A few Saturdays ago I discovered the right mudflap was gone. I wasn't keen on the mudflaps as they advertised where the pickup was bought. But I left them on. With one mudflap gone - and missing - I removed the other mudflap. It was a job to do. The two bolts holding the mudflap bar to the bumper was rusted solid. Finally after a lot of effort I got this mudflap off.
Then I turned to the water trough's pump and pipes. I have a cobbled together set of pipes that go from the valve on high down to the water trough. That way the way the water flows into the trough nicely and doesn't splash out.
Well.. with the cold weather one of the pipe fittings started to leak. Maybe tightening the pipes would fix the leak. Nope. I had to take the pipe fitting off the valve. That was easy. Maybe why the leak happened. But to remove the bad pipe from the other pipes... it was a problem. The fittings didn't want to unscrew. Just like the bolts on the mudflaps.
I thought I would use my propane torch to heat up and loosen the fittings. But the torch would not light. Even when I tried to use a cigarette lighter to light a fire, a fire would not stay lit. So I put the pipes in my vise. I still couldn't unscrew the pipes. I tried harder and... I broke the vise. What?!
I finally unscrew the pipe fittings. I had to put two pipe wrenches on the two sections and between standing on the wrenches, and then using a hammer against one of the wrenches I finally unscrewed the two pipe fittings. Thankfully the pipe wrenches did not break. The thread on one pipe fitting was ruined, but I didn't care. I think the end of the thread was already bad where it had screwed into the valve and that is why it now leaked.
I bought a new pipe fitting and the leak is now gone. I am a little leery about the pipes filling the trough. As you can see in a previous photo I had previously wrapped a wire around the pipes and attached it to the fence rail. That is because the cattle push on things. I don't want them to break the pipes. After I fixed the leak the pipe fittings now seem to be further away from the rail. I'll have to come up with something new to hold the pipe in place against the cattle's pushing on them. Because the cattle like to break things. A few days ago I discovered they had broken one of the cross boards in the long wooden feeder in the corral. The cross boards are to protect the long sides of the feeder when the cattle push against them when eating hay.
The propane torch. I ended up buying a new pipe with a lighter. It appeared the old lighter had quit working. Well.. the new pipe and lighter didn't work. No propane would come out of the bottle when the pipe and lighter was screwed into it. Today I took the bad pipe and lighter back to Walmart and bought a new pipe with lighter. I'll see if that works tomorrow.
The broken vise. I showed it to Curtis. He said he could weld it back together. And he did. Then when I put the vise back together the bar that goes across would not fit into the welded piece. So I gave the entire vise to Curtis and he made it work. So now my vise is working again.
One of the brake cables on my bicycle broke yesterday. It should be a 10 minute fix as I have extra cables. The brake cable housing was also bad. I have an extra housing. But the newer cable did not want to go into and then through the housing. After working on the problem - and even drilling the housing's ends to have larger openings - I finally got it to work. I also tried to true my bicycle wheels as each wheel has a slight wobble. The wheel's spokes didn't want to turn. *argh!* What's next? The wheels are better, but not 100% true. Maybe next year I will buy new wheels. I'll see. Hours later I was done and was able to ride to Walmart to take back my propane's pipe with lighter to exchange it.
The bad propane torch.
The two pieces of the broken vise.
The bad pipe fitting (on the right side of the photo).
The welded and fixed vise.
The completely fixed vise. Curtis welded the cross bar on the right side. Otherwise, before, the bar was held into place by two nobs inside the opening. One of the nobs broke when the larger piece broke. So Curtis welded the cross bar into place once he was able to get the cross bar to fit into the welded opening.
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