other dog

I cooked these ribs in the barrel Saturday. I cut them up and cooked them on the grate instead of hanging them from the rebar. Last time I cooked ribs I used the hinged grate and hung one rack and cooked the other one on the grate and everybody (everybody meaning Zina) liked the ones I cooked on the grate better.

Yep, they really do a great job as a smoker. The only disadvantages to them really is that the little fire box doesn't hold much, so you have to add more wood every few minutes, and probably the biggest thing is that most people don't want an old gas or electric range sitting in their back yard. But man do they cook great!

We're still moving of course, spending the weekend at the new place. It has a sleep sofa that had never been used before, still had the plastic on the mattress. It is extremely uncomfortable. Anyhow, we brought the corner cabinet over and my son helped unload it Saturday and I was putting my stuff back in it yesterday. I took everything out of it in Gladys and put it in a box. Some idiot had set the box down on the arm of the couch instead of putting it on the floor, then I- I mean he- bumped into and it fell to the floor. Broke the mirror off of everything in it. Broke the little tiny bulldog off the hood of the mixer too. Old Bill sent me a lot of that stuff, like the Akubra hat with the crocodile hat band, and the leather Trimac cap. I bought the DM model in Macungie a few years ago, but it's too intimidating for me to even attempt to put it together. I might get a tube of Super Glue and some tweezers and try to put the bulldog back on the mixer, that's about all the model making I'm gonna try.

I was talking about my smoker made from an old stove a while back, and I just happened to run across these pictures. That's a couple of Boston butts in it. This picture almost makes me want to find another one...but not quite.

I have a high-low range selector valve off a 10 speed in the pickup🛻 🤣

My truck is only made from 2 trucks, I think, it has a push button starter, and I disconnect a battery cable when it's parked because something drains the battery, but it doesn't beep when I back up. Guess that disqualifies me!

Actually it did a great job- or it seemed to at the time. I'm sure if I went back to driving it now after getting out of a 500 HP truck I would think it was a slug though. It had 3.87 rears and it was comparable to the 350 Cummins they had as far as pulling. It was slow taking off from a dead stop, but once you got going it was fine. I remember having 25 tons of fertilizer in a van and went up Christiansburg mountain with it in 4th. gear. But most hills, like on 460 west of Blacksburg, and coming down rt. 8 from Butler, Pa. I had to pull in 3rd.

That's a tough question. I liked all of them, but some more than others. I liked the Transtar, it had a VT 903 and a 13 speed. Both F models were good trucks. The orange and white one was a 300/5 speed and I drove it all over, when I hauled kyanite they loaded 14 pallets of it, which weighed 50,155 lbs. Unless it was going to Missouri, Illinois, or Indiana, then they only loaded 12 pallets. The other one had a 350 Cummins with a 10 speed. All the K 100's were good trucks. The first one was the first brand new truck I had, nobody else had ever drove them before. The first one had a 350 Cummins, the next 2 had 400's in them with top of the line interiors. The first 2 T800's were good, especially the black one. It had a 444 Cummins with an 18 speed. Now, the teal colored one- that was one of the worst. It had a cat engine and a 13 speed. I think it was a 3406E, but I'm not sure. It was supposed to be set at 425 HP, but it never ran right, it broke down a lot, people I ran with said it was the weakest 4 and a quarter cat they'd ever seen, even though it wasn't the old original "4 and a quarter". The transmission went out in it too. And every time I took it to Truck Enterprises in Roanoke they would pretty much say "ain't nuthin' wrong with it, it's supposed to be like that". The 350's I drove pulled better. That's when I told the boss that I wanted my next new truck to be an International, and they were. The red one and the white one both had 500hp. N14 engines with Super 10 transmissions and they were good trucks. The black Freightliner was good, N14 460hp. I turned it over when the trailer got into a ditch at a job site. The blue one was one of the worst. It looked good- from afar anyway- but it had the cheapest interior you could get in a truck, and you could shut both doors tight and still stick your fingers inside at the lower rear corners. My wife could put her whole hand inside. And you had to wear a rain coat inside when it rained. But it ran OK, 475 Cat with a 10 speed. The last one was good and bad, it was a nice truck, looked great I thought. But it was when the ISX engines first came out, and it had a lot of EGR issues. So if I had to pick a "favorite" it would be tough, but I'll go with the black T800.

I would typically leave on Sunday or Monday and get home on Friday or Saturday. If I got in on Friday I would unload and then load a load to leave on Sunday with. If I got in Friday night or Saturday I would unload and leave again on Monday. Sometimes I would get in and go home during the week, but not very often.

I started to put this in "Other Truck Makes", but there's a couple of Mack's in there. These are every truck I drove for H.H. Moore Jr. Trucking Co. from 1979 until 2005.

Like I always say "everybody loves boobage".

They have several Oliver and Massey Ferguson tractors with Detroit Diesels in them at the Keystone Antique Truck and Tractor Museum in Colonial Heights. They had one pulling tractor with a Detroit, I think it was a Massey Ferguson too, I'd love to see it at a tractor pull, mostly I'd like to hear it! And I remember when I first went to work for H.H. Moore and we were hauling chips to the Westvaco paper mill in Covington. An older driver told me of the time they had to haul chips from the Westvaco wood yard in Rupert, W.V. It was the yard that Burns hauled out of, but they wanted H.H. to send some trucks up there to help. It was in winter and he said it got so cold one night that every single truck froze and shut off, except for one- and that one had a 318 in it, all the rest had Cummins engines. He said they got some fuel conditioner from Burns, he didn't know what it was, but they kept it in a barrel by the shop and after that they never had any more fuel gelling problems.

Yes, it was nice, it did everything we needed to do. We had a mounted corn picker for it, pull type combine, hay baler, etc. One of the reasons my dad got that tractor was because you could get a mounted corn picker for it, he just didn't like a pull type corn picker for some reason. Before that we had a mounted picker for the Farmall C, and it took half a day for my dad, uncle, and grandfather to put it on the tractor. Took a while to put the one on the 5000 too, but not near as long as the C. Speaking of the corn picker, I was picking corn in my senior year of high school. I only had to take 2 classes to graduate, so I'd get home from school and help daddy. I was by myself and when I got to the end of the row and turned the corner to go back up the other way I reached back to clear some shucks that were building up in the shuck catching thing-a-ma-jig and something caught the sleeve of my jacket. I got away, but only because it pulled the entire sleeve off the jacket at my shoulder. Thank God it wasn't a better jacket! I stopped the tractor, and took what was left of the jacket way down in the woods and threw it away so daddy wouldn't find it, still trembling. Many people have been killed or injured by equipment, especially corn pickers, and I knew better. You always stop the PTO before you do anything, but that one time I didn't. I never told my dad about it, and even though it was in the fall nobody noticed that I wasn't wearing a jacket when I got home.

Nice tractor! I spent a good part of my teenage years on a Ford 5000. My dad had a B-414 before that and my grandfather had a 444 International, and a couple of Farmall Cs, but the 5000 was the main workhorse. It was a '68 I believe.

Thank you Vlad, and yes, Winfall is still pretty close. I was driving through Winfall the other day and took this picture because the mountains in the background were so pretty.

My wife picked this up for me, I'm going to put it on the shed somewhere.

It's in Spout Spring, Va, in Appomattox county. Google said it was only 24 miles from here. I used to live in Appomattox before I moved to Gladys, right after my wife passed away. The blue dot in the lower left is where I'm at now, the red dot in the upper right is where we're moving to.

and speaking of the fence, I went to Tractor Supply and got the posts, walked across the road and grabbed the post driver, and slapped a fence up around the garden.

speaking of lizards, I was going to throw this tub away that was sitting by the back porch, but last weekend we noticed that it was full of lizards so we left their happy home. I took this picture today and you can see six or seven of them in there. I'm sure they eat lots of bugs.

Well, no posts. I checked Amazon and they're being prepared for shipping. 2 reasons that I ordered them from Amazon was that they were supposed to be here yesterday, and I figured they would be cheaper than tractor supply. Tractor Supply is usually the most expensivest place to get anything but I just checked and the posts were actually cheaper. So I cancelled the Amazon order and will just go to tractor supply and get them.

Yeah, I gotta get off here and start loading the pickup now before Zina starts woofing at me! 🤣

I bought one of these next, and it works very well. That's the one that was on the back of the pickup. We unloaded it yesterday, the ladder idea worked great. It's not super heavy, just big and awkward to handle. But if I could only have one smoker that barrel is the cat's ass.

Yes, it wasn't the smoker's fault, it was all mine, and they really do make a great smoker. Very easy to make too, pretty much just take that burner out and it's good to go. I've made them out of electric ranges too, but they're a bit more work. You have to remove the wiring, remove the insulation from the bottom of the oven but leave it around the top and sides, then drill holes in the bottom of the oven to let the smoke in.

Well, in my defense - I have no defense. Every time I used that smoker I would take the leaf blower and clear all the dead leaves and debris from around it, then take the garden hose and saturate the area all around it. Every time. Except on that particular day for whatever reason I didn't. It was a gas stove made into a smoker, and it worked great. It had no burner in it, you just opened the drawer in the bottom and put charcoal in the little tray, and then just add wood as it burned down. It didn't hold much in the tray so you had to add wood about every 30 minutes. I was in the house looking at BMT on the computer actually and it was about time to go add some wood to the smoker but gear head grrrrrl was into it hot and heavy arguing with somebody, which is what she did best. I think it was 41Chevy, but I'm not sure. Anyway, Jobyna came up the hall when she got out of the shower and said "the back yard's on fire". No sense of urgency or anything, like the back yard was on fire every other day or something. So I jumped up and ran out the front door to turn the garden hose on, then ran around to the smoker. It was close to the shed and the shed was already blazing when I got there. I started beating on the back of the house and told Jobyna "call the fire department". I mean it was going by then, and I had 2 cans of gas in there, I don't know how much oil, several gallon jugs of hydraulic fluid, 3 chain saws, a weed eater, the leaf blower, all with gas in them. There was nothing I could do for the shed with the water hose, it was about the equivalent of peeing in a volcano, so I just kept spraying the siding on the house until the fire department got there. It was a very close call, scary how close I came to losing the house.

Speaking of moving, we're moving slowly. I have to go over and get the pickup today so I can haul a load over tomorrow. It's been at the new place all week with the smoker on the back because I didn't have anybody to help unload it. But I have a plan- i'm going to put the ladder from the ground to the tailgate, like a ramp. Then i'll put one end of the smoker on it and just slide it off. Speaking of Amazon, I ordered some metal fence posts from Amazon- I know, who knew, right?- and they're supposed to be here today. I got 2 100' rolls of plastic fencing to put around the garden. My neighbor across the road has a post driver I can borrow. I planted some green beans last weekend so i'm gonna try to get the fence up tomorrow, because deer and rabbits both like any kind of beans when they're coming up. The garden started out as just a field, the neighbor that we bought the place from used to keep it bush hogged, but that was all. I mowed the grass in a rectangle shape on the most level area there and just used the roto-tiller until I finally got it looking like this. I wanted to do that whole mowed area, but that tiller about worked me to death, I just had to keep going over it over and over and over. That's grass and rocks that I raked over to the side there. Then I talked to a guy up the road with a tractor and he said he would plow it for me, so I went ahead and planted 3 rows. We've got tomatoes, peppers, squash, and zuccini there. I didn't try to keep everything tight like I did here, I left enough space in between the rows and plants to run the tiller between them. We never did see tractor guy, so last weekend it was back to the tiller. I managed to about double the original size and planted the green beans, some cucumbers, and a couple of watermelons. That's 2 4' rolls of plastic fence on the ground at the far end. I still want to eventually biggerize it to where I had originally mowed, then I can plant potatoes and onions, maybe some sweet corn. The cucumbers and cantalopes take lots of room because the vines spread so much. Here's 2 dogs in a car.