Bowed Over...

 The last few winters have brought almost unprecedented periods of rain, wind, and heavy wet snow. This resulted in many trees falling down, losing branches, or getting bowed over. While some of the bowed trees spring back up after the snow and ice melts, many don't. It's not just saplings, some of the birch are six inches at the base and maybe thirty feet tall. So I've been cutting down the ones that are still bowed over and salvaging what I can for firewood.

While most of the aspen were smaller saplings, some of the birch were larger and needed to be hauled up to the wood yard with the tractor. This is the same tree leaning over the dog yard in the first photo in Finally It's Spring (5/13/23). After bucking them up to wood stove length, they get split and stacked out to dry. 

With the wood from these smaller birch and a couple of larger ones that fell next to the dog trail, we'll have plenty of firewood for heating this coming winter. It warms yah twice!

Road Trip...

Back in January, there was an announcement on the public TV station that the Antiques Roadshow, a PBS program, was coming to Anchorage this summer. You had to enter a lottery to get tickets. So I did, not expecting anything, and we won two tickets to the show in July.  If you're not familiar, they have a bunch of appraisers and you bring in stuff and they appraise it. The best ones are filmed and shown on the TV program. So Andy and I drove down to Anchorage and did the stand in the endless lines for hours routine to get a few minutes with an appraiser. I brought a bunch of my dads WWII Army stuff and the ship in the bottle that my grandpa made. 

Surprisingly, the bottle was worth several hundred bucks, while the army stuff not so much. Andy's Roy Rogers lunch box and her mom's Navajo blankets were about the same.

So this is kind of how we felt afterwards. We drove to Palmer to visit Andy's friend Val and we assuaged our disappointment with several cold beers. The next day we drove back via the Palmer Fishook Road, a very narrow, rough road that goes over Hatcher Pass and eventually gets you to Willow on the Parks Hwy. The clouds were down to the ground on the south side of the pass, but lifted just enough to see the hillsides on north side.

Look ma, I'm on top of the world! Well at least 3800 ft in Hatcher pass. So besides seeing the pass, the highlight of the trip was stopping for coffee and ice cream at McKinley Parks glitter gulch. Tasty! 

Springing Back...

A while back, I posted about the chrome lining the bores on the 850T Guzzi (Chrome Bores 12/15/19) and how they tend to start flaking off over time. This, of course, is very bad for the engine, especially one with no real oil filter. Since the replacement cylinders were no longer available, the only real option is sending them out to the lower 48 to be rebored and either fitted with metal sleeves or plated with a nickel alloy (nikasil). So while pondering this, I figured I'd mostly ride the 650 Guzzi (v65). Well now I'm reading online about how the double springs on the v65 are apparently too strong for the valves and can stretch the stems until they fail, with catastrophic results. The fix is to replace the springs with later model ones, but the catch is they're only available from a few dealers in Europe and are very expensive. So what to do.

The over energetic valve springs are just barely visible below the round caps at the bottom of the head.

So one solution is to check the valve clearance fairly often. As long the measured gap is nearly the correct, the valves are probably OK. So I checked the gap the other day and three were spot on, the other one was .01 too large. That's pretty good, cause when the valves stretch, the gap decreases, so they're probably good to go, for a while at least.

Went for a short ride today and the bike ran great. Well it should, since I didn't change anything, but it's good to know it'll run like that for a while,