willedoo

That story reminds me a bit of my grandfather. He lived alone for a lot of years. My grandmother died in 1958 and my great uncle who lived with them died in a car accident in 1963, then the grandfather in 1972, so nine years on his own. A neighbour rang him one day and noticed he sounded a bit odd on the phone so went around to check on him. He found my grandad with a broken nose and a badly swollen face after pranging his '38 Oldsmobile into a tree stump hidden in the long grass in a paddock. He'd been that way for about a week. That set things in motion where he didn't really bounce back at 88 years of age and eventually pneumonia got him. My dad was the same. Rolled the quad bike and broke the bottom of his leg bone and just kept working on the farm for a week like that until my sister visited and saw him with a foot half the size of a football. I'm glad I didn't inherit that trait; I'm not shy about going to the doctor if I think it's needed.

Thanks Nev, you reminded me of the old trick of driving on the other side of the road to lessen the effect. I haven't been out there for a fair while so had forgotten that one.

I've figured out some positives. Life is good. We've had twenty seven inches of rain so far this year and the country is looking great. It's finally stopped raining and the beautiful clear and cool weather is here. I have a debt free roof over my head, lots of food, a motor car that works, I can walk, talk, breathe, hear and see and have plenty of fun stuff to do. The first photo is the front yard, the second is the back yard, and the third photo is my best mate outside the kitchen window trying to shame me into giving him some dog biscuits. I've known him since he was born, so he's known me his entire life. There's nowhere I'd rather be.

It would be hard to reject an offer like that.

I think it will be one or the other. If they are going to get anywhere they'll need more like him.

The problem looks to be more so with the twin cam example as given in the video, ie a hollow pressed crank pin with a welsh plug in the centre. I wouldn't think tack welding the pin would get much penetration and strength in the long term. Some people replace the welsh plug with a solid pressed pin in the centre of the crank pin, extending full width of the flywheel.

I'd never heard of David Farley before he ran for One Nation in the Farrer byelection. I read in a news article that he's an ex managing director and CEO of AACo. It was a fair while ago, he served in that role from 2009 to 2013. For those that dont't know the company, Australian Agricultural Company is Australia's biggest cattle and beef producer. been around since 1824.

It's funny hearing some journalists referring to the government's 94 seat majority. That's their number of seats in the house; their majority is 19 seats.

This bloke does some good video presentations. This one gives a good explanation of what happens when hoons ride Harleys:

To summarise all of the above post, basically I've got to spend less time fooling around on this computer and more time swinging a hammer.

I've estimated there won't be much ratbiking happening until later in the year. There's a lot of shed renovations to finish before that happens, but in the meantime a bit of parts sorting and sourcing is still happening. On the shed/workshop renovation side there's still a fair bit to do. Some steel diagonal braces need to be relocated for better workbench fitment. A couple of windows need to be finished off and a couple more timber wall purlins swapped out for steel. Where one diagonal brace set is to be removed, an existing timber wall frame in that quarter section will be converted to a bracing wall with rods and bracing ply, double braced and insulated. Then a six metre long wall section leading to another shed room will be walled in for bench and shelving space. The steps leading into the other room will be removed and alternate entry to that room sorted. That gets the walls done, so then it's on to positioning existing work benches and building a couple of new ones. After that, the shelving set up. That's all the hard part. The easier, fun part will be filling those shelves and sorting out tools and bits and pieces and setting up the workship equipment. The goal is for everything to have a fixed home instead of the mayhem the shed is now. I'll also lash out and get a sparky to run permanent wiring, lights and power points. I'm over plugging leads in and out all the time. This is a bucket list goal to get the workshop set up the way it's supposed to be. It's been a cluttered half workshop/half storage area for the last eighteen years or so since I built it, and it's been hard to do any major work in it due to all the junk in there which now has to go.

It's not just heavy trucks, anything with wheels will do it. You see corrugations on a lot of tracks that mainly only have Toyotas traversing them.

I ran into a bloke years ago, back in the 70's and he was doing interstate work with an F-700 with the five speed box. He jokingly said he only had to change gears three times between Melbourne and Brisbane. The only Macks I've driven were the old B model and a V8 R model. I can't remember what transmission the V8 had but it had some legs. Good torque as well. The old B model was a bogie drive with the 55 mph diff. It was more like driving a tractor than a truck.

Pete, I guess also as truck design advanced, the extra weight would play a part as well.

It shakes bolts out of trailers which is the biggest cause of flat tyres on those roads. Frustrating for the truckies blowing $500 tyres.

Good point. Normally I'd spend most of the day in air con, but for some people they'd be on their feet on the hot ground all day. I hope they had better boots than the Mack ones.

Grading after rain works in some areas where they get rain, but you'd be waiting a long time between grades in a lot of this country Nev. A lot of the country has a six to eight inch annual rainfall if you're lucky. That's where water trucks come into the equation.

It wouldn't be a bad job grading those roads if you liked a bit of solitude. I've seen quite a few setups where they have two graders and a joint camp. I ran into one bloke once who worked on his own. He had a donga with everything in it, sleeping quarters, kitchen and bathroom. The 40' trailer also had the spare space for a fuel tank and genset. He had a satellite dish as well. He would estimate the distance of a day's work and tow the donga trailer and Toyota behind the grader to where he was going to make camp for the night, then set up camp and do a grade down to the start point and back. You'd need a compact, self contained camp like that if you were moving camp daily otherwise it would drive you mad. He worked equal time job sharing with another bloke. I can't remember what hitch they'd do, it might have been two weeks on/two weeks off.

A big problem with them is they reappear fairly quickly. The grader only knocks the tops off them. I can remember grader drivers telling me how deep the corrugations go below the surface as they found out at times when they've had to cut the surface right back. They can extend a foot or two below the surface like hard ants nest.

I once bought a pair of Mack branded lace ups. I don't know if they still make them, but at the time Mack and Cat branded boots were getting about. They had the gel implant in the heel for cushioning like a lot of modern workboots have. At the time we had a yard at Moomba and we left our gear there to go home for the Christmas break. I thought I'd be clever and leave some personal gear in one of the dongas to save carting it back and forth on the plane. When I got back early in January, the heels on the boots had exploded and blown the guts out of the heels where the gel bags would have been. Too much heat I figured; it would have been up in the 60's most likely inside the donga without the aircon on. They were expensive boots and nearly new but you couldn't wear them; it was like trying to drive with flat tyres.

Hopefully they'll have the money to fix it. Our council is flat broke to the tune of one billion dollars in the red. They've been spending money like drunken sailors trying to imitate the Gold Coast and now the shite has hit the fan. I'm a bit cynical I suppose, but my guess is higher rates and more potholes before any of the more than 1,000 bludgers sitting behind desks lose their jobs. They have way more sitting on their arse in the offices than they do out in the world doing some work. More than half the rates income goes to paying council staff.

It must be this one here:

Thinking in hindsight about the leaking fuel tanker in the above post. They tried everything they had on hand to try and stop the leak which at pressure was a big spray of fuel. After giving it some thought, if we'd had some rubber matting or belting as a bandage and decent sized ratchet straps on hand to hold it, we could have possibly slowed it to a dribble at least. A bit like how Captain Cook and Co. saved the Endeavour off Cooktown.

It would be nice to have heaps of spare cash to throw around as there's some bargains out there. This Massey came up today on marketplace for $5,000. There's way more than that in scrap price - heaps of steel, shafts, pulleys, hydraulic rams and pumps, gears etc.. On top of that it's got a V8 Perkins diesel with 3,000 hours on the clock. Naturally the catch is the transport cost to move it anywhere.

They're awful things; two things I don't miss about out there are corrugations and flies. The worst corrugations I've ever encountered were on the Kintore road after you turn off the Tanami road. From the turnoff it's about 375 klm to Kintore and about 200 klm of that was really bad corrugations with no let up hour after hour. It was the sheer distance of the corrugated section that made it so bad. We had a couple of casualties - one of the towed dongas had some suspension come apart so we had to take the wheel off and chain the axle up. The worst bit was late in the afternoon when a fuel tanker on the back of a body truck split a seam. We off loaded as much fuel as we could into trucks, machines and Toyotas but had to leave the tanker truck there overnight. Moving it would have ruptured it more and been a major fuel spill. With the level lowered, the pressure behind the leak wasn't as bad but it still lost a lot onto the road which the local council wasn't happy about. We borrowed a heap of 44's from a local station and a couple of the blokes came back with the float and a hand pump and offloaded fuel into the drums. They were going all night and into the next day to get all the fuel, about three trips they did. We found the best trucks to handle that rough country were the W series Kenworths. The cabs held up much better than Macks and other makes. You could buy some really good second hand road train rated W series trucks at fairly cheap prices. For the people selling them, they were no longer viable or economical for highway work, but they were still good for many years of desert bashing.