Been Painting Some

 After getting the basement straightened out and the motor job underway I started painting again.Had this one painting I started up at my camp in the fall I wanted to finish so I started with it.First it was like this :

Then it turned into this :

Sat for a while then turned into this :

Where it sits now waiting for me to finish it or declare it finished as is. I hate when this happens.It's so much better when it just flows. So this morning I woke up and as I was drinking my coffee I decided I'd do something different on another canvas.I decided to go abstract but use a nature based theme and painted this :

I call it  " Sunset By The Stream" it's oil on canvas 16 X 20 in size.This flowed out just like running water ! I love it  when that happens.So,maybe I'll go in this direction for a while. My work can be seen here :

edward-theilmann.pixels.com

Other than this there's not much else going on .Staying away from people and avoiding the Covid  as best as I can.So far so good .At 72  I don't need this crap.I hate having so much of my time wasted with this but there doesn't seem to be any other way thru it. So,I'll keep painting and wrenching down in my basement shop where it's nice and warn.Perhaps I'll get lucky and we'll have some warm dry  winter weather so I can get in a ride or three.I need a ride !

It's Winter

 Yes,it's winter here in New York.Not my favorite time of year but we deal with it. Been thinking about how nice it would be to be living in Arizona but the emails I get from Zillo are telling me that I'm getting priced out of that market now.What I could afford two years ago before this damn disease struck is now out of reach for my budget. Thinking about spending the end of my time here on planet Earth up in the frozen north of Northern New York. can still afford housing there and I could use my camp as a shop to build motorcycles and sell them from. Could set up a wood shop in my barn and make things . There's lots I could do but it gets me depressed when I think about those long long very cold and snowy winters.Well, maybe the housing market will cool off by the time we are ready to leave here when my wife retires in two years.I sure hope so but if it doesn't at least I have this option to head north. Can't stay here in Long Island that's for sure.The cost of living here is way more than we can afford on our SS and her pension . Oh well , enough of this garbage.  It's been a pretty good year for me.I had these two good jobs that kept me occupied and able to remain isolated from the population for the most part keeping me free of the Covid .Now I'm hanging out at home building a motor for a friend who is restoring a 1975 Yamaha RD350.  This time last year I was at this point in the shed job I had going for my neighbor next door.

At this stage I just secured it for winter and did other stuff. Over last winter I built windows for it and in early spring I finished up the carpentry by building a door and  doing the trim. Then I went to work on my friends kitchen renovation.That took 4 months of real hard work and was finally finished in September.Went back and painted the shed to finish out the year after waiting all summer for my neighbor to pick the colors she wanted.Now it looks like this.

For a long time now I have been looking to replace my old 1971 Chevy C20 pick up truck . Cars and trucks are crazy expensive these days so I sort of put it out of my mind.Went riding with my friend Paul back in October and he told me he was looking for a good used car for his wife  to replace her 2000 Chevy S 10 pick up .I told him to let me know when he is ready to sell it because I'm looking for just that sort of truck. You know , a small pick up with a 4 cylinder motor that is good on gas.My C20 has a 350 V8 that gets 8 to 10 mpg on a good day and I just can't afford to use it to travel. It only rolls when it's earning money ! So.a couple weeks go by and he finds this 2010 Honda he likes for her.They finally get it in the 2nd week of December and he tells me I can have the S10 in exchange for building the motor for his restoration project and he'll bring it over. So,now I have this cool little truck and something to do that I really like doing. 

Yeah,it's pretty funky inside but when I'm finished with it it will be like new ! Split the case the other day and got inside.The clutch looks to be good as does the transmission but the crankshaft it toast.

So,I cleaned everything and honed the cylinders .They are good and standard bore so we ordered new pistons ,rings ,wrist pins, small end bearings ,and a full engine gasket set. I dug thru my inventory and found I had 5 cranks for this particular motor and all were good so I gave him a good crank so he doesn't have to spend 700+ dollars to have this old piece of crap crank rebuilt.See,he helped me with a truck and I help him with his motorcycle project. It's a win for both of us .So now here I am waiting on the parts doing projects around the house. Refurbished a cool turbo convection oven from the 1970's  for my wife.Yesterday I built a nice shelf for it to reside on in the kitchen. Gonna paint the inside of this little old house we live in .It's an easy job for me and I can do it at the same time I build this motorcycle engine.Wanna get these things out of the way while it's real cold out so I don't have to spend so much money heating the garage with kerosene .By mid February it usually starts to warm into the 40's F and the garage heats up quick and costs way less to heat.At this point I start my next motorcycle job,a 1970 Yamaha R5 . I want it built and have it for sale by June. So there you have it.my first post of 2022 .As I look forward I'm hoping for a good year . I'm also hoping I find the electrical problem that is preventing me from being finished with this little gem.It's ready to sell , I have a friend interested ,all that is left is this damn electrical issue. Well ,perhaps we'll have a warm day next week at some point and I'll light the heater and get to it.I did fire it up, there were no issues with the motor so it's just one small problem away from finished now that I have all the paint work taken care of.

Happy New Year !

Out In The Garage

 So,I've been busy these last couple weeks .I've focused on this sweet little 250 cc Yamaha two stroke that I built years ago.I made it nice but never really completed it.Just parked it and forgot about it. Four or five years ago I brought it home from my storage garage and went thru the motor.Fixed all the small issues that needed attention then it sat in my shop.One day I was doing something with a friends bike and it got knocked over into another bike and the battery side cover got damaged.Took it out of my shop and stuck it in the shed with some other project bikes where it sat until another friend showed interest in buying it.This is what it looked like four or five years ago after I went thru the motor

See,she's a nice motorcycle that I just got sidetracked with.Things always came up and this project got put aside .What I discovered when I let it sit was two stroke oil leaking.At this point I realized I needed to really go thru the motor and sort it all out. This was the point where I decided to take the bike all apart and really make it nice.So,I pulled the motor,replaced the 2 stroke oil injector pump and decided to go thru the rest of the motor.Gave it new pistons ,rings , pin bearings, crank seals ,took the clutch all apart and checked everything for wear and so on.

You see in the one photo all the oil that was leaking past the check valves in the injector pump and filling the crank case .This was the cause of the two stroke oil leak problem. I replaced the oil pump and set it all up to factory settings ,the basic problem was now fixed. Then before I could put gas in the tank after the whole bike was sorted the accident in the shop that damaged the side cover happened.She got parked and put aside again but closer to being finished.

So not it's 2021 and my friend who saw the bike years ago and fell in love with it tells me he wants to buy it.This motivated me to finally finish this motorcycle.I needed to have the paint matched. I went to the body shop supply house and brought a sample part so they could scan it and get a perfect match to the paint I shot this bike with 25 years earlier ! They did it and now I had the material I needed to finish this job.Here is the replacement side cover all painted 

I shot this with my HVLP turbine system .I really like doing this kind of painting work. After seeing I had some left over paint I took a good look at the other paint work and decided to repaint the headlight bucket and the headlight ears(mounts) I decided to keep the old ones as they are and paint other parts in case there is a problem .So I dug out the parts from inventory I have and did all the needed body work.Got them in primer the other day and today I shot them in white.The orange goes over the white just as I shot the original job so it all ends up the same color .The under coats can affect the final color so I wasn't going to take any chances and skip a step.So,today they are white and hopefully tomorrow they will be orange

I few more steps and I'm ready to fire up this bike after 25 years of letting it languish in my garages never seeing the light of day except for those brief times she was out in my work space.I'm psyched,can't wait to fire her up and run her up the street.

The First Frost

 So,I got up this morning to see we had a hard frost out in the farm field behind my house. Looks like winter is on it's way . Been out riding lots and also working in the garage preping a bike for a pending sale.This one is hard for me to let go of but I finally have come to terms with that.I built it as a replica of the bike I bought way back in 1972 after I returned from some travels that I began a year earlier by selling off my 1965 YDS3 .I still have this bike ! It has been thru so many changes and finally a restoration in the early 90's when it was made like new with all factory paint work and chrome.It turned from a beater that I used to chain to the fence at the beach to a show bike overnight . Thing is it is now green not orange.I was able to find new body work for it at various dealerships in different parts of the country and restore it to it's former glory. The bike went from this :

To this :

So after I finished restoring the bike I crossed the country on as a 20 year old  I decided to build a replica of my original DS6C in orange. This was in the mid 90's.I built it ,never even tried to start it ,just rolled it down the street to a garage I was renting and stored it. I didn't even look at it until 2013 when I brought it home and went thru the whole bike. Then it sat again .One day I was helping a friend do some work on an old Yamaha motor and he saw it and fell in love. Now here we are years later in 2021 and he's wanting to buy it so I'm at it again.I just finished sorting out the whole motorcycle and am ready to fire it up for the very first time .I'm Finally getting down to building bikes to sell off to fund the down payment on a house out in Arizona where I can hide from winter and first frosts ! Here it is this morning :

I took this as I was lighting the kerosene heater to warm up my shop so I can work.  The frost was kinda nice so I took a couple pictures of the farm 

And while walking around looking at all the frosted corn stalks I took this photo of the shed I started building this time last year for my neighbor Donna.It was a fun project that ran thru the winter into the spring. Finally got it painted over the summer after she finally was able to choose a color she liked. This is it today all finished and in use: 

 and this is it last November around Thanksgiving :

It was lots of fun building this shed.I'm enjoying being somewhat retired .I'll never stop working ,that is a mistake that way too many people make . You gotta keep active is what I keep telling myself . So here I am doing the things I love to do keeping active.The next project bike is going to be a purple and white 1970 Yamaha R5 350 cc 2 stroke twin. They are bringing good money these days .I have two years until my wife can retire so I have two years to build bikes and sell off the excess or take it into the scrap yard.It's finally time to get down to business and head west ,or north depending what the housing market does. So now it's time to head out to the garage and continue with this project.With any luck it won't have any leaks when I put fuel in the tank and it will fire up.I went thru the ignition yesterday,she has spark in

both cylinders so she should run. I'm also hoping to get a ride in today on one of my bikes. It's a beautiful day here in New York today and warming up into the mid 50'sF by this afternoon . So now it's time to get to work so I can ride later on.

Missing The Woods

 Been back here in Long Island for three weeks now and like the title of this post says,I'm missing the woods. Lately I'm starting to think that my plan to move to Arizona is never going to materialize .I always had it in my mind that I could head north to my camp as plan B  and as time goes on I'm starting to think of this as a very real possibility.Been looking at houses up in St Lawrence county on the internet.I'd rather go west where I can ride my motorcycles year round in relative comfort but the housing out where I want to head just keeps on getting more and more out of reach financially .Sometimes I think I could use my camp as a shop where I can build motorcycles and sell parts from .I could get a house 20 or 30 miles away in any direction and have a pretty good life.The real problem with this plan is the weather up north .It rains too much when it's warm enough to ride and for six months it is a frozen forest with four feet of snow or more on everything . Well,I have two years to really commit to one plan or the other. The fires and drought out west made me somewhat worried about moving to southern Arizona but it seems there is something everywhere that is a concern . I have a strong suspicion that motorcycling year round will win this battle in my mind but for now it rages on . This is my camp 

It's such a beautiful place . I've owned it 44 years now ! 

Arizona is calling , I've been working hard towards saving the money needed for a down payment on a house there and getting some motorcycles prepped for sale to lighten my load.It's a hard thing to choose but something that must be done . The wet green of the Adirondacks or the stark beauty of the desert 

Well,who knows what the next two years will bring .I may go broke or hit lotto , get organized , get some bikes and parts sold , maybe even see the price of houses drop rather that increasing like they have for the past two years. Everyday I look.I get those emails from Zillow . The one thing that is certain is that I don't want to stay here in the insanity of the New York Metropolitan Area . I'm back 3 friggin weeks and I'm already climbing the walls and missing the woods.

Late September In The Adirondacks

I always head up to my camp in late September .I love this time of year up north in the woods.Autumn comes early in the North Country and it is truly a sight to behold. After fooling around with the 1976 Dodge Aspen I finally had a car I could do the trip in.It was a long haul fixing up this car.It fought me every step of the way but in the end I got it all finished and roadworthy so off I went.The trip up went well ,No real problems to report but the voltage regulator wasn't putting out enough to run the car with everything going  .Just before dawn it started to show signs that it was letting me down.The radio quit and the lights were starting to dim.It came back to life for 15 or so minutes and once it got light out and I could turn off the lights it was all good so I just continued on my way. Made it up fine and all was just as I left it at my camp back in July when I made my last visit.The next morning I put in my spare voltage regulator and headed into Potsdam to buy a new one. Got that but never used it.The spare was working fine so it's still in the car a month later.I had my Kayak with me.Had all these plans to go into the back country but it was cold . Not really kayaking weather without a wetsuit so I never got into the water. I did have a great twelve days hiking around in all these great places and hanging out at my little piece of paradise in the mountains. Had the wood stove going most days.It got down into the upper 30'sF at night so I needed heat.I was sure glad I cut all this wood the year before.

  

 

The woods were really beautiful .I hiked on St Lawrence County trails that pretty much cover the whole county.Here are some photos of the trail off the Lake Ozonia Road .

                                                     

The next hike I took was along the west branch of the St Regis River over in Parisville off Sylvan Falls Road. This hike was more interesting with some good hills and a section along the river. Both these places were deserted which made it even better for me .No such thing as crowds up in this part of the Adirondacks .The High Peaks Areas are over run with city people  and the problems they bring with them like traffic and garbage. It has gotten so bad the state has closed off some areas and there have been articles in Adrondack Life about how the quality of the water and the trails themselves has gone down because of this huge influx of covid 19 refugees from the urban areas. Well,thankfully I'm in the forgotten part of the park where there are few tourist attractions and lots of wild open spaces.Best thing I ever did in my entire life was to buy this little place out in the middle of nowhere.I was so lucky to meet Howard  and Barbra,the previous owners on my first day of my hich hiking trip to Alaska way back in 1971.Yeah,that's how I got this place,hiching to Alaska .Well,that was 50 years ago.I bought the place in 1977 and have never regretted it for one second.It's changed over the years some,become more civilized and up to date but the area still has this charm that is almost impossible to find in most other places.The North Country of New York is a pretty special place. So back to the second good hike .I set out to go kayaking  but again it was just too raw out to be on the water with no wetsuit. Really enjoyed this place.It was rocky and hilly terrain and I was somewhat worried about my leg that is still giving me shit from the fall I took back in late December but I did ok and it actually helped doing all this hiking. Here are some photos from this hike

Every day I got out and about.I pretty much just wander around in the car looking for cool places to check out and hit the food coop at the end of the day to get fresh food. It's nice being retired up at my camp. Life is simple . Usually start the generator up in the afternoon to run the pump so I can shower with stream water.It's ice cold of course but very refreshing. While I'm showering and doing my dishes I am also charging my 12volt car battery that I run my stereo with .I can have the radio  and my MP3 player hooked up so I can get news and weather plus listen to all my favorite music at night while laying in bed.It's very comfortable buy basic in my little off the grid cabin , Kerosene lamps and lanterns , 12v car stereo with small but decent house speakers , Colman gas lanterns for when I need bright light , and , lots of LED flash lights. Sometimes the mice wake me up but they have really dropped off in numbers in the past 2 years.There must be some animal that is taking them .I do hear a pack of coyotes out in the woods that I hear carrying on late at night howling and doing their thing. They keep the mice in check I'm sure. The third hike was a bit more civilized.I hiked the trail in Potsdam on both sides of the Raquette River on both Clarkson University campus and Potsdam State  campus on the other side of the river.It was a really nice few hours on my next to the last day at my camp for 2021.Here are some photos from this hike

On my way back to my camp I stopped at the short trail to Allen Falls and walked back to the falls.This is on the west branch of the St Regis river near Parishville NY 

After leaving the falls I saw something I wanted to photograph while driving.I pulled over to turn around when all these cows came over to say hello 

After hanging out with these friendly cows I finally did turn around and went back and took this photo. These last two photos pretty much capture St Lawrence County New York  and the North Country in general . 

It sure was a good 12 days up at my camp !