This morning, I picked up a 6.5 glass carboy and a bare-bones copper wort chiller on Craigslist for a ridiculously low price.
The wort chiller is just coiled copper tubing, so I’m going to need to source and create the connections to hook it up to a garden hose. A little Internet sleuthing revealed this page: How to Make a Wort Chiller, which has everything I’ll need to find. The wort chiller, plus a cheapo fountain pump, will mean more control over the wort once it’s done brewing.
Wow, this is awesome: Austin Homebrew Supply has free shipping on all their recipe kits. And they have a huge selection to boot. I think I will go shopping on my next payday…
I spent the entire day inside behind a computer working, but took an hour out to go outside and grind some paint off the bed of the Scout. I’m using a Norton wheel on my 4.5″ angle grinder, and the paint just seems to fly off with little or no effort. In about 45 minutes I got a good patch of the bed cleared off, including all of the hard-to-reach channels between floor ribs. Now I have to figure out how I’m going to prep it for eventual bedliner; the current plan is to wash it down with etching cleaner and then POR-15 the whole surface. Before that happens, I have to figure out what I’m going to do with the areas that are pinholing–there are several spots in front of and behind the wheel wells that I can see daylight through. Maybe I just fill them with weld and sand things smooth?
One thing is for sure: this is not a clean job. I was wearing a high-quality dust mask, eye and ear protection, and I still came away covered in particles. I think a big box fan will be the order of the day for my next attack.
I ordered a quart of POR-15 and a supplemental bottle of Prep & Ready (cleaner/degreaser) this morning while I had a free shipping coupon. Now, to make more time to sand…
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Design is the solution to a problem within a set of constraints. And unsolicited work ignores the biggest constraint of all: your ability to get your work through the approval process. That’s not design, it’s jerking off in a vacuum.
–Mike Montiero, from The Two Corners of Unsolicited Redesigns
…Felt more like three days. With preparation for the parade party on Wednesday, my first vacation day felt more like a triathlon, and there’s absolutely nothing interesting to report about that. Thursday was a great day with friends and food and parade and fun. This year we had the largest turnout yet, around 100 people, give or take a score of kids. The weather was hot and steamy as usual, and with all of the water toys and sprinkler and mister set up, the side yard was a bog by the end of the day. My homebrew went over well, even though the IPA was foaming, and my plan to scale food offerings back to hot dogs meant I spent less time at the grill and more time catching up with friends.
After the parade, and as the crowd thinned out, everybody pitched in and broke down the tents, washed dishes, and generally cleaned up with us, which was VERY appreciated; by about 6PM I was absolutely spent. We rallied long enough to make it to the front yard where a tremendous privately funded fireworks collection was being lit off across the street, which meant we didn’t feel obligated to stagger down to the high school for the official community display.
Friday was all about recovery and rest. We farted around the house and cleaned up a little bit, and crashed the neighbors’ pool, but mainly napped and puttered. That evening we’d been invited to a neighborhood happy hour, so I made some guacamole to bring, packed up some leftover bottles of beer, and we walked a few blocks over to the party. The hosts were wonderful, we met a lot of new people, and Finn had a ball with a gaggle of kids her age. When it got too dark to see other faces clearly, my neighbor and I walked the girls home—under constant threat of attack by werewolves. I think we were all asleep by 10:30.
Saturday Aunt Renie was in town with her friend Wendy, so we got ourselves purtied up and drove in to town to meet them at Clementine, where we caught up, drank Bloodys, and ate like royalty. The ladies followed us back home to the A/C where we hung out and relaxed, talked, and played games with Finn. All too quickly they had to leave for a lacrosse game, so we said goodbye and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of our day. The consensus was fooling around, giggling, looking at baby pictures on my phone, and not moving from the couch.
Sunday the girls were up and out quickly to meet with some friends on vacation in Virginia, while I stayed home to catch up on some projects. What I thought would take a few hours consumed most of the day, but luckily I was inside in the A/C and there were leftover cupcakes and beer.
I had a total of five days off, but as with all vacation time, it slips through my fingers too easily. I did get to spend a lot of quality time with my girls, which makes me happy, but I’d love to have another couple to recover more.
My good friend Brian H. tells me he’d like to move the spare engine he’s got out of his shed, and asks me if I’d like it. Who am I to say no?
…Now I just need to figure out how to get it onto a truck and over here. I wonder if the wooden floor in my garage will hold a ~800 lb. engine?
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I went through a series of backflips with my kegerator setup in order to have two batches of homebrew ready for the Fourth party. I have three Cornelius kegs, two full-size and one metric, which is a little less than 5 imperial gallons. One of the full-size kegs has been rock-solid dependable, and the other two are flaky in that they don’t seal properly around the lids. I’ve been able to get the second full-size to work up until this weekend, when no amount of trickery, brute force, or cursing could prevent it from spitting, hissing, or foaming my precious beer out around the lid.
Friday night I decided to ditch Keg #2 and transfer it into keg #3, and a preliminary seal test was successful. Upon opening the kegerator I found both kegs sitting in about 2″ of beer. After freaking out a bit, I realized it wasn’t the faulty keg, but a bad connection on the tap connected to the good keg (keg #1), which meant I lost about 6 glasses of IPA to a slow drip.
After fixing the leak, I cleaned keg #3, sanitized it, moved the beer, put it in the kegerator and gassed it, and… it foamed out around the pressure valve. I swapped the lid from Keg #2 out and gassed that with the last of the CO2 in my tank, but still couldn’t get a clean seal. So, at the end of the night, I had two bad kegs, flat beer, and no gas.
At the homebrew store, a kind employee and I went through two replacement kegs before we found one that held a seal properly, and once I got that home everything went much smoother. The hefeweizen is carbing and tastes fine, even after having been moved four times in the last week, so hopefully it’ll stay good until the party.
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In happy house news, several large bits of heavy, pointy metal have now left the property. I enlisted my neighbor to help me hump our old kitchen radiator off the back porch (it’s been there for 6+ years) and lift the boiler from the garage up into the Scout; we then loaded his pickup with chunks of my old Scout top, a skid plate, and other assorted ferrous metals and hauled it all to the recycling center. Where they told us they don’t take metals anymore. We did recycle the copper, aluminum, and other more expensive stuff we had; I got $21 for an aluminum G5 case and several pounds of copper heatsinks. We found another recycling center down the road who takes metal, and ~400 lbs of radiator netted me another $26. $.07/lb is pretty weak, but all of that crap is GONE!