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-13F this morning

The wind and cold packed some drifts into great igloo material.

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From Bingo Road. Pink apples and pink juice.

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2 inch wide Stanley 750 chisel. Not a reissue. $2 at auction.

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I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos and practicing on the lathe. It's a lot of fun. I hope to make handles for my 14" Witherby draw knife soon.

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Last month I bought a 36" Delta Homecraft wood lathe off a guy in Cherryfield. It came with homemade rolling stand with heavy stock, complex beveled joints, and a chisel rack. It lacked a motor, but had a small shelf on which to mount one. So, with some wood, some hinges, some bolts, and a belt, I got a motor (borrowed from a bandsaw) rigged up and running.

I've only played with it a little, making a few file handles. I hope to make replacement handles for some draw knives soon.

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Took the rotten handle off an old 14" (!) Witherby draw knife and a beautiful hammered tang emerged.

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Waiting for apples

Last year I didn’t pay much attention to apple trees until around September, when I noticed some fruit was ready. This year I started watching them so, so early. I waited for green to appear, waited for leaves to form, waited for blossoms, waited for fruitlets. Every stage seemed to take forever, possibly because I checked everything around every day. (It was nice to come back from a two-day trip to see how much things progressed when I wasn’t looking.)

Right now some of the trees have fruitlets bigger than golf balls. Some have a blush of red on one side. They are starting to really look like apples.

But unfortunately it’s still weeks and months away from harvest time. The very earliest will be at the tail end of July, and most of them won’t be ready until September at the earliest.

I hate waiting!

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Looking for scions

I screwed up last winter. That’s when I started looking for apple scions. I had a real hard time identifying the past season’s growth, and cut a lot of scions that were actually old, useless (for grafting) wood.

Scions from the previous summer’s growth are much more likely to work, and a good time to start looking for them is right about now. It’s a lot easier to identify the new growth, which around here is still tender and green at the ends, but getting darker and more sturdy at the point of original growth in spring.

I’ve been flagging local trees with survey tape on branches with good new summer growth. My hope is to come back in early February to find and collect scions from the taped branches.

This might not work - one tree I flagged with good new growth was hit hard by deer, and all the new growth was eaten away completely! But there was enough new growth on other branches to re-flag.

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Tree inventory

I am very impatient but like long-term projects too. Currently that takes the form of planting and nurturing trees on the farm. My main goal is to have productive fruit trees, and to that end I have a random collection of apples and plums. 

For apples, I have two Fedco trees on Antonovka rootstock, Porter’s Perfection and Zestar! (The ! is part of its trademarked! name. The apple itself is patented. I wouldn’t have gotten it had I known.) I also have about a dozen or more young seedling trees onto which I hope to graft good local seedling scions. And to round it out, I have ten Bud 9 rootstocks awaiting local scions as well.

My friend Tim has given me five plum trees, taken from suckers around the trees in his yard. He got his trees from suckers around his dad’s trees about eight years ago. Two years ago they produced a bumper crop of small plums, a little bigger than golf balls, with wonderfully sweet flavor. I have high hopes of getting something similar here in a few years.

We also have a few rows of the garden dedicated to seedling red oak trees. My father-in-law gave us a barrel of acorns to feed to the pigs. After a couple months, I tried to dump out the barrel only to find it completely full of fresh root systems taking up almost half the barrel. We planted a few dozen of the germinated acorns closely spaced in rows and we’ll see how they grow from there. If they thrive for a few years I’ll try to transplant them to a final location.

In the future I’d like to try balsam fir Christmas trees. We have plenty of room and a large local fir population. We’ll see!

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Honda Ranchers

We have two Honda Rancher ATVs for farm work and fun stuff. One's a 2001 and the other's a 2003. They're not the fastest or flashiest machines but they have been reliable workhorses in rain, snow, mud, water, dust, dirt, and anything else we go through. And even when it's just hauling food and water to the pigs or chickens, back and forth, day after day, we haven't had to worry about them breaking down or getting stuck.

I have to fix the starter system on the '01. Pushing the electric start button results in just a clicking noise. It's either the wiring, the solenoid, or starter, I think - I have to get some parts, watch some YouTube videos, and try to get it going again. Fortunately, Ranchers have a backup pull cord starter. It's one of the reasons I got a second older Rancher instead of a newer, bigger Polaris.

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Fried perch

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Volunteers in the pig pen

Last year we had a small pig pen and two pigs. We kept them from June to November and got about 500 pounds of pork out of the process. Last year's pig pen is now an experimental plot for some pumpkins. It was tilled in late spring and planted not long after.

But the pen has plans of its own. A bunch of squash plants germinated first on the western side of the pen. But covering every square foot of the pen, what looked like just weeds a week ago, are baby tomato plants. There are more tomato plants than actual weeds. It will be interesting to see if they get completely crowded out by the pumpkins, or if they survive and put out some fruit.

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Frapoli's in Liberty

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Southern Maine tool-hunting

I live in Downeast Maine, not far from the the Aroostook County border. Southern Maine starts somewhere vaguely around Bangor for me. I just spent a couple days at the Maine Startup and Create Week conference in Portland, and, aside from visiting friends I haven't seen in quite a while, I shopped around for some tools for farm woodworking stuff.

I recently picked up an old Delta Homecraft lathe in Cherryfield, but the tailstock center (the thingy that goes into the tailstock and holds the workpiece from that end) was a weird cupped slug thing. It didn't seem to be working properly, so I went to Rockler and picked up a new "live" center. I also picked up a few EZE-Lap diamond honing paddles to try out Paul Sellers's honing technique with them.

Someone tipped me off about Industrial Hardware in Biddeford, which is a dusty old place that’s only open a couple days a week. The guy working there was elderly, hard of hearing, and shuffled slowly to the back to show me where some chisels. “There are some good sets back behind there, someone stuck some shit in front of them, just move it out of the way.” None of the chisels were, in fact, any good, but there was a section full of new-old-stock Simonds and Nicholson chisels and rasps, 50 years old or more, stuff they don’t make any more. I picked up an auger bit file and a rasp.

Next up was Liberty Tool in Liberty, Maine. They have tons of stuff, but no real deals - everything rare or desirable or fancy gets snapped up quickly as soon as it’s in stock by tool vultures who visit the store often. Since I can only get there once or twice a year, I don’t have a shot. But they do have a ton of interesting old stuff at fair prices, including buckets and buckets of hand saws, piles of braces and bits, dozens of middling hand planes, and stuff like that. They have a display case full of Stanley 45 planes, but they’re priced appropriately, i.e. over a hundred bucks each. I prefer to find stuff like that cheaply at flea markets, yard sales, auctions, etc.

They did have a really neat Wilton vise. It was equipped with woodworking jaws on one side and metalworking jaws on the other, with the appropriate set rotated into place as needed by removing and restoring a locking pin. But it was almost $200 so I skipped it as well. I have a bunch of vises that haven’t been installed yet already.

The final place was a few doors down (past the historic, octagonal Old Post Office), Frapoli’s Place. It’s tiny, compared to Liberty Tool, and it’s also raided regularly for the best stuff, but I did find a nice beechwood spokeshave with the iron in good shape. I couldn’t read the maker’s mark - it was an oval that looked like “... KENT” at the top, “SHEFFIELD” at the bottom, and “... WORKS” in horizontally across the middle. The iron is currently soaking in vinegar so I can remove the rust.

Next steps: rig a motor up for the lathe. I have a 1/3 horsepower Dunlap motor I borrowed from my Craftsman/King Seeley bandsaw, and I hope to rig it up properly to power the lathe. 

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The Grants Gold Label plane.