It's all verifiable fact. Here's the Snopes link to prove it: Snopes: DHMO

They even have a website now dedicated to the whole movement to ban DHMO: www.dhmo.org Go there! I promise that you will learn something you didn't already know... Probably about yourself.

Penn and Teller even did a segment on it for their television show. Here's a snippet from YouTube: Penn and Teller: DHMO (Caution: Penn and Teller, though milder than usual, still use one bad word; and even though I agree with that one use of the word, it's still a bad word.) THIS IS SERIOUS STUFF!!! We have a world wide crisis on our hands!

How many people don't know about all of this?? What can we do??

The worldwide crisis, is not that we are surrounded by all of these terrible malicious things. The crisis, unfortunately, is that we are surrounded by all of these people who are too easily duped by pseudoscience, sensationalism, and hype.

Bring on the backlash...