The 70% Rule

One of my moto buddies stopped by Tinfiny Ranch, our high desert lair in New Mexico, and in the course of showing him around the property we got to talking about how incomplete everything was. He called it the 70% rule. As in 70% is close enough and time to move on to another project.

I blame it on my upbringing because I was raised in a house that was under construction for 16 of the 19 years I lived at home. There were additions, a second floor added, Walls knocked out and relocated, wall unit air conditioners installed and all manner of improvements that never saw completion. Oh, the stuff was sort of finished. The air conditioners worked fine but were never trimmed out, leaving a jagged edge around the face. The second floor had a beautiful staircase and the roof didn’t leak but it was still bare walls and floors when I left home for good. Same for the upstairs bathroom: the plumbing was stubbed out but the fixtures never were installed. The cats loved it up there. They had the whole floor to themselves.

Finishing just doesn’t seem that important to me. I’ve got the off-grid solar panel system working in Tinfiny’s large metal shed. Except it needs more batteries to complete the storage system. I have the 3000-watt array connected to four group 31 batteries, which the solar can charge in about an hour of sunshine. The rest of the day the solar power is wasted. I need about 12 more batteries to give the solar panels something to keep them busy. And I’ve yet to run the 12-volt circuits or the 24-volt circuits but I do have some LED lights and 120-volt outlets.

I’d like to have a concrete floor in Tinfiny’s shed. I’ve been working on it. Sadly, only around 25% of the floor is concrete leaving 75% (AKA the lion’s share) dirt. It’s a solid sort of dirt though, and not much water runs under the building’s edge when it rains, unless it rains really hard. Then it gets a bit muddy. It would have been a heck of a lot easier to pour the slab first, then put the building up but that ship has sailed.

I’ve nearly finished the water system. There’s a 2500-gallon tank being fed rainwater from half of the shed roof. I plan to gutter the other half some day but first I have to finish those 24-volt circuits to get the pressure pump working. I know the pump works ok because I’ve rigged it up to an 18-volt Ryobi battery. It’s just temporary, you know? There’s a pesky leak on one of the Big Blue filters. I’ve taken the canister apart several times but it still leaks from the large o-ring recessed into the canister. I leave the Ryobi battery out of the jury-rigged power connector when I don’t need water. That slows the leak quite a bit.

When you are off-grid you need a generator as backup in case a series of cloudy days runs the battery-bank down. Of course, the generator needs its own well-ventilated, soundproofed shed to keep the generator out of the elements and not drive everyone within a 4 square mile area crazy. I have almost finished the generator shed. I’ve got the floor poured, the wiring to the solar-generator transfer switch installed and complete but for some reason the wheels came off and the project stalled.

Lately I’ve been tinkering with an old Kawasaki Z900. If I run true to form and leave it 70% finished something will have to give. I could eliminate the brakes or maybe run 3 sparkplugs instead of 4. Tinfiny Ranch has more examples of my inability to complete a project. I estimate around 30% more. Hey wait a minute, this means we are nearly 70% done with this story. I guess that’s close enough.