If you remember from earlier in the last couple of months we had moved a large stack of pre-cut wood from the backyard area behind the garden fence to an area by the east end fence/midway area for staging so I could further cut and split the wood for stacking on the firewood pallets in the firewood staging area. Well after chipping away at this pile of wood for so long I finally managed to get the last of the wood taken care of. With the wood all cut and split and stacked, I was able to cut the grass over this area to get the grounds prepared so I can spread more gravel over these grounds. Some areas are getting mushy and bare so its high time for some more gravel to cover this area around the east fence so I can move on without the worry about having to deal with muddy or otherwise compromised areas when moving about the homestead.
Surprisingly the pallets that were laid on the gravel in the firewood staging area had just enough room to accommodate the remaining firewood. Of course this doesn't matter as I don't have any fresh firewood other than some "scrap" wood from the dismantled porch that I will cut up. I will have to spread more gravel over the bare area in the firewood staging area and get my hands on some more pallets. More on that in a bit... With the firewood taken care of the next thing on the menu was more gravel. Instead of spreading gravel on the side path by the storage trailer, I moved back over to the eastern fence line to cover up the areas left bare by the wood and the tow dolly and my foot and wheelbarrow traffic through the area while working with the firewood. Of course unlike before where I could just stage the truck over the area to be covered and just shovel the gravel from the bed onto the ground, I had to use the wheelbarrow to carry gravel over to the area to be covered. This made things take a little longer of course and had me burning more energy and getting hotter but it did get done. I first took time to cover up some more of the area in the firewood staging area since I did manage to get my hands on a couple more pallets when I was on the gravel run so I can stack some more firewood I had made when I cut up some of the porch wood that was not worth saving. After dumping a few wheelbarrows full of gravel down I was able to set up these two large pallets on the ground. I'll be able to stack a boat load of gravel over these. After getting the firewood area taken care of I started spreading gravel over the grounds next to the midway, more or less continuing with the gravel that had been laid a long time ago. Some areas that started getting bare or low also got some gravel as a touch up. I managed to get a good covering of ground from the midway up to the eastern fence line and up to the edge of the house. Because I got enough ground covered I actually moved the S10 over closer to the house, setting it on the new gravel. Doing this allowed me to open up the midway enough that I can drive through with the F250 or any other large vehicle without interference. The last thing on the agenda was correcting a problem that I should've been taken care of from a long time ago. For the longest time the F250 has had an issue with its starter cranking ultra slow when the engine is hot. It cranked sorta slow when cold but would still start up. If its shut down while hot and I tried to crank the engine, it would crank like the battery was almost dead. Most of the time it would still crank up but I can only imagine that the battery was really loving me the whole time. Well I decided to see what I could do to remedy this since I had a bunch of starters stored in the storage trailer from other Ford V8 setups. After looking I found out that these trucks actually had a two stage solenoid setup for the starter. The truck has the regular external starter on the inner fender like its older counterparts, but that solenoid actually fired the onboard solenoid on the starter itself. It seems like overkill but that's how Ford designed this shit. Now I could've just reversed all this and just ran the heavy gauge cables straight from the first solenoid directly to the starter and been done with it but I ended up finding the starter that I pulled from the FMT. Since both of these trucks are the same year and same setup, I just took that starter and used it as the F250's replacement starter. Now the solenoid terminal on the FMT's starter actually used a stud for a loop terminal while the F250's old starter used a male spade terminal. I ended up making a short jumper with a loop terminal and a male spade terminal to plug up to the F250's female terminal and allow me to connect to the stud on the FMT's starter. With the new used starter installed along with its jumper, I was able to crank the truck up, seemingly faster than before, obviously. I let the truck run a while to warm back up then shut it off. When I tried to crank it again it fired right up without skipping a beat. A little while I moved the truck back to where I normally park it and shut it down again. The engine cranked and started right back up with no problem. Now I don't know how old this starter is as far as usage so there's no telling how much life this thing has. But for right now at least I don't have to worry about having to leave the truck running when I use it since I couldn't crank the engine when it was hot.
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