It was only last week that I thought that we had finally finished with the tomato crop, but surprise surprise. 2 more baskets full. and now all that remains are a few stragglers that will be fine over the next few weeks for salads or fried up for brekkie. The last 8 jars have taken us up towards 90 jars! A lifetime record for us.
This is definitely the last batch for this year. A new project will be to find extra ways of cooking with tomato passata that we haven’t tried yet. If you have a favourite recipe, please contact me.
The saffron crop keeps on coming, bit by bit. An extra crocus flower opens each day and we carefully pick the stamens out and dry them on a paper towel in the kitchen.
We wont be retiring on this new crop anytime soon, but we are looking forward to making one dish of saffron rice when we have the whole crop harvested.
Over the weekend we were busy in the garden and yard. Janine decided to burn off the pile of hardwood stumps that we generated from all the clearing along the new fence line. I’m pleased to report that we have had no more deer inside the garden since the fence went up. However, we have seen fresh scats outside, and along the fence line. So for the time being, the fence is working. Now to deal with the pile of stumps.
Janine worked very hard, all day, both days, patrolling along the fence line and taking out the small trees that had been pushed over and out of the way of the fence. Using her electric chain saw, she could move anywhere along the line and chop up the trees, then drag them back to the bonfire pile. In this way, she kept it going all day.
I helped out intermittently with the toy tractor, moving heavier pieces, but I was also busy.
I made two trips to the sand and gravel yard in Mittagong, a 50 km round trip, to buy a couple of cubic meters of mushroom compost. I ploughed over the English cottage garden and also along the front of the new pottery shed, spread the compost, chicken manure and lime, then re-tilled the mix into the soil with the cultivator. A few packets of English Cottage Garden seed mix, and a few punnets of seedlings later, and the new spring garden is underway.
It doesn’t look much just now, but in a couple of months it will come to life, once all the seeds germinate and come into flower. Below is how it used to look.
The strip along the driveway is a new venture, to try and give a bit of a colourful lift to the front of the pottery. I hope that there will be a bit of a splash of colour in time for the mid year ‘Pop-Up’ studio sale on 10, 11 and 12th of June. Save the date. Certainly it will be in full bloom for the December studio sale.
Once I got the gardening done. I was back to help Janine with the bonfire. There was a big pile of huge pine logs left over from the bush fire that burnt everything here. When we milled all the burnt pine trees into slabs and planks to line the pottery, there were a few difficult logs left over. I had thought that I might cut up these last few logs for kiln fuel. But as it has taken me 3 1/2 years to get my act together on this job, it is far too late, I’ve been sitting on my lazy arse too much and these pine logs have all started to go rotten. A shame, but what can you do? I tried splitting them, but they were mostly pithy and full of mush.
I sorted out the better ones and split those and got another half a stack of hob wood logs for the kiln. Better than nothing. But they won’t add many calories to the kiln firing, maybe just a little extra ash?
All the rest were just too big, too heavy, too rotten or too branched and knotty to do anything with. So as we had the fire still burning on the Sunday, I added them all to the bonfire and got rid of the ugly, difficult mess.
I’m getting old now, so I can’t man-handle those big, heavy rounds of pine like I used to. I don’t want to do myself so sort of damage wrestling with them. Those logs are 670 mm long and 600 mm dia. and probably the best part of 100kgs. Just too big for me now.
However the little tractor is the best investment that I have made in a long while. I bought it for myself when I turned 60. I traded up to a new model with a front-end 4 in 1 bucket. So much more useful than the old one, that was just a glorified mower and rotary hoe. I was able to push, roll and cajole those big logs onto the pile and keep them all up close together all day as they slowly burnt away. As the big logs burn, they get smaller and slowly move away from each other, then the fire can dawdle and start to go out. It is necessary to keep pushing the lumps closer together, to keep them burning fiercely.
The site looks so much better now and will be lovely after I get in there and scrape it all smooth, then keep it mowed and clear. That pile of huge lumps of wood were just too much work to chop up, so being able to burn them away was the right solution to get the site clean again. It’s taken me 3 1/2 years to getting around to dealing with them, but it is almost done now. Another job ticked off the list.
This is all that remains on Monday morning. it will be all gone by tonight.
This week is the mid point of autumn, Half way between the equinox and the solstice.
The weather is certainly a lot cooler and we notice that the days are so much shorter. I really like this slightly cooler alternative the long days of summer. Our summer wasn’t so hot as it used to be during the decade of el-nino years. These last few summers have been so much nicer, cooler and wetter, everything has turned green and grown its head off. We have harvested more tomatoes then we have ever grown. It seems that all the planets aligned for the tomatoes. I haven’t counted the bottles, but there must be over 40 jars. Quite enough to last us well over 12 months, possibly even 2 years?
We went to Canberra over Easter for the National Folk Festival.
We caught up with people that we haven’t seen for over 4 years, as we were confined to home because of;
1. The fire,
2. The on-going clean-up,
3. The rebuilding,
4. Covid, followed by a year of lock down.
It’s only now that we feel that we have the time, space and safety to go out again. Womad was on again this year, but we chose to stay home, save time and money and get on with some of the long list of jobs. However, we decided to go to Canberra for ‘The National’, as we can drive to Canberra in just 2 hours in our electric car. Travelling to Adelaide for Womad is looking more and more extravagant and carbon intensive, regardless of whether we drove or flew, we were responsible for burning loads of carbon each way. I just can’t justify it anymore.
The long weekend of music was wonderful, so many great acts, too many to list, but a few stood out.
The ‘We Mavericks’, Lindsay Martin and Virginia vigenser, were excellent. We have had them here in our home to perform for us in one of our house concerts a few years back. I believe that we were their second only performance together. They get better and better.
Billy Bragg was also really good. He was the best that I have ever seen him. Powerful voice, smack on key and few very powerful, short spoken interludes between songs, on why we should care about the state of things and the world. He also explained what he is doing to make a difference. Very inspiring. However, it crossed my mind that he must owe a tremendous carbon debt?
We also enjoyed Gleny Rae Virus, Leroy Johnson, (above) the Park Ranger from Mutawintji National Park out near Broken Hill, and Farhan Shah & SufiOz. singing Sufi devotional chants. + many more.
Back at home we have been Splitting wood for the kiln firing, and working in the garden.
We met up with our friends Susan and Dev in Canberra, and they called in here on their way home to give us a hand with those jobs.
My friend Len Smith also called in and we had a little reunion. As Len, then Janine and finally myself, were Susans teachers at different times in her life, at different colleges.
Together, we ripped out 3 beds of waning tomatoes, that had reached the end of their productive life and added them to the compost heap.
Afterwards, I planted out lettuce and radish seeds as well as lettuce and spinach seedlings.
The garden suddenly looks a bit more loved again after a few weeks of minimal up-keep and absence.
My last job was to plant out 160 of our own self grown and stored garlic cloves. I should have been onto this a month ago, but better late than never.
I did two rows of 80, one of our purple garlic and the other of our white skinned variety. They have started to shoot from their skins. A very good sign that they are ready to be planted out now!
Everything takes time and time needs to be made or created by making decisions about what is most pressing and needs to be to be done NOW.
Tomorrow it is back into the pottery to unpack and repack the electric kiln for yet another bisque. Learning to Juggle my time and energy has been a life long exercise in developing this skill for me.
I want to do so much each day, Even summer days aren’t long enough. I need to triage my desires to fit my capacity to actually achieve outcomes. Added to this, I really don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I’m reasonably well trained in making pottery, and I have taught myself to grow vegetables and orchard fruit trees, but I have such a low basic understanding of building techniques and mechanical engineering, I just muddle through as best that I can. I rely on asking more knowledgeable friends for advice on what they would do, or where is the best place to buy the correct parts.
I’m so grateful to all of my friends for the advice and help that they have given so generously over the years.
When we built the new ‘kit-form’ tin shed for the new pottery. I paid a bunch of so called ‘expert’ tin shed builders to come onsite and erect the kit. They had experience and all the fancy gear to do the job. A bobcat loader, a scissor lift gantry and a truck load of power tools. They put the frame up OK. It is at least level and vertical. But when I asked them to screw on all the 2nd hand, grey re-cycled old rusty gal iron sheeting that I had collected to give the shed some character, they did the worst job that you could imagine. They chose to use roofing screws without any rubber ring to seal out the weather, and as a consequence, all the walls leaked in heavy weather. The windows weren’t ‘flashed-in’ correctly or at all, and leaked. The cement slab was cast with a definite hollow in the centre. The verandah wasn’t ’stepped-down’ 50 mm to stop water blowing in under the doors, so that when it rained hard, the building leaked, all the water ran to the centre of the building and pooled there. I’ve spent over a year discovering all these faults, omissions and bad workmanship and then correcting them as best that I can. If only I’d known something more about the building trades, I might have spotted these faults occurring and got them seen to at the time. But I trusted them. BIG mistake.
Our previous three potteries that burnt down were all home made on a shoe string budget mostly out of wood and other materials that we could scrounge off the side of the road on council clean-up day, or from the tip. They too had character, but a very different character. This last shed is so much better in all sorts of ways, but mostly it will be easier to defend against fire. Metal clad, metal frame with metal lining and the cavity stuffed full of insulation. All the previous buildings were made of wood and therefore were very flammable.
It seems that I have discovered all the problems with the poor workmanship in this shed now. I’ve discovered all these faults bit by bit over time and fixed them myself. The builders have shot through. There is something to be said for self-reliance.
Do it yourself, do it right the first time. I do it to the best of my ability. If it isn’t the most professional job, at least it is mine and any mistakes are honest ones. The stuff that I do has my character printed all over it. I own my mistakes, my lack of skill and my incompetence, but in the end I figure it all out and I can live with the result. At least I’m not upset with myself for ripping myself off. AND everything is done on a minuscule budget. We have never earned much money, so have learnt to live very frugally.Everyone seems to be obsessed with money these days, as if it solves everything. I heard on the news that the 3 richest Australians have more money than the bottom 10% of the nation. Pretty shocking! It’s a shame that there isn’t a way of making life a little bit more even and equitable for the disadvantaged. The Lovely and I have done very well for ourselves, being able to have built a simple, largely non-acquisitive, low carbon, organic lifestyle here, without ever having had a ‘real’ job. We’ve managed to ‘get away with it’ for all this time, living an engaged, creative, self-employed, part-time amalgam of a life. Without credit card debt or interest payments, doing almost everything ourselves. Living within our self-determined means. We’ve never been on the dole and never asked for handouts. Money may be essential in the modern world, but we don’t let it ruin our lives.
As an example of this frugal self-reliance I recently fixed up an old Chinese wood splitter. It needed a new/old/2nd hand starter and air cleaner to get the engine going again. That wasn’t too difficult. I just stole the parts off another old ruined motor that was in the barn. Best not to throw things out if they might have useful parts on them to keep another machine going for a few more years, There is a lot of embodied energy stored in those old bits of machinery. So it’s better to try to repair something old and get extra life out of it, than to give in and buy a new one. It’s also much, much, cheaper
Once I got the engine working, I decided to make it into a bigger splitter with a longer stroke. All cheap Chinese hydraulic splitters have a 600 mm. (2 ft.) hydraulic ram. That is the upper limit of their log capacity. My new kiln has a fire box length of 690/700 mm. (2’ ft, 4” inches). To give the splitter a longer stroke I decided to cut 75 mm. (3” ) off the cutting wedge to make it shorter ,and therefore add extra length to the logs that can be split.
I wasn’t sure that it would work, but it seemed a lot easier than cutting the end off the frame and welding a new section of RSJ onto the frame to make it a longer machine.
By shortening the blade I achieved the same outcome with much less work. But an hour on the angle grinder was a bit of a chore, as 20mm thick steel plate doesn’t cut easily.
You can see in this image that the blade used to go all the way to the bottom of the backing plate.
Scrooge’s technique of making a bigger splitter out of an old small one.
The old small engine managed the longer wood OK. I filled the truck with wood cut and split to 675mm long. That is about enough to fire the kiln to stoneware in 14 hours.
2 1/2 stacks of Hob wood,
A couple of piles of smaller kindling lumps for firing on the floor,
and then a couple of stacks of thinner side stoking wood for the 2nd chamber. Thanks to Dev and Susan.
I finish the day by servicing the chain saw. Best to do it when it’s fresh on my mind, even though I’m tired from all the work, fixing the splitter, then testing it out and finally stacking all the wood.
I hate it when I go to use the saw and find that it is blunt and needs servicing, So I do it straight away. Sharpen the chain, blow out the air filter, rotate the bar, fill with 2stroke and bar oil.
It doesn’t take so long and everything is ready to go again, — except me! I need a rest.
We are almost half way through autumn now, the Indian summer is over and the weather has turned cooler. No more 30 degree days. This past week has been steadily in the 20’s and with rain or showers almost every day. However there are bright sunny patches in between. I’ve been working my way through the big pots that I threw to begin this throwing session, bisque firing them in the electric kiln using only pure sunshine. The recent addition of extra solar PV panels last year, bringing us up to 17 kW total and the addition of the 2nd battery, means that we are able to fire without any withdrawal from the grid. I can even fire both electric kilns to bisque at the same time, or just one kiln to stoneware. This is a great sense of independence.
With the price of gas having gone up from $1.75 a litre last year to $2.50 this year with no additional increase in the production cost. It’s just profit gouging and it’s a complete rip off.
So I’m very proud to be able to fire my kilns with my own sunshine. And drive my car off it as well! It’s amazing that there is enough to go around, but we still export our excess on the days when we are not firing. We even manage to export a little in the early stages of the firing.
This is from our most recent electricity bill. Our daily usage is down to 0.76 kWh per day. Down from 1.64 kWh per day the previous year. When we were doing more firings.
The average Australian 2 person household like ours is using 17.6 kWh per day. So, it seems that all our efforts to tread gently in the world are paying off. We run a very efficient, low energy house hold.
Some time later this year, or maybe next, We will be getting rid of our old LP gas kitchen stove. That is our last big investment in our conversion to fully solar electric living. I’m waiting for induction cookers to become more widely available and hopefully a lot cheaper. I have already installed a twin induction cooktop in the pottery. It was only $350. Very affordable.
A sign that autumn is well under way here is the change in the Cherry trees, as they shut down and prepare for winter. They are early to fruit in spring, and correspondingly, the first to loose their leaves in the autumn. Our bedroom looks out on to the Chekov orchard. We currently have a carpet of yellow leaves out side our window, that is slowly turning brown.
Janine has been collecting more hazel nuts. So far she has picked up 3 baskets full, and there are still more to come. First, she shells them, then checks them for nuts, by bouncing them on the table. If they bounce, they are empty and are discarded. Not worth the energy to crack them to find them empty. The full shells are then cracked open and the nuts are dried in the sunny window for a while. Later she roasts them in a pan on the stove to bring out that superb hazelnut flavour. It’s an ongoing job that is spread over a couple of months. Fitted in here and there whenever the time allows. Most often in front of the idiot box — if there is anything at all worth wasting time on, which is an increasingly rare event
The hazels have already started flowering again. The male ‘catkin’ flowers are out now. I often wonder why? As the female flowers don’t come out until the trees are dormant and have lost all their leaves. The female flowers are quite insignificant and very hard to see, just a pin head sized red dot. They don’t attract any pollinators at all and are wind pollinated, so we have planned out our hazel nuttery of a dozen trees, in such a way as all the best pollinator varieties are up-wind of the predominant winter gales that blow the male pollen down among all the waiting and fecund female flowers.
This is the Hazel nuttery and I am the Nutter. Two of these hazels were bought with an inoculation of French Black truffle spores. So we have some vague hope of truffles in the future — maybe? I planted a dozen different truffle inoculated trees of various types and they all got burnt to the ground in the fire. Only 3 trees re-shot from their root stocks. As truffles are a fungus that lives underground. I’m hopeful that the spores are still active and will one day produce a little surprise for us. But I’m not holding my breath.
In the pottery, I have been making smaller pots that are quicker to dry, so that they will all be ready for a wood kiln firing after Easter. I’m not sure if my skin is getting thinner and less robust with age, or these recent clay body experiments are just more aggressive, but I’ve found that I’m wearing away the skin on my finger tips so much more readily than I used to when I’m turning.
I used to only wear rubber ‘finger stalls’ when turning rather dryish hard stone porcelain bodies. Now I find that I have to wear them all the time when turning.
I’m really pleased with my home made larger format wheel trays that I built for the shimpo wheels. I can turn for an hour without filling them up. They hold 50 bowls worth of turnings.
I have also been throwing on my kick wheel as well. It has a decent sized tray. I made 50 bowls on it yesterday. I started with a dry tray and ended with an almost dry tray. I have learnt to throw with a minimal amount of water. Just a few drips and splashes make their way off the wheel head.
Our local council is offering a bulky rubbish clean-up day this week. So the village has been dragging out it’s unwanted lumpy rubbish on to the side of the road to be taken away. Furniture, mattresses, electrical appliances, etc., it’s all piled up in clumps out in the street.
We have nothing to put out, But I make a point of riding my bike along the street to get a good look at everything that there is out there for the taking.
I went back with my truck and picked up 3 wheel barrows. One had a flat tyre and ruined wheel bearings. I pumped up the tyre and it held air over night, that was good, so I bought a pair of wheel barrow bearings for $6 each and in 15 mins, I have a perfect wheel barrow ready for work.
The 2nd one had a broken tray, but everything else was good, so off with the tray and back on the clean-up pile. A new replacement tray is $59, so I ordered one. The 3rd one is old and has been used for concrete, but works well. No issues there. Good to go.
Three wheel barrows for $70.
Reuse, repair, re-purpose and re-cycle. I’m happy.
A little while ago, I was travelling along in this chaotically hectic life thinking that I’d be making pots in the 2nd half of January.
But the appearance of the deer in our yard have changed everything.
Out neighbour saw a large buck with antlers in his yard last week. We have had the doe and fawn. So if there is a doe and a buck… then there will soon be a lot more.
We needed to act quickly.
We have now completed the complete perimeter fence of one half of our land. A few years ago we only had one side fence put up by our only neighbour to keep their dog in.
Then after the fire, while we were waiting for the council to approve our re-building plans and waiting for our tin shed kits to be delivered, we decided to use the time to put up the stone and steel gabion wall out the front. This is to act as a radiation barrier in the next fire event.
Now we are the proud owners of just over 510 meters of perimeter fence. It’s been a lot of work. At first, I thought that I might not be up to it, But it went well enough because I didn’t over-do it. I paced myself. However, I wouldn’t want to do it again. I was working close to my limit. In the end the effort was worth it to preserve our fruit trees and garden that we have spent over 45 years cultivating. Only time will tell if it is enough of a deterrent to encourage them to dine elsewhere?
I’m really glad that it’s over.
Starting at the gabion wall on the street front, we had to cross the culvert ditch and make it deeply deer proof. So we installed a swinging gate to allow for the clearance of flood debris.
Then down between the two dams.
Then down to the back lane/firetrail.
Then along the back boundry, and through the key-line dam system overflow.
And finally up to the existing neighbours fence.
Having completed the fencing the only weak spot in our defences were the openings in the gabion wall where I never got around to making the gates. There are 2 drive in gateways, and two walk through openings. One directly in front of our front door, and the other next to the electrical meter box for access for the electrical services people.
I have spent the last few days making gates for those vulnerable openings. I now have 3 completed. The last one will have to wait, as I really need to get back to work in the pottery.
If the deer arrive in the mean time. I’ll just have to drop everything and weld up that last set of double gates to close off the 7.6 meter wide main drive way.
Now that the gates are in, it made me look closely at the gabion wall, which I hadn’t being paying much attention to recently.
I noticed that the stones had settled down in some places.
We’ve all read the warning label that “Contents may settle during transport”
Well, our stones have settled while stationary.
The only thing to be done was to make a trip down to the sand and gravel yard and buy another tonne of stones to fill it up again.
Now that it is topped up, it should be all good now for another decade?
A month or so ago, Our neighbour saw two deer crossing our road and entering our land.
We have never fenced our land. I rather liked the concept that all the local wild life could come in and graze on our grass and drink at the dam quite freely.
After-all, the wallabies, kangaroos and wombats were all here before us.
However, feral deer are another matter. They have been breeding up in extreme numbers out in the Buragorang Valley National Park for years, so now they have reached Balmoral Village.
We live in a small hamlet or village, on a very old road and disused railway line that is situated between two National Parks.
Whether the deer got here from either the East or the West side parks, doesn’t matter. The big problem is that they are here now.
We have been so lucky to have had 46 years of living here without this problem, but now we have to deal with it.
Luckily for us, There is this guy I know who does fencing all summer and sells firewood all winter. His family have lived and worked here since 1906. AND, he’s a really nice guy to boot.
I had been talking to him about getting some help with a fence along the back lane, as some kids had been coming in and yahooing about down the back there.
We have already put a fire-proof steel and stone ‘gabion’ fence along our front boundary as a kind of heat shield for the ground fire in the next big bush fire event, whenever that comes.
We asked our neighbours on the South side if they wanted a fence 30 years ago. They didn’t. So no fence was ever built. We got on really well together as neighbours, so didn’t need one.
Those neighbours were burnt out in the last big fire, and wont be rebuilding or returning to live here.
So now we have deer in the back orchard eating our fruit trees. They particularly like cherry tree leaves. They leave their turds on the grass around the trees as they nibble, and their hoof prints in the soft muddy soil around the edge of the dam where we were clearing out the dead trees and undergrowth from the water yesterday.
Mother turds,
and Baby turds, so there are at least two of them eating our trees.
Monday the 16th of January, is the first day back at work for most tradies and small businesses around here. So Phil turned up with his two sons to get a bit of a start on our fance.
A lot has changed since I spoke to him in late October last year. The fence now needs to be twice as long, to seal off the property, and twice as high with the arrival of the feral deer, as they can jump very high. We originally discussed a wire mesh fence 1200 mm. high with 3 strands of barbed wire on top. This is apparently the basic, standard rural fence these days around here. I wouldn’t know. I’ve lived here for 46 years and never spoken to a fencer before. I have done all my own internal fences around the gardens and orchards over the years, cut my own fence posts, crow-barred and shovelled my own holes. Rammed my own posts solid in the ground. But now I am a bit too old for all that hard work these days, as the fence will end up having to be 250 metres long to keep the deer out. I’m learning to relax and to compromise my standards by letting someone else do some of the hard yakka this time. Basically, I trust Phil to do a thorough job.
The new deer fence will now be 1800mm high, at a greater extra expense and a very dear fence it will be.
We cleared a track through the bush that had never been cleared before. I tried to keep as many trees a possible, allowing the fence to wander a bit to find the line of least destruction of the bigger trees. The first thing that Phil said after walking the fence line, was that some more trees will have to go. It needs to be straight, otherwise you’ll be up for the added expense of extra strainer posts and stays.
All the trees in question are already dead. Standing blackened, leafless and burnt dead. Victims of the catastrophic bush fire that raged through here 3 years ago. I have no idea why I wanted to ’save’ them. Just habit I guess? So out they come and the line of the fence is straightened. They drag the trunks out of the way and into the clearing where we stack our fire wood. A place well away from the house. I spend a day chain-sawing. I stop regularly to refuel, re-oil and sharpen each of the three chainsaws. Large, medium and small. I spend all day at it, but can’t keep up with the delivery rate that the fences are dragging the dead wood out.
I cut them up into usable sizes for the pottery oven/heater, the kitchen stove and the lounge room heater. The trees with the largest diameter butts are cut into just 150 mm. long slabs. This is to make them lighter, and easier to lift and stack them, and eventually move them to the hydraulic splitter. Large diameter hardwood logs can be very heavy. The skinny logs and tapered top branches, anything less than 150 mm. dia. are cut to the longer lengths, as their weight doesn’t matter at that size. All the intermediates are cut to 300 mm long. It all works out quite well, but the site looks like a bomb site with timber and branches everywhere.
Phil and the boys have already got most of the iron bark timber posts in the ground by the end of day one. Phil acknowledges that I have worked all day on the saws cutting up the 14 trees that he has dragged out this morning. There a still more to come. He asks if I ever want a job, he’ll give me one as a fencer. He tells me that he has watched me work and says that I work harder than most of the young fellas half my age that he has employed!
They have an antique tractor, fitted with an antique post hole drill and fence post rammer. They drive the iron bark posts 900 mm. into the ground. The gear may be a bit old, but they work fast and efficiently.
Tuesday, the fencers don’t turn up. They have told me already that they need to finish off another job from last year that was waiting for some more parts to be delivered. They are keen to get it finished and get paid. I was pretty tired and achey after working on the chainsaws all day yesterday. So in the morning I weeded some of the garden beds in the veggie garden, then picked just over 3 kgs of blue berries. I sharpen and service the saws from yesterday, then after lunch, I’m back into it, collecting up all the short cut billets of wood and taking them around to the new firewood stack. Once I’ve cleared away all the cut wood from yesterday, I start the cutting again. I want to get at least one side of the site cleared of tree trunks, branches and twigs ready for tomorrows task of doing it all over again, cutting, carting, stacking and splitting.
The wood is stacked more or less 20 billets wide x 6 or 7 billets high x 7 stacks deep.
We have several tonnes, possibly 10 tonnes, of wood cut and stacked, with just 4 more trees to work on tomorrow. I’m trying to get all the logs and timber detritus out of the way of the fencers, so that they can work efficiently and un-interrupted tomorrow. I also get a lot of satisfaction in seeing it all cleared away and neatly stacked.
I’m assuming that the fencers would normally like to take all these trees away with them each day and sell the wood as fire wood over the coming winter? However, we have a need for it, so I’ve kept it for our own winter needs.
We celebrate with an eye fillet mini roast, just for the two of us. Janine makes a traditional Yorkshire pudding with the left over meat juices in the little roasting pan.
It’s one of the best that she has ever made. It’s a beauty!
Their big old tractor almost gets bogged in the low spot where the dam over-flow water seeps down to the back lane. It was almost dry enough to drive over, but we had 30 mm. of rain overnight and on their last pass over the soggy bit, they sank in.
Wednesday morning we spent a few hours loading barrows with broken bricks , left over from the brickwork on the facade of the new pottery building. I knew that all those broken bricks would come in handy one day. I fill the deep muddy tyre gouged trenches with the brickbats and stomp them down into the mud. This may not be enough, but I’ve filled the deep trenches, so we’ll see how the tractor goes over this lot before I barrow another 20 loads down there. I’ll try and finish off with all the smaller pieces and mortar sand and gravel when this is all over.
Enough for now.
The first layer of mesh is tied onto the strained high tensile wire. There will be another 600 mm. of barbed wire on post extensions that fit on top of the steel posts to make the fence more Deer resistant. The extensions are not often called for, so are not in stock and will have to be ordered in.
A very Dear fence indeed.
Phil and his sons have done a very nice job of staying the strainer posts with a mortice and tenon joint in the iron bark posts and a huge flat stone embedded into the soil to buttress the other end of the stay. A very impressive and thorough job.
Thursday morning sees more rain, so I’m putting off doing the last of the wood carting and stacking till later in the day, when the weather is forecast to clear. I’ll spend the morning writing. While Janine is sorting the hazel nuts.
I wasn’t planning on spending my first week back at work after the summer break on chainsawing and wood stacking. I imagined that I was going to be making new batches of clay bodies for the coming year. That will be next week now. The fencers can fit me in just now, between other jobs, so that is what we will be doing. We are lucky to get them.
John Lennon said that life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. So true.
Life goes on. As my friend Anne says; “How we spend our days, is how we spend our lives”.
In my case, that appears to be lurching form one crisis to another.
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.
This weekend we spent Saturday over at the Village Hall, helping out with the clean-up, maintenance and garden building.
Janine did a lot of pruning and mulching of the existing garden beds, while I helped with the wheel barrowing of several tonnes of road base , then gravel to create new paths, followed by filling the new garden beds with another few tones of topsoil and mulch. The final part , was to plant out all the donated plants to fill the new beds.
A terrific effort from a lot of the Village residents.
Janine shovelling mulch
Road base spread to level out under the gravel paths along the tennis court.
Next we filled the garden beds with top soil and then covered it with a thick layer of mulch before planting out the flowers and shrubs.
Janine watering in the new plantings. It’s a lovely feeling to be part of a communal group activity.
We finished up with a BBQ. A great day of work, that wasn’t too onerous, because everyone turned up and got stuck in.
Many hands = light work.
Today, Sunday morning, Janine and I spent time communing with nature.
Janine engaged deeply with nature by walking into the muddy dam fully clothed to hook some very heavy load chain around the dead tea trees bushes that were killed by the fire, and have been sitting in the water, standing dead and ugly for 3 years now.
We decided that today was the day to snig out as many of them as we could reach safely, and drag them out of the water and up onto dry land, then cut them up for fire wood for next winter.
It has been raining so much for the past few years since the big fire, that we couldn’t even get close to the dam bank without getting bogged. This has been our first opportunity to get this long-term job started.
We have cut about half of the wood that we will need for the next winter so far. Cutting and splitting fire wood is an on-going job all year.
We have achieved as much as we can at this stage. We will come back to it when and if the dry weather continues, so that we can walk further into the dam safely to get to more of the branches.
This small dam used to be our most reliable swimming dam in summer, because it was the deepest, and therefore held water the longest. The largest dam is beautiful to swim in, but only when it is full, as it is quite shallow and the water soon seeps and evaporates down to a waddling level.
Once the dam dries out once more, we will get all the dead tree branches out of the small dam, we will clean it out, so that we can swim in it safely on the hottest summer days once again.
Everything worth doing takes time. This is a long term plan.
Over the solstice break, I’ve been having a bit of time off.
A change is as good as a holiday I’m told. So I took some time out to weld up a steel frame to make a fume extraction hood to go over all the electric kilns.
I have been ‘making-do’ with a bathroom exhaust fan set into the kiln room window, but it doesn’t catch all the fumes.
So we now have a ‘proper’ hood that covers all 3 kilns and there is room for a 4th kiln at the end, if I ever get round to building it.
The frame is welded out of 20 x 20 RHS sq. section tube and then primed, undercoated and top coated with a strong yellow industrial grade paint. Something resembling ‘CAT’ Yellow, just to give it that heavy duty industrial look. Actually, I was thinking of the sort of colour that big factories have to paint over-head cranes, gantries and such.
It has turned out to be a massive edifice measuring 4.5 metres long by 1.5 m wide and 500 mm. high.
I had to build a special little trolley to manoeuvre it out of the welding area and into the court yard, where I could rotate it so as to allow me to screw in the poly carbonate lining.
I decided to use light weight RHS construction and poly carb sheeting because of the weight factor. I have to lift it up into the ceiling. But I also noticed after the fire, that poly carb doesn’t burn. It just melts, even at really high temperatures. So I thought that I’d give it a try as a fume hood lining. It wont get too hot, so shouldn’t melt. It is very light weight. It lets the light through, adding to the ambiance of the kiln room. It is cheap compared to any other sheeting. BUT most important of all, it doesn’t rust. The big killer of overhead hoods is the condensation of acid gasses and the rust that they create. This could be a solution?
Time will tell.
My son Geordie and my friend Warren came over for our Solstice lunch get-together, so before we ate, we did the install. It took all of 5 minutes, because I had every thing planned out and ready.
Now, the bathroom fan will be more effective at removing all the fumes from the kilns, and there is room for expansion.
Hopefully, a cheap and effective solution to the kiln vent fume problem.
While we had both Geordie and Warren here, I got them to help us move an exquisite old Japanese cupboard into our bedroom.
We were given this gorgeous old Japanese cupboard by my lovely friend Anne, who I have known for a very long time, getting on for 58 years in fact. Where does the time go?
Thank you Anne!
Somewhat disappointingly, we had another flood in the new pottery shed this week. Each time it happens, I look at the causes and find a solution and fix it. This time we had a brief, but severe storm of just 25 mins, but we got 25 mm of rain come down in that short time. It caused the gutters to over flow into the court yard around the kiln. However this time the rain all came it, not from the open wall leading into the courtyard, but deep in the enclosure against the kiln room wall from the gutters that couldn’t cope with the intense volume of water.
It has become apparent that the builders were pretty sloppy with their levels, such that the concrete slab is high at the edges and low in the middle of the kiln/glazing rooms. The result was that all the water flowed in under the gal iron wall and pooled in the centre of the kiln room, with some seeping into the glaze room.
There is absolutely nothing that I can do to change to the contour of the slab to stop this happening again. So my only option is the make a drain that can intercept the water before it reaches the wall and enters the building.
To this end, This morning I used a diamond saw blade to cut two 8 metre long slices through the 115 mm thick concrete slab down to the substrate of compacted rock dust and gravel. It was one of those nightmare jobs that nobody would ever want to do. But someone has to. Meet muggins.
You can see in this image, where I had initially tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to create a small diversion channel around the wall using a circular saw and a friction disc. This wasn’t deep enough to cope with the flood of water from this last storm. I realised that the drain needed to be substantially larger and deeper.
Then, I hired a jack hammer to break up the concrete into rubble. That was another big job.
Finally, I removed the broken ‘rio’ bars and the strip of black plastic waterproofing membrane, and then shovelled out all the larger pieces of crushed concrete and re-installed all the finer gravel.
This allowed me to then lay pavers over the rubble to make an ‘agg’ drain.
With my remaining energy, I completed the job by laying a line of terracotta pavers to cover the scar, but leaving a gap all along the trench to allow any future flood water to flow down into the rubble drain and seep out along the alley way between the two sheds. Hopefully a simple and effective solution to yet another problem left by our slack and seemingly incompetent builders. ( who have now gone out of business I’m told). I have noticed that any rain that is driven into the courtyard by the storm, just sinks into the porous pavers and their gravel bed. That paved part of the kiln shed/courtyard never holds any water. It’s just a total bummer that the slack builders cast the slab with the fall in the wrong direction.
It’s been a hard day. I’m pretty worn out from the effort of jack hammering, crow-barring and wheel barrowing all the broken-up concrete out of the trench, but very happy with the out come, now that it’s done!
I’m hoping that it will work. I’m getting too old for all this strenuous high energy stuff.
There is such a beautiful optimism about spring. The weather is warming up. We even have clear, bright, warm days when we take our jumpers off! My brown work jumper that I wear when I’m welding and/or firing the wood kiln has had a lot of holes burnt into it over the past 15 years. I have been slowly working on it over that time repairing the holes by darning colourful threads over the gaps. It has started to become something more than just an old, repaired, work jumper now, it’s becoming a work of art in itself. I’ve spent this last week of evenings in front of the wood fire fixing it up for another year of hard work. It’s become something more than just a jumper. It’s becoming a treasured item, embodied with effort and work. Not just the work that resulted in all the holes and burn marks, but the extra effort in its recovery and repair. It’s a bit like doing a kintsugi repair on a treasured pot that got broken. I do that too.
I also have a better, but also quite old woollen jumper that I used to keep ‘for best’. ie. for going out in. I keep it in a plastic bag over the summer months, filled with herbs and lavender, to keep the moths out. But over the years, the little tenacious critters seem to have found their way in every now and then and now this jumper too has a few holes in it. So after I ‘finished’ the brown jumper. I started on the next one. It only has a few small moth holes, so it was a quick ‘two-nighter’ job. Done sitting in front of the wood fire, keeping warm and getting next years woollens up to speed for the next winter, before I put them away for the summer. Back into the fragrant herb lined plastic bag.
This series of repair sessions that began 13 years ago trying to extend the life of a good quality piece of clothing, slowly took on a life of its own. I think that I may have made this old brown jumper a bit too special for welding and firing now. It’s become rather special in its lovingly repaired old age.
The Japanese have a single word that sums up this concept. Mottainai!
As for the concept of kintsugi that I mentioned above. I have been slowly working my way through a number of special pots that survived the fire. They are all broken, but still rather lovely in their own special broken and shattered way. I have re-built all the broken and missing sections of the bowls using my own home-made epoxy-based filler which I hand-build in small sections, layer upon layer, grinding back and sanding each layer, then adding on another little section, slowly building the missing section back up to where it once was.
The really beautiful thing about something that you have done yourself, by your own hand, is rather special. These repaired items are more valuable and unique than they were beforehand, not in a financial way, but something more cerebral and emotional. The loving workmanship has transformed them up to another level of complex value. And, in the final analysis, probably also some sort of increase in monetary value, but this is hard to quantify, as such special personal items rarely ever really come onto the commercial market.
Well, I thought it was. With 2 pug mills apparently fixed. I decided to make up a few batches of clay in the repaired ‘phoenix’ dough mixer. We had run out of the last quarter tonne batch of clay. All we had in the clay box were several bags of recycled turnings that really needed wedging thoroughly, or pugging. We opted to mix all the re-cycled turnings in with the new batches of clay and pug it all together. All well and good. It should have been so easy.
The dough mixer worked perfectly and I soon had a batch of plastic clay on the clay trolley and out to the rebuilt pug mill. Janine started pugging the clay while I mixed a second batch. Each batch is comprised of 100kgs of dry powdered clay, felspar and silica. These powders are all mixed together dry, then I add 24.5 kgs of water to the batch and the mixer stirs it all together into a stiff plastic, sticky mass. It then has to be hauled out of the mixing bowl, bit by bit and stacked onto the clay trolley to be wheeled out to the pug mill.
I could hear the big pug motor ‘whirring’, the gear box grinding, and the vacuum pump making its ‘phut’, ‘phut’, ‘phut’, noise. as I worked in the clay mixer room. Then nothing. When I came out to get the clay trolley to reload it with the 2nd batch. Janine was standing there looking a bit puzzled. The pug mill had stopped. The motor was working when I rebuilt it, but that was without any load on the motor, just ‘free-wheeling’ . As soon as the clay went in, the load on the motor increased and it just stopped. The over load switch clicked in and it wouldn’t restart.
Bummer! We now had 2 loads of clay needing pugging and a machine full of clay, but no action. I couldn’t do anything about it right there and then. The machine will need to be stripped down again at some stage. But right now I need to pug this clay. The only option was to wheel ‘Pugsly’ out. I was hoping to keep it clean and ready to pug the first batch of porcelain clay. That’s now a pipe dream. We start pugging the white stoneware through Pugsly. It starts well enough, but then I realise that the vacuum pump isn’t working. It’s making the right noises, but the clay is coming through with air bubbles in it. I can lift the lid off the vacuum chamber white it is working. This lid should be severely locked down tight by the vacuum pressure. Again, I can’t do anything about it immediately, I’ll have to figure it out later. I need to get the clay made, bagged and into the clay box, before it dries out.
I just spent a month of all my spare time re-building these two machines. One doesn’t work at all and the other doesn’t work a very well. I’m a complete failure as a mechanic. This is a real lesson in humility. When all the clay is finally pugged. Tonights dinner will be humble pie for me. One small up-lifting part of this whole disappointing exercise is that the paint work was a success. It’s bright, colourful and cheering. That’s a small reward.
We spend two days processing all 400 kgs of clay and putting through the pug mill twice. Each batch is pugged and laid out on the clay table in rows and layers of sausages. Because there is the possibility that I could have made an error while weighing out the dry ingredients, or that there might be slight variations in the materials as delivered in the various bags. We pug all 4 batches of clay, then chop the ends off every sausage and re-pug the clay to make sure that every sausage that come s out of the 2nd process has all the same consistency. This is then bagged and stored in the clay box. It’s a bit of teamwork to get it all done efficiently and as quickly as possible, with as little mess as possible. However, inevitably, There will be some clay that gets dropped on the floor.
Once all 400 kgs of the clay is pugged, bagged and in the clay box, a very slow process, as the 3” pug is so much slower than the bigger 4” one. We have to clean up the floor to control the dust. A very small successful part of this protracted failure is that I built all the clay tables and trolleys on wheels, plus I mounted both pug mills on castors. We mop the floor all around the pug mills. Then wheel everything out of the way, and clean the floor under where the pugs were. It’s all quick and easy, and every part of the process of cleaning up is a success. It’s soon time to roll everything back into place. Ready to start pulling both machines to bits and finding out the problems involved, then sorting it all out.
Jane’s big pug has a motor problem. It wants to start, but can’t get going. It must be the starter windings or the starter capacitor. I pull the motor off and take it into town to find someone who knows about such things, to get the parts that I need to get it going again – hopefully. I’m told that it is most likely the starter solenoid. There isn’t one to be had in Mittagong at either of the electrical workshops, so I order one. It should be in next week. Watch this space.
Now for Pugsly’s vacuum pump. I think that it is something to do with the valve, hose and filter, vacuum air line. I disconnect the plastic hose, turn on the vacuum pump and put my finger over the end of the hose and it has hardly any suction at all, but there was some, just a tiny bit. I pulled it all to bits and found a few things out. The first was that the filter had been installed back to front at some stage in the past. Someone has had it to bits at some stage in the past and put it back together back to front. I hadn’t thought to check that when I started work on it. I’m totally hopeless as a fitter and mechanic.
When I got it off. I also discovered that it was chocker block full of white clay – on the pump side, not the pug side of the line. This is theoretically impossible, so that was a bit distressing. As I continued to dis-assemble it all, I also found that the sump of the pump had white clay mixed in with the oil! That would have ground out the bearings! I drain the oil out and replaced it with fresh oil. Ran it for a short time to rinse out all the old oil from the crevices, then drained it again and refilled it with new oil again. After reassembly, I test it and it has quite good suction. So not such a bad outcome.
I decide to have a look at the vacuum pump on the big pugmill. I discover that it has been over filled to the brim with oil. I drain 2/3s of it out until it is back down to the indicated upper level in the sight gauge. Everything else seems to be in order. However, because I’m such a hopeless mechanic, there could still be more issues to deal with the next time that we get to test these machines out.
It would have been so much easier to buy new machines from the start and I wanted to. I even had the money for them set aside to pay for them. But ‘Venco’, the pug mill manufacture here in Australia closed down a few years ago, when Geoff Hill, the proprietor died. The company has re-started under the new ownership of his grand son, but only in a very small and intermittent way. They have no plans to produce the 4” pug mills for some time yet. So far they have only made 2” pug mills, with the first batch of 3” pugs coming through now.
So I am stuck with my ineptitude to muddle things through. I will get it all done, but it is frustrating and very, very slow.
This last few weeks has seen us making pots, but also getting into some serious repairs and maintenance.
I was outside digging over the ‘cottage garden’ preparing the soil for sowing seeds of a spring/summer flower garden show of colour. I know that now is the time to plant out seeds for spring in this flower garden, as in the veggie garden, where we go almost everyday to harvest food for dinner, do a little bit of weeding and plant out successive sowings of vegetable seeds. I see that the red ‘Flanders’ poppies are germinating in the freshly dug soil where I have recently planted garlic cloves. Poppies decide when the time is right to germinate, but they will only germinate in freshly turned soil. So now is the time to dig over the cottage garden site.
I whipper snipped all the old foliage into mulch, raked it all up and onto the compost, or used it as mulch in other places in the yard.
I took what I thought was the easy alternative of using the cultivator. Not so! I only got 1/4 of the way round and the fuel line blocked up. This machine is a little beauty. I bought it 45 years ago, second hand for $50. It has just gone and gone and gone on working. I only use it a few times a year, but it is so much quicker and easier than hand digging with a garden fork if there is a lot to do. I tweaked the old rubber fuel line and it just snapped clean off in my hand, trailing petrol straight down onto the soil until the small petrol tank was emptied. I walked to the shed and got a pair of pliers to remove the stub end of the fuel line. It was very brittle as its quite old. I have replaced the fuel line a couple of times over the 45 years that I have owned it. The remaining length of line is too short to re-join for a temporary fix, so its another long walk to get some more fresh fuel line from the maintenance shed. With repairs completed, another walk to the fuel shed to get some more petrol and I’m back in business, just a half hour later.
I love this old cultivator. It’s just like me. Out of date and long past its use-by date, but it just seems to be able to keep on going, and going. So solid, reliable and old fashioned. Not very complicated. A good worker. I’m happy to spend time maintaining it to keep it working. It’s a pleasure to be able to own and use such a lovely old Australian made, solid machine that works so simply and so well.
I completed what I set out to do with no more interruptions. Luckily, I had all the parts that I needed on hand, so the job was started and finished on the same day. It’s not always so.
We borrowed Sandy Lockwood’s small pug mill over Xmas and January, as she wasn’t using it over the break and was happy to lend it to us. My wrists weren’t up to wedging another quarter tonne of clay again, so It worked out very well for us both, because after we had finished pugging the new batch of clay and also working through all our stored up re-cycled and bagged turnings and throwing slip. I pulled the pug mill to bits and cleaned it right out. I even saw that the chassis was getting a bit rusted in places, so I cleaned it back, rust converted it and painted it black again. Good as new when we returned it. This pug mill has never been in such good condition since it was built.
That batch of clay is now all used up, so we need to be getting on with getting another pug mill working.
In the old pottery, before the fire, we had two 4” or 100mm dia. Venco vacuum pug mills. One for white clay and one for dark clay. I also had a 3” or a 75mm dia. stainless steel pug mill just for porcelain clay and finally we had a very small 2” or 50mm dia. stainless steel pug for small batches of test bodies and recycling of turnings. That was such a good position to be in. Luxury really. It took me over 40 years to get to that position.
At the beginning of the year, we were given a pug mill from our friend Toni Warburton. It hadn’t been used for a long time. Perhaps 20 or more years? It had been stored in her back shed for time out of mind and was full of dried out clay. That’s not such a problem. What was a problem, was that it had never been taken apart. so all the bolts holding the 2 halves of the pug mill barrel together were rusted and swollen up in their sockets. They couldn’t be removed or even rotated. I could have snapped off the heads trying to get them loose, but then the shattered off ends would have made them very difficult to drill out accurately. So I decided to just drill them all out straight from scratch. A very long and difficult job.
Drilling out all 8 of the bolts took some time. They were all 90mm long, so I started off with a 3mm pilot hole, then increasing from 5 to 7, and then 9mm drill bits, until the bolt was completely hollowed out and could be removed.
I was wondering if I would get away with it, but I didn’t snap off any drill bits, especially the first 3mm drill bit. That would have certainly put an end to it.
Once I got the barrel apart, I could clean out the dry clay and start to clean it up. The pug mill had previously been used to prepare dark iron bearing terracotta clay. However, I want to use it for white stoneware, so It had to be cleaned out very well. scrupulously well. I made a thorough job of it, starting out with a paint scraper and generally progressing from hand held wire brush, through to a circular wire brush in an electric drill and finishing off with an angle grinder for the most stubborn bits.
I set about removing every trace of terracotta from both the barrel castings and the stainless steel blades and shaft. They cleaned up pretty well. I ground the barrel back to bare metal and gave it a good coat of etch primer to seal it. This wont last in the places of heaviest wear, like in front of the shredding screens and in the reduction cone of the barrel, but elsewhere it will help minimise the ‘salt’ corrosion caused by the alkalis in the clay reacting with the bare aluminium metal under very wet and humid conditions. The barrel is cast out of marine aluminium, but eventually it still corrodes. In the last pottery, I replaced the oldest barrel that I had on my oldest ’70’s ‘Venco’ pug mill in 1984. It was starting to get corrosion patches breaking through the barrel after 35 years! I kept sealing them with ‘LockTite’ ‘wick-in’ each time I took it to bits and serviced it. The Locktite seeps into the crevices and then ‘gels’ to seal off the void. Very cleaver. If this barrel lasts that long, it wont be my problem! Someone else will have to deal with it.
Toni had christened this pub mill ‘Pugsly’, so that is its name now and forever. However, I gave Pugsly a bit of a spruce-up and a new coat of paint.
Bright and cheerful and ready for work. I mounted the vac pump underneath to keep them both close coupled and easy to move around on the one solid castor unit.
This will be our old, but new, porcelain pug mill.
Last year our good friend Jane Sawyer offered us her old Venco pug. She had bought it 2nd hand in the 90’s. She offered it to us as she wasn’t using it anymore. She has another one at ’SlowClay’. This pugmill had stopped working at some stage and was surplus to her needs. We had tried to get it trucked up to Sydney, but no taxi truck company wanted to take on the job of delivering it to the trucking depot for transfer to Sydney. The only quotes I could get were approaching upwards of $1,000. Way too much! So at the start of April. Janine and I made a lightning trip down to Melbourne to collect it. We drove down in the ute, as it has a crane on the back, built for lifting such heavy gear as this. We had 3 days with Jane and took a day of rest to walk into and around Melbourne. The 10 hour drive each way was a bit boring. We changed drivers every 2 hours. It has been a very long time since I drove to Melbourne. The road is all dual carriage way now and a very comfortable drive. The truck is not particularly fuel efficient, so the 20 hour drive cost us $300 in petrol. 1/3 the cost of getting it trucked. But at least we now have it! The best part was that we got to spend a few days with Jane. And, It arrived home safely without being damaged in transit!
This image by Jane Sawyer.
Once home I started to get the pug mill to bits to clean it out. It had also been used for terracotta, so a lot of cleaning was needed. The motor still made a noise when switched on, but instantly went into overload, shut down and stopped humming. It appeared that either the gear box was broken, jammed or a bearing was seized. The only way to find out was to strip it all down to basics. This was easier said than done.
The bottom half of the barrel had seized bolts. I snapped off one of them trying to get it loose, so decided to drill out the other. Once the barrel was off, I tried to remove the collar connecting the gearbox to the barrel. This is where the problem lay. Once I got the bolts out the collar and shaft could only rotate together when I switched on the motor. I eventually got the shaft away from the gearbox, but the collar was very firmly jammed onto the shaft.
I spent a week heating, quenching, oiling, and tapping, several times a day. Whenever I went past. I eventually put the collar in the vice and hit the shaft with a sledge hammer. Gently at first, using a hardwood block to cushion the blow. Nothing happened, so I hit it harder, still nothing. Then I hit it really hard and split the wooden block! But there was possibly a little bit of movement – but only possibly. Was I imagining it? Another hard wood block, and another blow from the sledge hammer saw it definitely move 1 mm.! I dosed it quite liberally with RP7 and left it over night. Several days and 3 hard wood blocks later, the shaft was free.
I discovered that the grease cap on the collar was blocked, so the collar was badly corroded and had swollen up and jammed onto the shaft. The lubricating tube was so badly blocked I couldn’t clear it out. I decided that it was easier to drill out a new greasing tube through the collar to be able to lubricate the shaft into the future.
I welded up a new steel pug mill table/trolley on castors, so that I can move the very heavy pug mill around in the future. I made an under carriage to carry the vacuum pump together with the pug, so that I don’t have to move the vacuum pump separately. This will be our new/old white stoneware pug mill. I’m still waiting to get my hands on another 4” Venco vacuum pug mill for the buff/brown stoneware wood fire clay body. It’ll happen. I just need to be patient.
Bit by bit, slowly, slowly. We are getting everything back to where we were before the fire.
There is a huge sense of satisfaction in being able to take other peoples unused and non-functional pieces of equipment and bring them back into productive use for very little money, by more or less only using my own labour, ingenuity and time. I’ve never done this kind of thing before, so it’s all new to me. I’m just making it up as I go along. There isn’t anything in life that teaches you how to disassemble a pugmill with a seized shaft. I’m lucky. It all worked out well.
It’s an honour and a privilege to own and use these personal links and connections to my friends. There is so much embedded energy in these machines, it’s important to keep them going and avoid waste. it is a delight to see them working properly and being productive again.
We are so lucky to have such Generous, helpful and supportive friends.
Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished and nothing lasts.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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