Alfie, The Born Again English Tractor

   I often wished there had been a tractor around here in the early years when there was lots of lifting, heavy jobs and construction going on, it would have made life considerably easier and saved a lot of wear and tear on my back. I remember some nasty winters too when I wished I had a machine around to dig myself out, getting dumped on by snow and having to park my truck out at the main road for a month or so and packing all my stuff in here on a toboggan.
   My Uncle Alan had a spread up on Sumas Mtn. near Abbotsford and developed a place up there with a lake, log houses and a tennis court, and ran enough cows to qualify for the farm tax rate. Early on he had bought a tractor from a now defunct International dealer in the farming community of Yarrow in the Fraser Valley. Over its useful lifespan the tractor had suffered at the heavy hands of numerous farmhands and countless joyriders I'm sure. The machine was developing some issues and wasn't needed around there any longer, and we discussed retiring it up here to the hot spring.
   We arranged for cheap rate on a back haul to get the machine up here. The plan was to off load it at the start of the gravel road, and I would go out with a driver and run it the rest of the way in, so I was surprised when Uncle Al had decided to personally deliver the tractor, arriving with the truck at the end of the road. I met them there in the early evening and the tractor was backed off the large low bed trailer. I was surprised once again  when Uncle announced he was driving  the tractor the final 2 rough hours out to the hot spring. He was in his late 70's at the time, and I was pretty sure he had spent more time driving a golf cart around than driving a tractor, but he was a self made go getter in the world and not the type of guy you would stand there and argue with.
He was going to drive the old tractor to the hot spring.
"OK", I said, holding the door open while he sat in there revving it up and studying all the levers, "...let me take over when you get tired, I'll be right behind you".
The ungainly machine had a front-end loader and a large brush mower mounted out the back, it gave a great lurch as he dumped the clutch and started off down the gravel road, swerving as he looked down pumping the clutch and searching for a higher gear.
   I had figured the old bugger would bounce along the rough lake road for a ways before he figured he had a good enough story for his golf buddies, then pull over to trade me for the comfort of my pickup. I didn't really want to follow too close as I didn't want to dirty up my air filter so I held back, killing time and stopping to throw rocks in the lake. So I get back on the road and I'm going along expecting to come upon him at any moment. It looks like he has found  high gear and left me behind!
I can see the tracks on the road and sometimes they appeared to slide and drift around corners.

    Well, I keep going until I am approaching the forestry campsite on the lake when I come across a splash and a trail of black oil down the road. I can tell by the color it is more than likely engine oil. The old tractor has sprung a bad leak and I don't imagine the low oil warning dash lamps work on that old heap, and fully expect the engine to lock up solid. The trail of oil continues down the road then begins to thin down to a trickle and around the next corner I see the tractor off to the side of the road. That surprised me as I thought it would have run further than that after the oil ran out. I pull up and Uncle Al is standing there calm as can be, "Where you been? he asked. 

It turned out he needed to take a leak and decided to stop at the forestry campsite, he pulled over, shut down, and when he got out noticed a few drips of oil under the machine, and saw the drain plug was missing. What was the chance of that, if he had of gone further, even just a little, the engine would have locked up and written off the machine. We piled into the pickup and followed the trail of oil back up the road and not far from where it began we found the engine drain plug, all covered in sand but it still had the sealing washer on it. We continued back to town for more oil, and at the tiny gas station in Mount Currie we discovered diesel engine oil is a lot more expensive than the regular stuff and we need quite a bit of it. We got back to the tractor and screwed the drain plug back in, tightening it up with makeshift tools and began pouring oil in. The tractor fired right up with no ill effects. It was getting dark by then and Uncle decided he had done his part, choosing to take my pickup and meet me back at the hot spring. I didn't have to go too far down the road to discover the headlights didn't work and it was a slow, dark trip, using up most of the road, and arrived out here sometime around 11:00 that night.

    It was put to work moving some boulders to restrict access around the hot spring and a few odd jobs around the place. There was an abandoned car a few miles down the road, it was an eyesore that you had to drive by every time you went to town. I rounded up Stevie over at Rogers Creek one day, he had an old Ford flat deck that was in one of its running phases, and I suggested we go load up that car and pack it off.
He looked at me funny, "That tractor can lift a car?" he asked.
I told him I'd be pretty disappointed if it didn't.
The tractor is a stout one, and had no difficulty lifting it onto the flat bed truck.
   That first winter I parked it out on the driveway and for the first time, prayed for snow. I dared it to snow, and I even did a snow dance. The odd lone flake would flutter down now and again, as if to tease me, until finally one day it started to come down pretty good. I could hardly wait to plow the driveway and it was all I could do to wait for a sufficient build up. The big moment finally arrived, I sauntered out with a big smirk on my face and climbed in the cab, it fired right up and I really figured I was styling now. I left it idling there to warm up while I went over to the shop for a few minutes, and as I was walking back I realise I can't hear the tractor running any more.Well darned if the bugger hasn't just up and quit. I cranked and cranked but no way the bugger would fire up.
   Earlier that fall, there had been kind of a shady tree planting outfit camped out at the hot spring campsite while they worked a contract in the area. They had run up a bit of a bill for camping and various things and in place of a bum cheque had offered me a barrel of diesel fuel, which I gleefully pumped my tractor plumb full of. It turned out it was a leaky barrel and was contaminated with considerable water which got into the system and had froze in the fuel lines and filters. Normally during a big snowfall I would stay inside with a good book, feeding the wood stove, but with a time saving tractor, I got to spend the next day or so tying to sort that mess out, laying under the machine with cold diesel running down my arms and dripping in my face. It was snowing pretty hard the whole time and I was pretty motivated to stick with it and get this rig fired up. The last step was to install a glass sediment bowl. I remember thinking I'd sure hate to break that part because I would have to get one from a dealer. Of course it breaks when I tightened it up, thus putting a bugger into my entire snow removal program. It began to snow even harder at that point, and kept it up for several days.
It was during this snow storm the tractor came by the name Alfie, as I needed to call it something  more polite than @*&%$!

Saw milling  2004

The log napping caper 2004, I wrote about this in the Feb. 2012 post Shop Construction.

I got the huge log home but it was a little hard on buddy Pierre's vehicle.

    I was doing some work around the yard one afternoon, coming down the driveway with a bucketful of sand, going downhill at a pretty good clip when I notice the right front wheel is leaning to one side and getting a pretty good wobble to it and just as soon as it registered what was happening I started for the clutch and brake pedals. Right then the wheel collapsed and the machine lurched over and the end of the axle dug into the ground, right at the same time as I got my foot on the brake. The wheel tumbled away and the axle housing end dug into the ground, digging a trench and the machine ground to a halt, as evidenced by my oily face print left on the inside of the windshield.
   Well I got it jacked up and put a block under it and had a good study of the situation. The machine is a four wheel drive, and it turned out the right hand drive had come apart and buggered its self, shedding the wheel and spilling bearings and junk out onto the ground. There was a stubby axle attached to the front wheel that got pretty banged up when it all came apart. I thought this was a pretty standard tractor, and parts would be easy to get, but as I found out there were no more of these stub axles left anywhere in the world. Manufactured over in Great Britan of all places, there had only been 180 of this model produced in four wheel drive so some parts were scarce. This was the days before satellite Internet out here and things were more difficult. I could see this was going to take longer than expected, and meanwhile the broken down old tractor was clogging up the driveway with no way to move it. I was standing around lamenting this problem one day when I heard the logger's road grader scraping down the road. The loggers from the Lineham camp down at the head of Harrison Lake were always fun over the years and keen to help out. I knew the operator Louie, so I ran out to the road and asked him if he could swing in the yard sometime and we could move my tractor.
I didn't mean right then, it had already sat in that spot for a few months.
"Let me do one more pass!", he hollered over the running engine.
So by the time he's gone way down the road and turned around, grading his way back, he has got on the radio and called his boss Pat, whom arrives as well, not wanting to miss out on the entertainment.
In between jokes and good natured ribbing we tried to figure out how to move the tractor with the large Caterpillar road grader. Easier said than done, but after several false starts, and plenty of choice logger words, we managed to drag the 3 legged Alfie over and park it next to the shop.
   It probably sat there blocked up on one end for several years, put on the back burner while I went on to other things. I would go out and start it once a month or so, and grease it when I thought of it, always anticipating the day it was back in working order. I never had much luck rounding up another stub axle, and it sure wasn't from lack of trying. I had several machinists take a look at the large, heavy part with the banged up threads and splines. An outfit in Whistler agreed to have a go at it and a week later I got my part back.

   The large bearings and seals I imported from afar and in not too much time I had the front drive all back on the tractor. I was plenty happy about that after all that time and jumped in the cab and fired it up, only to discover that the while the machine had sat the clutch plate has rusted itself to the flywheel. Lucky the transmission was stuck in 2nd gear in low range,  I discovered I could start it in gear with the starter motor. That wasn't very good for it, but it enabled me to move the machine around. You had no clutch so you couldn't shift gears and when you needed to park you just turned the key off. That winter I started it up like that to plow the driveway one snowfall and I thought I was being pretty resourceful. Only problem was being that you couldn't stop, I had make a pass then do a big circle out on the lawn to make another pass the other way, and when I went out the driveway I didn't have enough room to turn around so I would have to plow all the way down the main road to the hot spring campsite and make a loop around there then come all the way back to make another pass down my driveway.
Like I mentioned, the tractor was stuck in low range, so it would take a good 40 minutes to do the entire loop, and I gave up on that. The tractor sat for several years while I pondered this predicament. To get at the clutch would entail lifting off the cab and splitting the machine in the center, and quite the undertaking. I tried every trick there was to free a stuck clutch plate, and consulted every tractor expert I could find. The root of the problem was, at some point, the clutch lever had broken where it was welded to the clutch actuator, it had been re-welded in the feild, but not in quite the right spot, so it was difficult to disengage the clutch fully. The old tractor always was a pig to shift, and now with a little rust from lack of use and the clutch can't release from the flywheel.
    One time I had a drilling crew staying here, they had a huge 6 wheel drive truck and offered to drag the tractor until the clutch broke free. We chained it up and away we went, I was in the cab holding the clutch pedal down with them towing and we just left great long skid marks in both directions.
I was getting a little disappointed with this whole tractor deal let me tell you, and I would have given the hulk away if we could have loaded it up somehow.

This past Fall I went out to the tractor to see if I could make any headway. I had the bright idea of attaching a longer lever to the clutch actuator and kept forcing it over center, until suddenly, the weld broke. Well that was the best bugger up to happen to me in years!

 I strung out a 240 volt power cord and hauled my welder out on the wagon and got the pedal linkage welded back in the proper spot. I started it in gear with the starter motor and got it pointed in a straight line while holding the clutch pedal in and when I figured I had a good head of steam built up I stood on the brake pedal. One wheel made a skip and a hop before the clutch broke free and released.
Ha, after 8 years I was back in the tractor business, and to think a few weeks before I would have paid you to take it away! Although I was afraid to leave the yard with the old bugger for fear of another wheel falling off or something so I set aside a week or so to put some work into it.

  I drove it in the shop in November and went to work on the old guy, fixing about a hundred little things that had always been wrong with it, installed new headlights, straightened the radiator, and ordered in new joints and carrier bearing for the drive train, and even went so far as to clean the rats nest out from under the hood.

I enjoyed going out to the shop in the morning, turning the lights on, lighting a fire and enjoying the early quiet of the day with a tea and organising myself for the days work.

 OK, enough of the peace and quiet....

 

I tore in to the transmission to check out that sticky shift fork problem...

I fixed the flat tire, I wrote about that a few posts ago.

The old tractor has spent nearly a half century sitting outside, now I've decided it needs a shelter over it and preferential treatment. I keep it plugged into a block heater ready to go, but you know, it has been one of those winters that we haven't got any snow. I'm kind of looking forward to a huge dump of snow, it has taken me 10 years to plow that driveway.

Anyone had a look at the Farmer's Almanac?

It Only Hurts When I laugh.

    Earlier this Fall, excruciating pain under my ribs sent me to the little Pemberton health clinic emergency one night. That started a whole round of visits with doctors, an ultrasound, and an MRI down in Whistler. After visits with specialists in Vancouver, endless jabbing, stabbing, bloodletting, and chest hair tugging little deals they attach wires to a decision was made to seek a date for surgery. They  emailed one day with a date that had come open if I wanted it. Friday the 13th. Oh what the hell, what could possibly go wrong. I don't imagine it is too unusual to get cancellations for surgery on Friday the 13th. That could go for some Doctors too I would imagine. She had given me an alternate date, just in case, but I was keen to take the earliest date available and get the ordeal over with.
   I got my firewood caught up and split, some winter improvements done to the intake screen up the mountain, and some repairs to the large water driven pelton wheel generator it initially feeds. Fixed the hell out of my old tractor to plow with, crossed my fingers and prepared myself for the possibility of being layed up for awhile, having the power not working and freezing up the cabin, vehicles falling apart, or any number of calamity than can befall a person out here.
   I don't usually care to leave here if I can help it. Double especially to the big city. Seems the closer I get to one, the more my stress level goes up.
I've become akin to a forest creature, comfortable in his natural environment, although some contented farm animal preferring to be left in his happy pasture is maybe more like it, and the closer Friday the 13th got, the more this critter couldn't help but think he was being led off to market.

Lions Gate Hospital North Vancouver
Friday the 13th.
   The day started early.  Forest creatures seldom sleep in the city, and last night was no exception.
With no little amount of trepidation I presented myself to the admissions desk where I'm handed an identification tag. "I put that on my big toe?" I asked.
Sometime later, the surgeon stood  chatting with me beside the operating table, holding something that I hoped wasn't a 'how to manual'.
"Well, Doc", I said, "...you guys have worked wonders on me, I've never felt better, so if you can round up my clothes and boots, I'll be heading on back to the old lodge".
"Sir, let me just strap your arm down now", a  young specialist said looking down on me from behind, "...there is important IV's and things, we can't have any movement going on." She pauses for a moment, giggles from behind her mask, then continues working, strapping, tubing, poking, reassuring.
   By now I have had a pretty good look around the operating room and its contents, and she must have wondered if my head was actually attached, and that door with the exit sign on it looked mighty inviting. In fact, I have memorised every step from the front door of the hospital, right here to the green painted O.R. You know,  just in case of fire and I need to escape or something and its every man for himself, but thats just me. The possibility of having to make a run for it dragging several hundred or more pounds of medical equipment along behind I wanted to make sure I was going to take the short route and avoid any stairwells or bottlenecks with the herd.
   The half dozen specialists present stand off studying charts, beeping equipment, and colorful computer generated images of the inside of me, chatting quietly among themselves.
"OK, I'm going to do the same to your other arm now." states upside down girl, who straps the other arm down
 "I'll never get away now." I mumbled to her.
"What was that?" she asks, stopping her work and leaning into view.
I thought for a moment, then said in a matter of fact voice, loud enough for all present to hear, that while they were rooting around in there, to keep an eye out for a set of lost keys.
I had them in my peripheral vision of course, and noted it had the desired effect...each had stopped what they were doing, turned, and looked.
Upside down girl popped back into view. "You swallowed your keys?" she finally had to ask.
"No", I said, letting the moment hang for as long as was suitable at a $25,000 an hour facility,"...but its the only place I haven't looked."
There was a collective shrug and they all went back to what they were doing.
"Goodnight Mr. Trethewey, just relax now, and breath deep." says upside down girl, opening a valve.
"Mooo..." went the inner critter softly, strapped down belly up and helpless, and the next thing he knew, or better put, didn't know, for the next 6 hours, was out colder than the proverbial ham sandwich.

   They insisted on keeping me corralled up there enjoying the hospital hospitality in a room over looking the Vancouver skyline for a few days, looking like the sorry loser of a knife fight, plugged into oxygen, intravenous lines, and several tubes jammed into me that drained off to bags clipped to my hospital gown. "What if I sit on one and squish it all back in again?", I asked a nurse one day, only half joking.
"That won't happen" she assured me, before cracking up.
After a few days I was up and about, hobbling along with my wheeled life support tree up and down the hallway. I was keen to go home and every time I passed a Doctor or nurse in the hallway I would straighten up and try to look as normal as possible and ask them which way to the weight room.
   Eventually, I was unencumbered from any equipment, found myself in my street clothes close enough the entrance to see pasture and made a run for it, skipping out on the bill at the same time.
I was turned loose after agreeing to follow their advice for a suitable recovery period, limiting my work and recreation, and making my carcass available for further prodding and poking.
And then I couldn't get out of town fast enough.

So for the time being, I am begrudgingly restricting my activities, and it looks like I'm going to have to plant myself here in front of the keyboard and behave myself for a stretch. 

So I'll sit back here and grow a new patch of belly fur and see if I can come up with some stories and posts for a bit to keep myself occupied.   

Flat Tire Fix

    I'm getting my old tractor back in running shape after an extended period of being broke down. After getting it mobile I tackled the flat tire that it has had for about 8 years now. By nature I like to do things myself of course so I got an new inner tube shipped up on the bus. Tractor tires are usually filled with water and calcium for weight and traction. I figured it could weigh 1000 lbs. or more. 

 First thing is get out your big tools. Your big ratchet, sledge, and 20 ton jack for starters, and be prepared to use a 4 foot pipe over the ratchet handle for leverage.

 I got all the lug nuts off but it was stuck on there, I'm not sure if the wheel has ever been off, I figured a few well placed hits with the sledgehammer would do it.

 I got my hands on an old sign post and managed to pry the wheel off the studs. I got in there and tried to roll it towards the front of the machine. I was rather hoping I could just hold it upright and slowly roll it to the front of the machine and lift it with the bucket. It was all I could do to hold it upright and there was no shortage of odd noises emitting from both ends of me before it finally fell over with a ground shaking thud.

I managed to get the calcium siphoning out into a
pan and dumping it in buckets and a barrel, it was slow going as there was probably between 50 and 60 gallons in there.

Once I got it lightened up enough I could stand the wheel up with quad to drain the rest out.
 

 I went to work at breaking the bead with the loader bucket.

I even got a little creative, and spiced up the language, then spiced it up some more, but no way I could knock the bead down, there was 45 years of rust sticking it to the rim.

OK, I know when I'm beat, into town we go.

So when I go to fire up my pickup it won't start. It was my in tank electric fuel pump, about the last bloody thing I wanted to be doing now, or anytime for that matter.
If you have ever had to replace one yourself you know what kind of job that can be.
Of course it had all rusted on bolts and several broke off just to make things entertaining, and I had just filled the tank.

  I had one in stock, for just such an emergency.

OK, back to the flat tractor tire. Several days later I backed out of the shop and fired it in the back. I took it easy all the way in, I was afraid of the tire spreading my pickup box.

A couple hours later I arrived in Pemberton and let the tire shop deal with it in the end, saving myself further aggravation. In a few days I drove back in to get it and took it home and got it back on the machine without any major calamities.

Road Work 2013 InShuckch Road.

 Our bumpy old forest service road out here has been getting plenty of attention the last year or two.
A contract was awarded recently to improve a section a few km down the road from here, and a small crew will be working there until the new year.

More often than not the roughest part of the journey, this narrow 1 km section along the river was always a challenge and prone to flooding. Locals call the area Singing Rock, the wind funnels through the notch and according to local legend, sings.
They had been making noises about doing this section of road for some time now.

A week ago a reflective vest showed up to pound grade stakes in.
I started hearing banging and clanging going on down the road a few days ago, and of course was listening to the chatter on the local radio channel.
So today I had to go down for a look, and make sure they were doing it right.

It was hovering at the freezing point which wasn't so bad, but Singing Rock concentrated the wind and it felt damn chilly out there on foot overlooking the job site.

They are lowering the road under the hydro line and packing off the material to bring the lower area up to grade.

Dumping it and spreading the material with the cat, taking the bend clear out of the road and lessening the grade. Work along the river can only be performed during low water so next year another job phase will take the work beyond along the base of Singing Rock.
The original gold rush trail of 1858 included a steep climb up and over the backside of Singing Rock. The Royal Engineers came along a year later to improve the important road to the upper Fraser River goldfields, blasting in a rough lower trail alongside the river.
In the early 1950's BC Hydro built a power line through the valley, and my uncle whom had been logging at the head of Harrison Lake received the contract at that time to upgrade the original wagon road between the two lakes.

A short section was completed not long ago along the slide just this side of the village of Skatin', above the Skookumchuck rapids, a long retaining wall holds back the unstable material from above.

A stretch at this end of Lillooett Lake was finished in September or so, and another long section of road further up the lake at the 18km mark was raised considerably and we hope has flooded for the last time.

 You get accustomed to the regular road closures at one point or other along the road, you know what time they going to let you through, usually every few hours so its not so bad.
It can be a bit of a social thing too, as people often get out and chat it up before being let through.

The waits along the lake could be quite pleasant too. Those that work or live out here often don't take the time to stop and enjoy what the lake has to offer.

For a period in July you could be entertained while parked waiting for the openings by the helicopters fighting the lightening caused fire up the mountain, coming down to the lake to fill their monsoon buckets and climbing overhead.

There was a steep hill down around the 40 km marker with a turn at the top that used to snag up 2 wheel drive vehicles in the winter pretty regular.

The loggers had at it and completely cut out the hill and turn and lessened the grade.

Its like a freeway along there now.

The past 20 years I've seen plenty of improvements done to the road, big and small, and I've welcomed every one. Wear and tear on vehicles out here is a major deal, and those with a vehicle are usually handy at keeping them together.
People have often asked me over the years what I thought the best kind of vehicle to drive out here was. I always answered, "Someone else's!".
The entire road will be improved on a regular basis until eventually it will be paved I imagine and only the old timers and native elders will recall what a rough, car eating, tire flattening experience it was to travel in the valley in the olden days.
Improved access to the remote valley will certainly be of great benefit to the local Inshuckch first nation as they complete negotiations and move towards improved services, self government, and future economic opportunities.

Refinishing The Lodge.

   In spent most of July 1995 staining the cabin here, and I recall crabbing about the $40 a gallon cost of the sealer which I recall buying in huge 5 gallon containers. It never really occurred to me at the time that eventually it would deteriorate and have to be sanded down and reapplied. It needed it a few years ago but I put it off as long as I could, then began to tackle it  a wall at a time.

Exposure to the elements over the years had taken its toll on the logs and finish.

I needed to fix were a bear tried to climb the bedroom wall back a few years, for reasons known only to himself. Imagine laying in bed at night and have this going on a foot and a half from your head.

I have two different sized grinders with different sanding discs, one for lineal and one for the notch corners. Its a nasty job, even with mask and goggles.

I let the first coat sit for a few days before applying the second.

Anyone making the mistake of stopping in looking for work was handed goggles mask and a grinder. Pretty soon word gets around and I end up having to do it myself, that's what happens to you if you don't stay in school kids. I got my old stunt double to finish it off this summer.

That stuff I spread all over the logs has climbed to $80 a gallon over the years.

It sure looks better though.

You need to remove trim etc and refinish that as you go.

 Railings and show spots are sanded by hand between coats to give a sheen.
All the spindles and railings were taken apart to be sanded down, and I have done that once already 8 years ago or so

Well I've got the south exposure all done, next year I'll start around the other side and do the guest cabin as well.....anyone looking for work?