Coffee 12-26-15

Welcome to the last coffee of the year. Come in, join us for a chat & enjoy some comradery like no other place on Earth. The coffee is hot, scrambled eggs & toast are cooking. Enjoy!

I hope you all had a gentle and smooth Christmas. Were you just bad enough that Santa brought you coal? Good! Cuz Chris & I spent the day together. She & I made rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffing & green beans for lunch & after a couple games of Scrabble ( both of which were a tie!), we made home made giant soft pretzels. Delicious! My girls will be here later today for us to have Christmas, then on Monday Linda is going to drive up from PA for another visit. With some luck she'll get snowed in & have to spend the winter. Speaking of weather...it was 65 degrees yesterday!!!! The most warm, most beautifully comfortable Christmas of my life. But, they say Tuesday will have a high of 20 & a low of 6....it had to end sometime.

See you next year!

Mornin everyone

Another good breakfast, Freddy and I'm bringing the strawberry jam. Those pretzels look real good.

Never got above 57 here yesterday, and that temperature only lasted about 20 minutes. The temps fell, fog moved in, and it rained fairly heavy at times. Supposed to get into winter here on New Years Day.

Take care and be safe all

Mornin all, outstanding b-fast choice Freddy. My oldest girl & at least 2 of the grandkids will be showing up today. Got to 68* yesterday, woke up to 26* this AM. I'm leavin some home churned butter. Enjoy the holiday season people. WHAT???? Thoughtful & Intelligent debates closed??????????????????? You can't do that!!!!!!!!!! Oh wait, YES YA CAN, you're the Mayor! Good move me thinks! I'm off to find some 32 S&W shells, not havin much luck local. Got 1 more Mom&Pop shop in Homer. Crap, might have to expand to Ithaca!!

Yummy yummy soft pretzels, another favorite food they look goooood! I hope everyone enjoyed this Christmas I know we did, I have family in town from Ky and we just spent the day together sitting around watched movies and BS.
NO coal for me this year(I guess I was to good) but I did get a new coffee grinder(conical burr) to replace my old(flat blade) one, its much quieter than the old one so I won't be waking the dead at 3:15AM anymore . I see the weather getting better for us skiers, finally I was beginning to wonder If we would ever use the passes I got last year or not but I still have my fingers crossed. Well have fun and enjoy the rest of your weekend and lets have a toast to our host "Freddy" thanks for good times, the good treats , and lets not forget the coffee , for giving us a place to share our good times, bad times, the things we like and the things we don't!! Thanks again Freddy

Morning all....I'm getting a late start to the breakfast table today. Still not too hungry after stuffing myself with turkey and mashed and pie and cookies and filling and cranberrys and corn and peas last night. Food was great and after not eating since yesterdays breakfast I went overboard.

Still pretty warm here and the rain has stopped for a while so I'm headed out to the FIL's to take off his mower deck from the tractor. He's taking it to have the seal around the front PTO redone and wanted the deck off it. I may head out to take a look at a barn full of tractors nearby to see if there are any FEL candidates. I been casually looking for a coal bin filling, snow moving machine for the last couple months.

Good Morning all - oops, I'm late again - Good afternoon everyone, the weather is still drizzly but at least it's not 75*. We won't get above 55* today but tomorrow it will be 70* again. Just for that one day, after that it will hang around 55* for most of January or so they say.

I'm still waiting for the baby. I'm packed and ready to hit the road, though. I'll have a nicer drive down this time because when DK and I were down there last weekend we brought a new to us low mileage Camry. Evidently someone brought it, drive it off lot and then decided they really wanted a truck. We used a car buying service and got a great deal. I've never had a car with so many bells and whistles including a back up camera. It's the car DK and I planned to get after all the kids had cars of their own. We've always had great success with Toyotas; I hope this will be the same.

The bees have been flying between rain showers. With tomorrow being the last warm day (lol) I'm planning to go into the hives to check on their food supplies. I have the hives set up in a way that allows me to slide more food in without disturbing the brood nest. Once that's done, it's back to waiting for spring.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas, Lisa

Ahh...Good Evening,Gang ! Still basking in the Warm Glow of Christmas ! May Your Days Be Merry !!

Had some bad luck today working on the vw. It has the urea injection on the exhaust and it has had a engine code for a bad temperature sensor on that tank. The temp sensor is supposed to control when the heater comes on to keep the urea from freezing at about 20*. The complete replacement heater kit cost about $400 but since it is only the sensor that is bad on mine (according to the fault code) I figured I could try a $12 10k ohm thermistor.

This is a common enough issue that there are some detailed instructions on the heater replacement on the VW forum. Went through the disassembly of the bumper, tailights, dropped the tank and replaced only the sensor, tested it out and all was good. Then reassembled the tank and bumper and tail lights which when done took about 3 hours.

Was feelin' real good about saving some big $$ then I noticed the styrofoam spacer that fits over the tank sitting on the garage floor.

OK, frustrating do-over but it has to be done....took it all apart again, much quicker this time since I had practice, put the styrofoam in place and was getting the tank bolted back to the underside of the car when the fragile plastic nozzle the pump tubing connects to snaps off. I'm SCREWED! No way to fix it, have to order a whole pump assembly for $380 because of a stupid fragile plastic nipple. Others on the vw forum had this same issue and I thought I was being careful with it but not careful enough.

I'm trying to rationalize the extra cost is still cheaper than the dealer had quoted at $1100 but it still makes me mad my $12 fix was undone.

Good GoPro footage of Christmas...
Hooked up a chesty jr to one of the twins...
And just let it go...
Still waiting on closing for new house...
New rules making everyone nuts...
The wife now knows why I do not hire any staff...
She had to get a bank branch VP to light up a unresponsive loan processor...
10 days no response to multiple requests for confirmation of documents...

Freddy, it looks like you are about to get your wish: you have 18"-24" of snow forecast for tomorrow !

We had a nice and long Christmas 'weekend'. Thursday night at a party, Friday we went to my Niece's place, had a wonderful dinner, then laughed at her kids opening all their gifts.. Some of the boys now are old enough that they'd rather have money.. my kind of gift giving.. let 'em get what they want !! Not that the occasional 'thoughtful' gift isn't a lot of fun.
Saturday we had a lunch with friends we only see at Christmas time, then yesterday, Sunday, we had more family over for a Christmas BBQ !! It had been nice enough weather to grill some ribs, and make all the usual BBQ items, deviled eggs, potato salad etc.. But, since after all it is Christmas.. We had pumpkin pie for desert.

This week:
The storm hit here at about noon. I was in the shop, heard something on the roof, and looked out to see sleet, snow, and ice or snow pellets bouncing off the ground. I was in the shop to make some room to bring the small 4x4 JD loader tractor inside. Just to keep it out of the 1" of ice that is forecast.

Since I was bringing the little tractor into the shop side, not the showroom, I also made some room and used it to pull and push around the huge La Blonde Lathe and the Gorton MasterMill 'knee-mill' around and into position where I think they will 'work'. Only doing a few machinist jobs will tell if the layout works or not.
The 'machine room' layout has room for my baby surface grinder I just brought home.. It will do some jobs that the mill and lathe just can't do.

Take care everyone.
Greg L

Ahh, I'm late! At least it's not New Years yet ...

Welcome to my world Titleist! Sounds about like how most automotive jobs go around here on vehicles built after '95.

Today's job went smoothly though - on my own vehicles. Had to flush the nearly 9 year old coolant out of the Silverado before it turned to sulfuric acid. Then, had to yank the summer wheels and throw on the winter ones. Before I did that, I had to dismount each tire and flip them around, since they're directional & that's the only way to cross-rotate them. First time I've done that on these tires in 5 years, so it was time. Noticed my front brake pads are more than 50% gonzo after 27k miles. Going to be needing those probably sometime next year. Then had to throw the steelies with Blizzaks on the Volvo. Pretty productive day today. Glad that's out of the way. Did the oil and greased the front end on the Silverado a couple days ago. Got my oil sample all set to go to the lab. All that's left to do now is to flush the brake fluid, and the Silverado should be set until something breaks ...

Ya'll have a hap hap happy New Year if I don't get on here before then.

Watch those wrenches!

lowfog01,
HAPPY Birthday to you, Lisa!
Cheers

Thank you, I've been blessed this year with good health, a great family and a multitude of friends and acquaintances here at NEPACrossroads. God bless you all, Lisa