smitty55

I agree, it was like he was looking for the worst spots.

Make sure to turn off the fuel and let it run dry whenever you use it. All my small engine fuel gets treated with Seafoam soon as I get home. It's good as a stabilizer for two years and keeps engines clean. It also prevents phase separation, specially now that even premium has ethanol in it. I also cut up a long length of fuel line so I can drain the tank and not have to bother running it for maintenance. Mine is only 3200K 110V so it's easy enough to lift up on some cinder blocks to drain. I also have it grounded to a copper pipe pounded into the ground. A lot of people don't bother but there's a good reason those ground posts are on the unit. As for extension cords, I made up a 6ft heavy duty male to male cord and I back feed one side of the panel through the outdoor plug after first disconnecting from the grid, you have to isolate your home. Luckily my well pump is 110V. and on the same side of the panel is my propane furnace, propane hot water and many of the downstairs plugs including 2 freezers and an all fridge. Plus some upstairs plugs and lights. I have a wood stove upstairs. That cord never even gets warm so I have zero issues using it that way. That genny had been sitting in my back shed brand new never opened box for 5 years or more when I saw it on sale for 40% and needed a new one anyway. It actually didn't click in till after visiting a neighbour the day after the storm that I had one in the shed lol. So that was that May storm '22, since then I've used it twice for a total of 40 hours tops. I know all the circuits to leave on, I have a paper list I made back then right at the panel. So, total cost to power enough of my home off grid to still take a hot shower, have some lights, house lights are all all LED's, watch tv, use my LPG range for cooking like normal? It was $350 I think when I grabbed that deal way back. No pony panels and expensive connectors, switches and cables. It's easy to make the patch cord, just need an extra male connector. If I was to lose power here I could hang in quite well on a smaller mid size genny. Cheers

Here just west of Ottawa there's only been one night so far this year that hit -20°C with a few other at -17 or -18 nights. Only one heavy snowfall so far. Some guys are just getting their shacks out now, some years it's December.

Lot's of folks refill the regular tanks, you can buy the adapters to fill them from a 20lb tank.

WTG, dandy Laker. My knees were shaking just watching that.

Just over a week back there was a post about Temu. Well go figure under the recent topics box there's now a Temu ad showing some rather curvy ladies in tight outfits. Meanwhile I get notices here about using ad blockers that I turned off but now we'll see how long that lasts.

Two spots come to mind for me. First would be at the top of the lake where it narrows down between the shore and that 60' hole, the other area would be halfway down the lake where the lake narrows down by that hump that sticks out and that little small island. Id be trying from 7 -15' early in the day and maybe check deeper for suspended fish later in the day. They sure do put a lot of Rainbows in each year and someone actually reported a Splake back in 22. I bet the Bass are well fed too.

I've lived here in Lanark since 97 and the coyotes certainly go in cycles. They hit their peak maybe 6-10 years back and there wasn't an evening spent outdoors or with windows open where you didn't hear coyotes sounding off from all four directions, sometimes pretty close to the house. Now its rare to hear them and last year I even started seeing a few rabbits around, that never happens anymore. There was always a local hunt gang that had wide spread permission from most farms that would use dogs and I'd see their truck parked all over the place for miles including just across the road. They don't hunt them anymore. Don't see any Fishers around anymore either. That's good because they do way more damage to the local feline population than coyotes as they are excellent climbers.

Seeing as it says Carp are you referring to the Ottawa River? If so they've been fishing Buchhams Bay for almost two weeks now and Shirleys Bay has shacks out now too.

This is a post from one of the forum members who visited the lodge while staying at Taggart Bay Lodge "Drove into there in September 2005 by myself when we were staying at TBL. What a place! Met Scott and he told me to make myself at home and explore the property at my leisure as he was just finishing packing-up to leave for the winter. I took a look at the original Topping Cabin...very cool...but also gave me the 'willies' for some reason. I walked up the river as far as I could past Hollywood Rapids....outstanding location and so picturesque. Scott showed me the large cabin he built in the 80s (from the book), and then gave me a tour of the new "mansion" cabin right at the mouth where the Hollywood Rapids meets Lac Temiscamigue. The log diameters had to be at least 3-foot wide for that cabin....super impressive in scale and detail. Scott was very gracious and welcomed me there like I was an old friend, though we'd never met or even communicated prior. I'll never forget that little personal adventure and am so glad I took the time to do it. Wish I had $9M..." This is the book he's referring to. I'm going to order a copy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3162806-kipawa-river-chronicles

I started going to Kipawa in the early 80's. I did a couple of years at Temagami as well when Quebec outlawed live minnows. As you say even though it's a nice lake there was just something missing compared to Kipawa. Plus the OPP had a big brand new boat and were stopping everyone all the time including lodge boats. We would hide out beers in those plastic rod cases lol. That's when I got into salted minnows for Quebec which worked just fine behind gang trolls for Lakers and on a jig for Walleye. Wondering why you would boat in to Mackenzie from Laniel instead of Kipawa? Was Laniel closer to you?

Yea apparently it's popular with kayakers too but I can't imagine trying to run those rapids from Grand Chute down in high water spring conditions.

I would have to say that easily the best fishing times I've ever had in my life were the 20 or so week long trips to Kipawa, there's just some magic there that stays with you for months after being there. Camped there the first few years and then stayed at Corbeau lodge several times, now privately owned by Eric Lindros and then once we got an opening stayed at Alwaki lodge for the rest of our visits. That was a 14 mile boat ride. I still follow the Kipawa forum and this was recently posted. The quite famous 230 acre Topping Retreat that once was sold to the owner of the NY Yankees is again up for sale for the great price of only $8.9M. This place once graced the Canadian $10 bill, was home to a couple of movies and was visited by many famous movie stars like Gregory Peck and Katherine Hepburn. The scenery is magnificent situated at the end of Kipawa River where it empties into Lake Temiscaming. There's close to a hundred pics of the property, well worth going through. Also a few good pics from upstream on Google Earth of some of the rapids. Cheers https://mrealestate.com/properties/999-Ch.-des-Grandes-Chutes/14751632 https://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/news/this-8-9m-historic-quebec-home-was-once-a-hollywood-retreat-is-now-up-for-sale/ar-AA1kMRGX

And a Happy New year to you as well Dougie. Cheers

For some reason I thought you were still using a Big Chief but obviously not if you're smoking at 250°. What are you using now? I recently joined the Smoking Meat group on FB. Some good posts there.

I also only use free versions of Avast, MBAM, and Spybot along with script blockers like AdBlockplus, Ghostery and uBlock origin. I used to use avg but the Avast has been real good at blocking malware in real time. The only thing I pay for is my VPN which is cheap and can cover up to 7 devices. The odd time I'll do a scan with Zemana as well but don't have it running. If I ever have a feeling that something seems funny my go to just in case is a system restore which has never failed me. Personally I would never use Norton as it's always been known to be a resource hog using way too much CPU and memory.

Wow, what eating you? Line counter reels can be real handy for trolling for numerous species. A lot more accurate that coloured mono trolling line. I've used them lots for copper line trolling too for Lakers.

Getting of topic here but Barry, I only found this out a couple years back but it's a biological fact that women have a better sense of smell than men. My propane furnace was going on the fritz back then and my wife mentioned that the outdoor exhaust was smelling funny while to me it seemed normal. So I have a neighbour who has a gas license and installs furnaces for a local company. So he comes over and the first thing he does is gets me to turn the furnace and he takes a deep breath of the exhaust and says it burnt his throat a bit so yes I have issues. Turned out the furnace was off grade and the acidic water was pooling under the heat exchanger and it was rotting out. I mentioned to Jordy that my wife could smell it but I couldn't and he said that they were taught in school that women naturally have a better sense of smell than men, hence why he had to actually inhale the exhaust and feel the burn to be sure something was wrong. I got lucky too, the original install company had to cough up for all the repairs. Antlers are so much denser and harder than wood, pretty sure that's why metal bits are needed. That's looking good Spiel, neat to see the different steps in the process. How many hours in total you figure to do the handle?

That's why I mentioned the switch, always start with the basics to confirm or eliminate components. I bet that's a relief, wtg.

Lol. I'm on the Kipawa forum and one member was up for a week and on the first day after doing some slip bobber fishing they went to leave and the motor was dead. Fortunately they actually had cell service and phoned the lodge for a tow. Once they got back to the docks he noticed the kill switch was on. Well of course he got razzed all week and he actually changed his handle on the forum to killswitch.

Could be the starter itself, or it could be a switch or a solenoid or an open connection. Was the starter acting up at all before? Also, does it not still have the starter rope?

Looks like the same type product as SeaFoam.

This may help you out. If it's that clicker in the spool gear you're referring to it doesn't look very complex at all, in this case the tab on the retaining ring had popped out of it's slot.

Quick story I spent 38 years from right out of high school working on electro-mechanical aircraft instrumentation, for the first 25 at Sperry Gyroscope and then 13 at a mid size airline in the instrument shop. So I'm like fresh out of high school and had worked on dismantling gyros and a few other things the summer before. Along with high school electronics that was all I had. A lot of the instruments were very fine mechanical engineering. A lot of instruments also used hairsprings, so there was a lot techs with a watch makers background. They all had the machinist type tool boxes. One senior tech in particular I got to know let me try his watchmaker quality tweezers and jewelers screw drivers and impressed on me as a 19yo on the importance of quality tools. So I followed his advice and took a bus downtown to Geneva Watch. This would be '75, so I bought 3 different Swiss made Dumont & Sons fine tweezers, back then they were like $25+ each. I also bought a set of Moody screwdrivers, over all it was all over a Cnote. Absolutely the best move I ever made, almost 50 years later those tweezers and two of the drivers spend their time on my on my desk and get used often enough still. With a little touch of a fine stone I bet I could pick up a .002 shim. So I learned a long time that you'll never regret buying quality tools, it's never cheaper to have to replace them. Same as buying the Knipex cutters, if that's the best tool needed then just buy it once and you'll be good forever. At Sperry it was union so when you were given something you had never worked on before you would get so much training time and help from a lead hand to train you. Some of these instruments were quite complicated with R&O times up to 100+ hours, think of all those cockpit instruments like the larger indicators and then of course all the different gyroscopes. At First air it was different, you could end up working on anything off the plane, if it had a wire anywhere it came to our shop. It was actually rare for me to work on anything I'd done before so everything was new. In the shop basically when you pick something to work on off the shelves the first thing you do is go grab the manual and start learning. Or we could go into the hanger and work on a component on the plane itself. I remember one week I spent on a new plane they had bought and I had to modify all those overhead personal service panels. I also worked on clock movements and replaced hairsprings to repair/modify/certify these clocks for use with lithium battery in cold climates up north, and the next day I could be working on an engine harness, or ovens, or coffee makers. I learned a lot. Never got bored. So with all that being said hehe, this is what I have learned over time. You learn some when explaned how to fix or do something. You learn more from reading a good repair manual. You then learn some more when you watch how it's done. But you always learn the most from doing it yourself and then the more you repeat it, the better, faster and more confident you get at it. Whether it's working on a vehicle, using a chain saw, adjusting a carb or dismantling and maintaining your reels. Things get easier to do. Cheers

Yea I've heard of that with boat harnesses too. Some of those environmental splices had a metal butt splice type crimp in the center that you would just slide the stripped conductors in each end and crimp and then seal with that shrink sleeve that had the sealant ring on each end. The other kind had a solder ring in the middle and an adhesive on the inside of the shrink sleeve where you would slide the stripped wires in to sit side by side and then with high temp on the heat gun the solder would melt as the sleeve shrunk and create a good solder joint in the middle with the ends sealed. No chance of that solder joint breaking as the wire was held solid by the sleeve. One more thing is that with the old pvc type insulated wired you can't really use a heat gun as the insulation will melt, even with a soldering iron you had to be quick. Most of the newer instruments had teflon insulation as did all our spools of wire. https://www.mcmaster.com/products/splices/wire-connection-type~solder/solder-loaded-heat-shrink-crimp-on-butt-splices/ https://skygeek.com/military-standard-m81824-1-2-terminal-splice-crimp-butt-cu-20-16-wire-blue-insulator.html