23 May 2020 Saturday Got up late becauseffm I stayed up late watching Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. I really like all of those English mystery and police shows. I am a real fan of the English TV shows. Plus the light fools me. It stays daylight up to near 11:00 PM and dusky dark to near midnight. After I got up, I made coffee, toasted an English muffin, stuffed it with a sausage patty with a bit of mustard. After the breakfast of champions, I loaded Miss Suzy and the tractor axle into the Range Rover for the perilous trip into town. First stop NAPA. no luck in getting the bearing pressed on. Carquest, same answer. Alyeska Tire, nope. Tire Town, closed. Otto Machine shop, closed. The fact is that everyone was either closed or did not do that kind of work. This left me with a broken tractor. I’m not one to take ‘No’ for an answer. When I got home I wandered around trying to figure out how to press the bearing onto the axle. I figured out that, if I lowered the drill platform on the drill press and put a half concrete block with some steel bars atop it and put a small hydraulic jack pushing up against the drill press platform. This made a crude bearing press that sort of worked.

I forgot to take the picture the hydraulic jack in place. Anyway, I was able to press the bearing partially onto the axle. Once it started to go onto the axle, I was able to take it off the cobbled together press and very carefully, using a piece of stainless steel bar, tapped the bearing on down to its’ proper place. Getting the snap ring on was a lot more trouble than the bearing. It took some fifteen aggravating minutes but I got the damned snap ring in place. The axle had to be driven into place. It wasn’t hard to drive in because it was only a tight fit for the bearing shell. With the axle back in, I started moving things out of the way of the way so we could move the travel trailer. We have decided that we no longer need the travel trailer and it is in the way of progress. After I moved everything Summer called me in for supper. She had cooked a dry rubber rack of ribs. They were delicious.

The idiots down the hill were having a ‘magic mushroom’ party. The owner of the property grows the mushrooms for food and, apparently, recreation. They were playing some kind of weird music loud enough that you could likely could have heard 10 miles away in Homer. I could hear them even with my TV loud enough for my half deaf ears could hear. There seem to be more pot heads and drug addicts in Alaska per capita than anywhere in the USA.

Well, that’s it for me today.