Same story at the pool today, but I was a little faster at least. There’s probably not much else to say.
(50m) 43.24, 44.63, 43.71, 44.18, 45.17, 43.58, 44.19, 44.39, 44.21, 46.83, 44.82, 44.64, 45.29, 45.07, skip, 43.08, 44.26, skip, no time, 43.15
(25m) 19.08, 19.37, 18.96, 19.32, 19.38, 19.32, 19.16, 19.49
Still no progress with the pool. It’s as warm as it was last week 🙁
Times are predictably poor, and I really felt as though I was slogging my guts out to go that fast. Even after I finished swimming, I stood outside the building running with sweat. That doesn’t normally happen, and is quite unpleasant 🙁
My times were:
(50m) 45.40, 46.12, 47.06, 45.84, 46.28, 46.57, skip, 44.62, 45.05, 45.49, 45.12, 44.75, 45.49, 45.40, skip, 44.13, 45.78, 46.51, 46.51, 45.90
(25m) 20.24, 19.67, 19.52, 20.41, 20.05, 19.19, 19.35, 19.15, 19.69. 18.96, 19.15, 18.93
I have an unplanned break tomorrow. In fact this entire week is a bit messed up. There was supposed to be a lifeguard training course running this week, but it was cancelled. However, most of the afternoon lane-swimming sessions remain unavailable and there’s nothing on a Tuesday after 7:30am which is far too early for me, so I shall be doing Wednesday, Thursday and Friday instead. Perhaps the pool will be cooler by then. Hah!
I couldn’t leave it sitting around for long, so today I hooked up the chipper to the towing hitch on the tractor, locking the stand in the “up” position to stop it dragging on the ground, and towed it up to the compost heap. I also fetched the trailer and went around the property collecting up recently-trimmed branches that were too small to waste time on chopping up for logs. We had a fair size pile by the time it came to fire up the chipper (which started very easily again) and leave it to warm up for a few minutes.
I wore my chainsaw helmet rather than separate goggles and ear defenders. Whilst having a cooler head might have been nice, the mesh mask is much more comfortable to work in, and obviously protects the entire face rather than just the area around the eyes.
In terms of performance, the machine did everything asked of it, sometimes in quite a scary fashion. A light touch is definitely required on the material going in, as it will often just grab the end and pull it into the machine. On larger, harder wood the engine did slow a little, though I didn’t have it on full throttle anyhow. Allowing it to feed through at its own rate worked fine though. It’s fast enough that there’s no reason to try to force things along.
The drum did block up once, necessitating the removal of both chutes to clear the chips out. I suspect that might have been the result of over-zealous feeding of the beast. I think it can be kept under control though by checking that the feed chute is clearing properly every so often, and if not then using a bit of the feed material just to disturb any build-up of chips enough to have them scooped through the machine when no new material is being fed through. That worked for me and there were no further problems.
The output chute seems to work far better when it’s pointing directly away from the machine. By the time it’s at right angles, there’s far less control over where the chips end up. Unfortunately when it’s pointing directly away the tow bar can be in the way. It is possible to remove the tow bar though there’s no quick release mechanism, so next time I’ll try with just a slight angle on the outlet. As I won’t be towing the machine on the road (I don’t believe it’s legal to tow on public roads) I might fit some sort of quick release to make it easier to remove the bar if I wish to.
First impressions though leave me very pleased. What seemed like a fairly large pile of trimmings from trees turned into a relatively small pile of woodchips and broken leaves in not very much time at all. It certainly should make life much easier and mean there’ll be no waste wood when trees are felled or cut back because it can all be used on the garden or put in the compost. In fact, I used some of the chipped wood immediately to mix in with a batch of grass clippings from the mower as they were put into one of the compost bins.
Oh, by the way… IT’S LOUD 😀
Looking last night at the forecast for today it was heavy rain all day with thunderstorms this afternoon. I didn’t therefore feel compelled to drag myself out of bed particularly early, but when I did so found that it wasn’t raining and in fact it has not done so all day. They’ve even been playing a match at the cricket club next to us and my wife is now taking in the last of the day’s sun in the garden.
Fortunately I had a few things in mind to do that meant I didn’t have to think too hard about changing my plans for the day. First I sowed some seeds that may become the first of our winter salads (are we really at that time of year again so soon?!) assuming they don’t grow too fast over the next few weeks. I also sowed some more radishes, and whilst I was in the greenhouse I thinned some of the other plants I’ve sown recently that will be going outside in the first couple of weeks of August. I had a bit of tidying up to do outside the lesser-used end of the polytunnel where brambles have grown out of the hedge, and fed those along with some other prunings from my father-in-law into the baby shredder (no, I don’t really shred babies — I prefer them thickly sliced and flame-grilled until rare 😀
After that I harvested all our remaining broad beans as the plants have pretty much reached the end of their lives and are starting to shed leaves, though I did notice that one or two have started growing new stems from the base. some even with flowers despite being only a few inches tall. I filled an entire five-gallon (ish) trug with the pods which I then shelled with my daughter and on the way back from taking all the empty pods to the compost we stopped off to lift all of the Charlotte potatoes. These haven’t done particularly well this year. The plants have been quite stunted compared with the other potato varieties either side of them. I guess we’ve got about 15kg though, which should be enough to see us through into autumn.
Back in the house I weighed the shelled broad beans. Given the ones we’ve already eaten I reckon we’ve probably totalled just over 3.5kg which hardly makes them a waste of time, but isn’t that much to show from twenty very healthy plants either. Because the bean skins can taste bitter when they get older I blanched them all, removed the skins and they’re now all in the freezer. I might try an autumn sowing for next year, with a backup option of a further sowing in January in case they don’t survive the winter. A bee-keeping acquaintance just down the road harvested 3kg of beans from half the number of autumn-sown plants, so I reckon it’s worth a try.
My final act of the day was to visit the no dig greenhouse to check over the melons. We appear to have a few that are fattening up, though they’re still no bigger than my thumb. I also harvested this, about which I should probably make no further comment 🙂
It could be time to take the rubber ducks and bubble bath to the pool 🙂
Another warm day, another slog through the set, though mostly it wasn’t quite as bad as yesterday speed-wise, though I had to skip a 50m rep and then messed up timing the next one. I’m going to need a way to manage that better I think.
Anyhow, the times were:
45.12, 44.86, 43.18, 44.50, 44.37, 44.24, 44.81, 44.15, 43.64, 44.24, 45.13, 44.35, 44.73, 45.53, 44.83, 44.36, 46.07, skip, not timed, 47.10
I clearly was getting very tired towards the end. The 25m reps were also an improvement on yesterday:
19.81, 19.52, 19.51, 19.58, 19.50, 19.61, 19.69, 18.49
At least there was nothing over 20 seconds today 🙂 Hardly impressive though. Perhaps they can get the pool sorted by next week. I think there must be something wrong with the heating. One of the life guards told me that at one point it was 50°C on poolside earlier in the week 🙁
No improvement in the pool temperature yet, and another slog through the session just trying to do the reps somehow. It wasn’t pleasant, and my pace was well off what I was swimming only a few days ago.
Now, of course, I have the records of the actual times, so my 50m reps were:
44.18, 45.42, 45.23, 44.05, 45.24, 45.01, 45.03, 45.81, 45.52, 45.18, 45.58, 45.61, 45.83, 45.87, 45.61, 46.30, 46.39, 45.81, 45.96, 44.57
And for 25m:
18.90, 19.66, 19.80, 30.31, 19.88, 20.24, 18.83, 20.25, 19.41, 19.56
at which point I ran out of time. I just couldn’t go any faster though, and I was completely exhausted by the end of the session 🙁 It’s shocking how much difference it makes when the water is just two or three degrees warmer than usual.
The new timer is taking a while to get the hang of, just remembering to press the button at the right time, and remembering that I have pressed the button the right number of times. The sequence goes: press once to start, once to stop (the watch shows the rep time then), once to see the rest interval time, once to zero the stopwatch when the rest interval is over, and back to the beginning. I think it might actually be easier to do the last press a few seconds before the end of the rest interval so it’s possible to check that it has reset to zero before starting the next rep. I’ll give that a try next time.
Today a new toy arrived 🙂 In a crate, even. It’s a big toy.
I’ve been thinking we need a decent size shredder/chipper for a while, but couldn’t really justify the cost. We have a lot of material that’s just too big for the little electric shredder though, and when this one came up for sale with a discount it seemed like a good choice. I’d rejected most of the smaller models in the 6bhp range because the reviews often weren’t confidence-inspiring in some cases, and many of the models just drop the chipped material on the floor which isn’t that helpful if I want to take it elsewhere in the garden.
So, this is a Crytec Vulture 15bhp model, with a removable tow-bar and manual start. There are lots of models with electric starts, but I’m not going to be using it every day, nor even every week, so a battery becomes more of a liability than a benefit. In fact it looks very similar to many other models on the market. They all seem to have slight variations in colour, engines and ancillaries, but fundamentally they all look like they might well come out of the same Austter factory. In fact Crytec have a link to a video showing how to assemble the parts in the crate and the chipper in the video isn’t in their colours and doesn’t have their logo. It’s claimed to chip wood up to 120mm in diameter, but anything that big is fuel for the woodburners as far as I’m concerned, so hopefully I’ll be able to chip pretty much all my tree waste to use on the garden or mix into compost.
The crate was fairly well packed with all the bits that need to be fitted, but the engine and drum all come ready-assembled.
And these are all the other parts, separated out.
Other than the online video there are no assembly instructions. The engine and drum are quite heavy (the assembled weight is claimed to be 180kg and the engine and drum make up most of that) so some of the assembly really requires two people, but the rest can be done by one person. I first leaned the engine back against a wooden block to allow me to fit the wheels which are just four bolts each, then rocked it back the other way, chocking the wheels and resting the bottom of the drum on a wooden block to allow the stand and towing hitch to be fitted on. That meant it was mobile, which made life much easier. The only major parts to be fitted after that are the two chutes for feeding material in and where the chips come out. These were much easier with two people — one supporting the weight whilst the other puts the four bolts in each.
And that really was pretty much that.
All that remained was to fill the engine with oil, put some petrol in the tank and check the engine fired up, which it did pretty much first pull on the starter. I also checked that the emergency stop did indeed stop the engine. I can say that it’s loud. Ear defenders are an absolutely necessity. Standing next to it the two of us couldn’t hear each other talking.
I need to check the belt tension, but otherwise the next step is to get out and test it. I actually have a pile of sycamore that I cut a couple of weeks back where it was overgrown, so I’ll give it a go with that.
My finger stopwatch stopped working during today’s session and I had to swap to a spare, but I decided to order a new one. The current timer is the yellow Sportcount model which just works as a simple stopwatch, but I discovered they have a new “pale blue” model which appears to have been developed specifically for USRPT. It not only acts as a stopwatch for each rep, but also times the interval between reps and stores the rep times in memory so they can be recalled later. The design is still the same however.
I’ve ordered one to see how I get on with it.
Another with a very warm pool. No improvement from yesterday at all. Just another slog through the set at a relatively slow pace 🙁
All is not well at the sports centre. Today the pool was far warmer than usual — 31°C according to the lifeguards. That was way too hot to swim hard and all of us in the fast lane struggled to make any kind of pace. It just became a question of doing the best we could, which wasn’t that great at all.
Hopefully things will improve over the course of the week, but I imagine it will take a few days.
