John Wolfram

Tommy Bolin wrote:I have the brother to that DR brush hog out here, '82 vintage or so. Was my dad's. Thing is a beast, digests about anything. Maintenance welding repair and a carb kit, the only real work ever done to it.

Indeed. Those old DRs (or their predecessors, the Bachtolds) are great. Regular greasing along with the occasional oil/belt changes have been the only real things I've done for it in the past 5 or so years. There's a finish mower attachment for it that I would love to get, but they're rarer than hen's teeth.

With the battery powered warmer out, I decided to make the world's okayest stove by cutting some holes in a stock pot, igniting some charcoal in the pot, and than closing it up. After about 20-30 minutes, the engine was warm enough to start after a few pulls.

I think the next iteration will have bigger holes to allow for more combustion and shorter heating times.

So, it was about 15F this morning and I can report that the battery powered blanket was a colossal failure in warming up the engine enough to get it started.

My first warning was the blanket wouldn't even turn on in the cold. I had to keep it inside my coat for about 20 minutes for it to be warm enough to turn on. Once I finally got it started, it ran for about half an hour, but the battery powered blanket was still quite cold. It just didn't have enough power to make a difference in starting the engine.

To get the engine started, I ended up making a small fire in the pot shown above, suffocating the fire, and then using the pot to heat the engine once again.

The Amazons were slow in delivering the battery powered heater this weekend, so I wasn't able to test it out. However, placing warm coals from a fire pit in pot under my brush hog for about 20 minutes worked wonderfully in getting it started in 5F weather. Hoping to try out the electric blanket next weekend.

thomas rubino wrote:I have never tried this, but I'm sure it would help.
I wonder how long a battery would last?
Might, take a bit to  heat up the metal enough for it to be above ambient room temperature.

According to Amazon, it say's it should last about 4 hours on a standard 20V DeWalt battery, so I'll figure 2 hours per battery. Luckily, I have several so that shouldn't be a problem. I doubt it will ever get things warm, but just going from 5F to 45F would be a huge improvement for some things.

Decided to spend $30 and order one. Will report back in a week or two with the results.

Anyone ever use a battery powered blanket for warming machinery/equipment in the cold?

For some reason, I got it into my head that a 5F/-15C morning would be the perfect time to do some brush hogging with my walk-behind DR mower out at my orchard. After about 10 minutes of trying to get it started I gave up and decided it was not to be that morning. Last week, I was dealing with low pressure in a really cold propane torch I was trying to use, and there are couple more months of winter to go.

I've been looking for an easy way to heat things up while out there, but don't have electricity or gas available at the orchard. Burn barrels can throw off a lot of heat, but would be a bit of a pain to set up. So, I've been thinking about using an inexpensive battery powered blanket as a makeshift block heater and was wondering if anyone has tried something similar. If so, how well did it work?

Part of the issue may be the shear volume of corn produced. The US produces about a trillion pounds of corn per year, or about 2,500 pounds of corn  per person in the US. With that much being produced, it's relatively easy to overwhelm the demand for human consumed corn.

If not for closet doors, every closet in my house and their contents would be covered in a layer of cat hair.

For what it's worth, I get much better cell reception in the basement of my new wood siding/asphalt single house than anywhere in my old metal roof aluminum siding house even though the old house was closer to the cell tower. Earth-sheltering a house probably won't hurt, but making your house into a big Faraday cage will likely be more effective.

My advice would be to let both of them grow for at least a year or two, and then cull out the weaker one. A lot can happen to a newly grafted tree, so it's good to have a backup.