Category: Farm/Country Living

Gasoline Leak!

Don’t you just hate it when your tractor dies in the middle of a field of dry grass, and when you go to investigate, gasoline is gushing over the hot engine? I know I do!

Gas was pouring out of the air cleaner side of the carburetor and out of the the fitting of the bottom of the gas tank as well. Not good!

I took off the gas cap to see what the deal was, and there an enormous “whoosh” and the cap shot up ten feet into the air.

After finding the cap again, I verified that it said “Vented” on it. You couldn’t prove it by me. What the heck?

The gas continued to leak out the carburetor after the pressure was relieved, but banging on the carburetor with a wrench recalled it to its duty. The pressure must have jammed the carburetor floats temporarily.

Here’s a picture of my tractor during an outbreak of teenagers a while back:

Ford 600 tractor with teenagers

Now I’m down to an annoying slow leak at the outlet of the gas tank, of maybe a drop a minute. The pressure must have distorted the O-ring. This is not an easy part to get at. I may have to take the top cowling off. Grumble, grumble.

So what the heck happened? I thought all vented gas caps were the same — basically a gas cap with a hole in it to keep the tank from building up any pressure (or vacuum). But unless the cap I had was simply defective, this is clearly not the case.

The cap wasn’t specifically recommended for a Ford 600-series tractor, it’s just that I noticed that a cap for my 1972 Ford F100 pickup also fit my tractor. I needed a new gas cap because I lost mine and Ford/New Holland no longer carries them. On the theory that all unvented gas caps were the same, I got the vented version of the one for my pickup. This clearly was a mistake.

The smart thing to do would have been to go to Yesterday’s Tractors and order the right gas cap. They’ve got everything, including forums with good advice. Check ’em out. I ordered the right gas cap and that should be that.

So the take-away here is that gas caps contain mysteries that are beyond mortal ken. Buy an exact replacement.

[Later:] I thought I had the gas tank fixed, but it turned out it still had a slow leak. After considerable fiddling around, it turned out to be a leak in the tank itself, rather than at the valve. I have ordered a new gas tank.

[Later still:] This is a serious problem! I’ve discovered several things:

  • Cheap Chinese gas caps sometimes contain parts that dissolve in gasoline! I am not making this up. Buy a name-brand cap, like Stant.
  • Even with the recommended Stant gas cap, the tank would over-pressurize and leak. The problem seems to be that putting a gas tank directly above the engine isn’t the smartest thing in the world, and the hot engine pressurizes the tank beyond what the gas cap’s vent can deal with. In the end, I used the trick I read about on Yesterday’s Tractors: there’s a spring-loaded plastic button on the inside of the gas cap in the center. That’s the vent. Drill a teeny-tiny hole in it. This gives you a non-pressurized gas tank.

Earlier tractors like the Ford N series had non-pressurized tanks, with a dome built into the top of the tank with a pinhole in the top and bottom to vent off gases. I’d rather have a proper spring-loaded vent (since it reduces emissions and minimizes the amount of gas that dribbles out if the tractor turns over), but I have to select something that works over something that doesn’t.

The safety issue, by the way, is why old tractors have metal gas lines rather than rubber ones. Because they use gravity feed rather than a fuel pump, turning off the ignition does nothing to stop the flow of gasoline. If you ever feel moved to use a rubber fuel line, you need to put a fuel shutoff solenoid between the tank and the rubber, and have it turn on and off with the ignition. Such shutoffs are available.

P.S. Check out my other tractor pages.

Are Expensive Hatcheries the Cheapest?

Suppose you bought 100 pullets from the lowest-price hatchery you could find, and 100 pullets from an expensive hatchery. What do you think the results would be?

I don’t know if anyone has tried this recently, but I found this very experiment in an old British poultry magazine. The results went like this:

The box from the expensive hatchery had more chicks in it (something like 106), and they were all alive. The chicks were energetic and did very well during the brooder period. The order was for pullets, and what was delivered were pullets.

The box from the cheap hatchery had no extra chicks in it. Some of the chicks were dead. The chicks were did less well during the brooder period. Many of the pullets were really cockerels.

(I wish I hadn’t lost the reference to the article, because I’d like to quote it directly, but you get the idea.)

So what’s up with that? The explanation goes like this: Suppose you’re running a hatchery, but you’re not very good at it, and you get complaints about quality. You need more money to put the kids through college. You have two choices:

  • Clean up your act and produce a product that can compete with the best.
  • Lower your prices to attract cheapskates. Cheapskates ignore quality and buy solely on price.

On the other hand, suppose you run the best hatchery anywhere, but profits are disappointing and you need more money to put the kids through college. Your choices are:

  • Find more sources of efficiency so you can make enough money to live on without raising prices.
  • Raise prices.

The difference between the options at the two hatcheries will eventually mean that the crummy hatcheries are all cheap and the good ones are all expensive.

Take-way: never buy from the low-price leader. It’s not just that cheap chicks are more expensive in the long run, it’s that it’s so depressing to have them die on you. You should insure yourself against disappointment by buying quality chicks.

Actually, the best thing to do is to ask around and see where the most successful local poultry folks buy their baby chicks. If you’re raising show birds, ask the show-bird raisers, since the commercial guys won’t know, and vice versa.

I always buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales NM, since in my opinion they’re the best hatchery in the West. I’ve tried ’em all, and their commercial-quality layers are very good. I use Phinney Hatchery in Walla Walla as my backup hatchery. I’m less familiar with hatcheries in other parts of the country, but I know that there are good ones and bad ones. Probably most of the well-known ones are good ones: Murray McMurray Hatchery, Ideal Hatchery, Stromberg’s, Moyer’s, Belt.


I go into this topic (plus many more) in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. If you don’t have a copy, you should. I went through an enormous amount of source material and tried all sorts of different techniques before I wrote the book, all aimed at keeping your baby chicks happy and healthy, giving you that wonderful baby-chick experience that’s what attracts us to poultrykeeping in the first place. I can guarantee that it will be worth purchasing, even if you’re an experienced poultrykeeper. And that goes double for beginners, because there’s a lot to learn, if you don’t get good results with your first batch of chicks, the heartbreak of letting down the baby birds who are so dependent on you will likely leave you discouraged, and you might never try again.

Time to buy a truck?

I’m told that SUVs and trucks have lost a big fraction of their resale value because they get crummy gas mileage. So it’s a good time to buy.

Not me, though. I’ve had mine for years — a 1972 F100 pickup, that I bought ten years ago for $650. It has a 390 cubic inch V-8 and gets 10 MPG. Its low gas mileage has never been a problem, because we don’t use it for anything but hauling. And that’s the point. If you live in the country, you need a vehicle that can haul a lot of stuff — feed, hay, lumber, firewood — whatever. You can have an economy car, too (I do), but you need a hauler.

Admittedly, my truck needs a lot of TLC, or possibly a wrecking ball. It’s a buyer’s market out there, though, so if you look around, you can probably find a good deal on something nice, whether it’s a truck or an SUV.

Let’s assume that you’re like us — too cheap to buy a vehicle built in this century. The trick with old vehicles is to have a spare, but you must keep the spare running. For example, there are two drivers in our family, so the working minimum is three vehicles: Two to drive, one in the shop.

For a lot of people, it’s so inconvenient to leave a car in the shop for a few days that they never do — until it dies. A spare vehicle makes it a lot easier to get the other ones repaired. It’s not that they need to be repaired very often, it’s just a hassle when you live way out of town. Also, it’s helpful to have a spare so if something happens to your regular car — a flat tire, say — you can drive the other car if you’re in a hurry, and attend to the first one later.

If you insist on doing your own repairs, you can justify one more spare. But don’t accumulate dead cars with the idea that they count. By definition, a spare is a car that will run whenever you want it to — not one that runs in some vague, theoretical sense. Spouses should be given carte blanche to take their personal vehicles into the shop at will, even if you think you’re god’s gift to car repair and will get around to it any month now.

When Karen was looking around for a pickup, everyone said she should buy a Toyota, even people who were sitting inside Ford pickups at the time. (“His and hers” pickups are every couple’s dream, right?) She ended up with a 1996 Toyota T100 3/4 ton extended cab pickup and has been very happy with it. It gets about 18 MPG. The word on the street is that the Toyota’s have a very effective 4WD and are much less likely to get stuck on wet pastures than other rigs, and they seem to last forever. We were tired of towing my pickup out with the tractor.

I have a 1990 Isuzu Trooper SUV, which I like well enough. Its 4WD isn’t as good as the Toyota’s, and it’s only rated for a half-ton load, but it seats four in reasonable comfort and five in reasonable discomfort, and it’s been very reliable through 200,000 miles, though it needed a cylinder head replaced when it was about 15 years old. I’m not very familiar with the other SUVs on the market, but if you need to haul a bunch of stuff and maybe seat 4-5 people at the same time, an SUV is the only way to go.

We used to have a Ford Taurus station wagon, which we hauled feed in all the time, and it tended to eat shocks, tie rods, tires, and other parts. So I figure that hauling needs to be done in a vehicle designed for the task — one with a commercial chassis — a truck, SUV, or full-sized van.

Scratch One Bobcat

I found a bobcat in one of my snares yesterday, which was Day Three of having snares out. It was a big male — 26 pounds. Most my chicken losses are consistent with how bobcats hunt (dawn or dusk, with a short chase, a quick kill, and the chicken carried away without being dragged), but I think I’m losing chickens faster than can be explained by a single bobcat, however big, so I’ll keep up my anti-predator efforts.

My flock size and egg output are down to shockingly low levels, thanks to large numbers of hens vanishing without a trace. I only had 13 dozen to take to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, where a few weeks ago I was routinely selling over 50 dozen even on a slow day.

The stealthiness of the local predators probably means that I can’t rely on the electric fence as my only permanent anti-predator measure — I have to do more.

Rural Trade-Offs

Living in the country requires trade-offs, and so does farming. Taking vacations in February instead of August, for example.

Sometimes the trade-offs seem like a good deal. Corvallis has an excellent fireworks display every Fourth of July, but we are so far north that the city waits until it’s fully dark at about 10:15 PM before starting the display. After it’s done, there’s a brief traffic jam and then (if you’re me) a half-hour drive home.

I decided a while back to never drive if it’s past my bedtime. It’s way too dangerous. So we spend the night in Corvallis at the Super 8 motel. The odd-numbered rooms on the third floor have a wonderful view of the fireworks. So much for late-night driving!

An added bonus is that the Riverfront Park in front of the motel is swarmed by holiday-goers who set off their store-bought fireworks while waiting for the Main Event. It’s a madhouse, but in a good way. My kids like joining in.

Our fourteen-year-old, Karl, who is autistic, found the flash and bang a little overwhelming (even with a set of hearing protectors on), and was greatly delighted to be able to retreat into the motel room, where he could still see and hear everything.

(If you have an autistic kid who hasn’t tried hearing protectors (Karl likes the standard 3M over-the-ear kind), give it a whirl. Karl can enjoy environments he found overpowering before.)

This year, with the Fourth of July on a Friday, we loaded the van with all our Farmer’s Market stuff so we’d be ready for the market the next morning. In fact, the motel is only two blocks away from the market.

Not too many years ago, I wouldn’t have sprung for a motel room, on the grounds of misplaced macho. It’s better to focus on what’s going to provide the best outing, and to cut oneself some slack into the bargain.