LOL! Someone Knows Me Very Well

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I just got the perfect (for me) Christmas gift!

My friend Bill that I worked with for years just came by and dropped it off.

It’s perfect!

The father of a lady friend of his had it in a barn.

That guy has been dead for over 30 years. He worked in maintenance at the local Paper Mill over in Camas Washington.

He figures the rail was probably inside the mill property at one point originally.

Her Mother passed away recently and the barn and the property got cleaned up to sell.

My buddy took one look at it and knew where it needed to go.

He even donated a couple of cupped wire wheels to do the clean up with.

It also came in handy as a backdrop to a gift I got from my friend Leigh in the mail that got here just in time for Christmas.

That one is going up tomorrow.

28 thoughts on “LOL! Someone Knows Me Very Well”

  2. You just can’t beat those old Millwrights and Saw Filers for ingenuity. They were the percussors to my feeling that the younger generation people are going to miss us when we’re gone. And that time is coming soon.

    Merry Christmas, Phil. Merry Christmas, Kevin.
    God Bless the ’60s America. It was wonderful.

  3. I saw that in Tractor Supply and immediately knew where it had to go. 🙂
    Merry Christmas, Bud!

    Leigh
    Whitehall, NY

  7. It’s just as well it’s winter and you’ll have trousers on! The big feature of those angle grinder brushes is picking loose wires out of your legs when using them in shorts in winter.

  8. Two of the funniest Christmas gifts I’ve seen so far this year because one looks like an ironing board.

    Leigh and Bill are the Man, Bravo

    Ps to my few friends here, ha ha. My middle Daughter gave me the best Christmas gift yesterday. I’m finally going to be Papaw next year. Say a prayer for Blessings please.

  9. Very timely. I have about a three foot section of rail out in the garage and was wondering just the other day what to do with it. And, now I know!

  11. Appears that it could well be from the mill tramline that was taken out in the mid 70’s.
    If so, that’s a piece of history.

    There was a spur that came up to the Outside Repulper I operated for some years. I have a lot of memories about that.

  12. Merry Morning After.

    Ever try to de-rust something in vinegar? After seeing it talked about time after time, I tried it on a piece of rusted tool steel I bought off eBay. It worked great! You submerge the thing in vinegar and just let it sit overnight. I suppose where you are you need to make sure it’s not going to freeze.

    It’ll still need fine finish work if you want it to be smooth and shiny, but no flakes or large amounts of time with the wire brushes.

    The trick will be getting something that it fits in without needing too much vinegar. Our local grocery stores sell a gallon of white vinegar for a couple of bucks. Not sure, but I think it’s less than a gallon of gas (about $3 here).

    • Back in 1980 when I was working 7 days a week, rotating shifts on the Dredges cleaning out the Columbia river after the mountain blew, one of the Dredges I worked on had 3 of those engines in it. Like the locomotive in the video, they ran a GIANT electric generator that was over 20 feet tall and had a 10 inch shaft in the center. That was what powered the electric motors that ran everything. 1930’s technology that had been updated.
      One night, after several months of working myself to death I was so fucking tired, that I snuck down in the engine bay to basically hide for a while. The Engineer was a cool old dude and he saw I was about to fall over. He said, take a nap kid, I’ll keep an eye out for ya.
      I took him up on that.
      Those big assed Two Stroke engines like that one?
      I literally sat down next to one of them, while it was running, leaned back and went to sleep against it for a half an hour.
      That, is fucking tired man.

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