Rattletrap2

Nice looking machine! It looks brand new. That should do the job very nicely...and you (and the boys) just might have some fun as well! Congrats!!

Lew, I'm no expert, but the blade shape does look very much like a Yamaha. Chris X should know, he is the mechanic. Is there not a merc number on the hub? Remembeer me asking you on here about the paint coming off my older Merc prop last year? You told me yours was stripped clean....so I stripped mine as well. Sure looks a lot better than the streaks of missing paint. I would love to try a SS prop out to see if I notice any benefits before buying one. I have a 1987 90 HP Merc 2 stroke. 13 x 19P I believe.

Great to hear that your Dad is on the mend GCD! Welcome back!

Very nice Roger! Looks like a sweet deal to me! Enjoy!

Congrats Peter! Great to see some hard work pay off. Take care and enjoy that little piece of heaven you have found!

Jan 13th is pencilled in....pending ice conditions! Things had better turn around real soon. We are in double digits today and looking at 8 degrees through Saturday!

Roger, That is absolutely awesome!! The talent around this palce is continually amazing! Music, singing, masterfull use of video and photo's....what else you got up your sleaves??? Thanks for posting that!

It is a terrible tradgedy indeed. I feel very sorry for the Parents of that 11 year old boy, but the neighbourhood calling for destruction of the pond does not make any sense to me. They said it has been there for 5 years now, and probably serves a good purpose for flood control. This pond is something that could be a true benefit to the area in more ways than one. The real need is for education. These people need to be taught about the perils and hazards of early winter ice. Accidents can always still happen, but destruction of this pond is not the answer. I hope this does not come off as insensitive, but I always hate it when everyone jumps to rash decisions and starts calling for an end to these things because of an unfortunate accident. Its like when a poor kid gets hurt tobogganing in a place where they never should have been, and people start calling for toboggan hills all over to be shut down and the activity banned! makes no sense!

Very sad indeed.

Yeah, very cool........I even have Photoshop CS2.....and do you think I could put a Santa hat on the Bass in my avatar???? no way! I always thought you could do anything....if ya had the right tools? Looks like I'm one tool short in the tool chest!! LOL I'm envious as well!

UA1990, Glad you found one. I was going to tell you to give John Shoreman a call at Battery Boys Mississauga or BBM. They are on Shawson Drive, just North of the 401 , West of Dixie Road. 1235 Shawson drive, Unit 11B (905) 564-7865 or 1 888 DCVOLTS They have every type of rechargeable battery and charger imaginable, and the prices have always been decent too.

It sure does put you in a festive mood! Very nicely done!

Very, very nice Rick! I was thrilled to find this new look when I opened the board. Good job!

Sounds like Steve_Paul has a good handle on the current offerings of residential furnaces out there. I had always heard that the Bryant, Payne, Day & Night, and Carrier (all the same, made by Carrier!) were decent furnaces, but since I have never worked in the residential part of the industry, I wouldn't have any first hand experience with them. If you do want to bring in a fresh air duct for combustion air to the furnace room, than I would suggest you install what is called a "saskatoon loop" in the duct. Bring the 6 or 8" pipe into the room, then turn it upwards, and then over and back down. This "inverted trap" will prevent cold air from dropping by gravity into the room. The only time cold air will be drawn into the furnace room, will be when the room goes into a negative pressure. The negative pressure is created when the furnace is operating and room air is going into the furnace for the combustion process. This happens on conventional and mid efficiency units. Fisherman, if you want to keep a close eye on your older heat exchanger, there are a couple of things you can do. 1) Use a small flexible inspection mirror and flashlight to look up inside the fire side of the heat exchanger. Obviously, you don't want it to be able to fire up during this process! 2) As was already mentioned, sometimes you can see the flames being blown around inside the heat exchanger if air from teh blower is being blown in through cracks. 3) Watch for excessive build-up of loose rust down around the burners. If this is the case, you have a moisture problem and the heat exchanger could be rusting through. 4) Make sure the flames off the burners are going straight up and not wavering around. They should also not impinge against the side walls of the heat exchanger. This intense heat would cause a crack in the metal. 5) Have it checked every year or two by a professional. They now have some pretty cool instruments that make checking the inside of the heat exchanger easier. It is a fiber optic flexible probe that can be up to 5 feet long with small LED lights on the tip. You look through a small viewpiece and you can see right up in there. It will look around corners as well.

Oh yeah, a wood burning open fireplace can very quickly suck every bit of heated air out of your house and toss it up the flue!!!! Guess where this repalcement of air is going to come from to try to equalize this negative pressure that was created when the heated air left??? You got it, through every crack and crevis in the outer envelope of the home. That is if you are lucky enough to be only inconvenienced with these cold drafts and extended operation of the furnace trying to reheat it!!! If you are not so fortunate to have a leaky poorly sealed house or you have done your bestest to seal everything up tight, you will end up sucking the products of combustion back down the flue or vent from your furnace to make it up. this is where you run into carbon monoxide hazards from the poor or incomplete combustion process in the furnace. Properly burning fuel appliances such as gas fired furnaces don't normally produce CO, but messed up ones do real quick. A good practice is to leave a window cracked open near the fireplace to allow for combustion air to burn the wood and draft up the flue. My fireplace has glass doors and a vent to outside that feeds right into the fire box. Much better, since we only have a fire because we like the look of it, not for heating. We don't feel any cold drafts with this set-up.

Gerritt, Let's start with the "runaway" furnace issue. If you say the thing keeps running and eventually overheats the house to 28 deg.C, than you have a couple of things to look at. I don't know what you have for a furnace, but if it is an older standing pilot model, it is probably about 60% efficiency, and there is very few items to consider as the cause of your problem. You say that you replaced the thermostat and even the low voltage thermostat wire. Unless you have a relay to control the gas valve (if you do, this could have "welded closed" contacts), then it is most likely that there is something causing the gas valve to hang up occasionally and stay open. If this is the case, it needs to be replaced. A pretty cheap item, but it should be replaced by a licensed gas fitter. Definitely a whole lot cheaper than the new furnace. Any decent fitter should be able to figure this out pretty quick and get you back in operation. The increase in efficiency between this one and the mid-efficient one is as follows: 1)New units are electric ignition. No more standing pilot flame when the unit is not calling for heat. 2)An additional heat exchanger to extract more heat from each cubic meter of gas burned. The flue gases are now reduced to a low enough temperature, that they can be expelled through a PVC vent. 3) Combustion air still comes from within the house on most of these. Efficiency ratings are probably around 70 to 80%. Pretty good, and as already mentioned, they don't have all the bells and whistles to go bad and result in very expensive repairs. They do have ignition modules, power ventor motors, and air proving switches that can fail. The good old thermocouple and standing pilot are about as reliable as you can get, but they are pretty much(if not completely) extinct now for new units. When you move up to high efficiency, you add the following: 1) Combustion air intake from outside. This saves firing all the nice warm air that you already paid to heat, up the chimney or out the vent. 2) A third heat exchanger to wring even more heat out of the gas being burned. These furnaces will condense the products of combustion back into water. This water is acidic and must be treated (neutralized) before it can go down your drain. Even some models of mid efficiency units can require a drain and neutralizer. These high efficiency units can be 90+ % efficiency. By the way, electric heat is 100% efficiency because there are absolutely no flue losses or heat exchangers. You just have to weigh the cost of gas over electricity. Gas has traditionally been much cheaper, but these times, they are a changing! If it was me ( and I have a 19 year old conventional gas furnace with a standing pilot), I would evaluate the condition of the existing furnace. If the heat exchanger is still in good shape and not too rusted or starting to show signs of a crack developing, I would fix the problem and run it till it has used up its life. Then I would probably go with the mid efficincy model. Even if I can fix the damn thing, who needs to be worried about it quitting every time you go away in the winter? Just my opinion. Now for your humidifier issues. Get rid of that drum style biological breeding ground! I would never have one in my house again! Get a flow through panel type. Aprilaire is very good and also General Aire and Honeywell make nice ones. The bypass style can be on either the return or supply plenum. In either case, the warm air plenum is pressurized and the return is in a negative pressure. The air is going to travel from high to low through the bypass duct. It makes no difference. The normal or standard practice is to mount the humidifier on the return plenum and the 6" bypass duct off the supply plenum. In order to evaporate water, you need heat. I prefer to also hook up the water connection to the hot water lines. This will increase the capacity that you get from the humidifier in pounds of moisture per hour. Don't worry about the cost of heating the water, you recover this energy into your system and the water that flows down the drain will be cold. The trick is to make sure that the water is distributed evenly across the top of the mesh panel in just sufficient quantity to be absorbed into the warm air stream. The humidifier has an internal restrictor orifice in the line to reduce water flow. Don't try to do it with the hand valve on the water line. What you are doing, is distributing the water that flows over the mesh panel and increasing the surface area of each drop of water. As each drop spreads out in a thin layer, it is more readily absorbed by the warm air. Any water that is not absorbed, will flow to the drain. This eliminates the standing sump of warm wetness that grows molds and bacteria. You will have to tee the drain from the humidifier into your condensate drain line from your airconditioning. If you had a power style humidifier (no bypass duct) then it would definitely have to be mounted on the warm air supply plenum. They have an internal fan blower that will draw the warm air from the plenum and then discharge it back through the water panel. These work very well also. In either case, the humidistat should be mounted in the living area if possible, usually adjacent to the thermostat. They have models now that will automatically adjust the setpoint as the outdoor temperature changes. They are pretty expensive though, and you have to run more wires for the outside sensor. If this is not pratical to mount in the living space, then the next best place is flush mounted in the return air plenum well upstream of the humidifier itself. The ideal setting would be 35 to 50% relative humidity. Unfortunately as the outside temperature drops lower, the inside temperature of your glass windows, metal door frames, and even poorly insulated walls will drop below the temperature known as the "dewpoint". This is the point where moisture will condense out of the surrounding air onto the colder surface. This can cause fogged up glass and paint damage in your home. In the worst case scenario, we get black mold growth. This is why you have to lower the humidity setpoint as the outdoor air temperature drops. As it gets colder outdide, the furnace runs more frequently and drys the air out. We want to add more moisture, but the dewpoint temperature of those surfaces limit us to what is tolerable without condensation buildup. One last point, your humidifier needs to be interlocked with the fan on your furnace! If the blower is not running, the humidifier needs to be off. To do this on older furnaces, you need a differential air proving switch that will only close its contacts when it senses a difference in pressure between the supply and return plenums. Holy crap, its 2 am!!!!! If I missed anything, let me know! DanC and Daplumma had it pretty much covered anyways before I even got into this long winded typographic diarrhea!!!!

I never get to see the TV shows, but really enjoy his magazine. Good job on the interview TJ

I fished the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina back at the beginning of October. We didn't "flyfish" but you could have. We just used small spinners and stuff. A whole day permit is $7.00 to fish the streams in that area. They stock the rivers with trout on a regular basis. Lot's of stopping off points along the highway to fish. Beautiful country there. The mountains all through NC and Tenessee are beautiful.

Gives a whole new meaning to "topwater" fishing!

TheCabelas ad claims that after you sit in the thing for a bit...it sinks the three legs into the ice and anchors itself! I'm just guessing here....but I'm thinking that for some of us....it might sink a little quicker and further into the ice than it will for others? For some of youz lightweights...a cordless drill with a hole saw could do the trick. Myself.....I ain't too worried about getting those legs set in the ice! LOL

Anyone know of a shop here in Canada that sells these? I see them on the Cabelas site, but can't find them around here. I checked BPS, and they don't have them. Polar Windbreak Thanks folks!

Always caught my Wife's eye as well. She never could understand why I felt the need to study every word Dano ever posted! What's an old man do for fun now?

Just curious....I was at that exact spot today....Hwy #89 and Hwy #10....Shelburne area. For the life of me, I can't figure out where you would go to catch Perch in that area. Trout perhaps, I saw lots of parked cars and trucks that were probably doing just that, but Perch is another thing altogether.

Those fish are fantastic! A rare catch for sure for most of us. A nice mixed bag with the Walleye and Drum added in. I have heard of them (White Bass) being caught in the summer around the moored yachts and stuff along the Lake front. Probably the closest thing to Striped Bass we will get.

I actually like the look and feel of this new board, but I am also one for nostalgia and liked the old board too. sigh.