Category: New Mexico

Tractor Supply

It seems like I’m always working a pick and a shovel at Tinfiny Ranch. Situated at 6000 feet in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains the place is steep with many elevation changes. An arroyo runs past the house so that when it rains (and it rains a lot in New Mexico) my driveway becomes a short-lived trout stream.

Water, being the universal solvent, plays havoc with Tinfiny Ranch and most of my time is spent trying to bend it to my will. Armed with hand tools and 50-pound bags of concrete I’ve managed to carve out a dry spot to sleep. The landforms here are fleeting, changing and slowly make their way 1500 feet down to the Tularosa Valley where huge dust storms blow the accumulated material back up onto the mountain sides. You don’t own real estate here: you trap it.

When Hunter called me to tell me he had found a Kubota tractor for me my first thoughts were about water. Like a slightly soft football a front loader tractor would give me a leg up on erosion. I was on my way to Stillwater a few days later.

Hunter is my riding buddy. We both like crappy old two-strokes and we’ve run them clear across country following the Trans-America Trail. We’ve passed some impassable routes and had bikes lay down on us in the middle of the desert. I know him as Vinnie The Snake from the dirt and only the dirt but it turns out there’s more to Hunter than a beat up old DT400 Yamaha.

We had a day to kill before I picked up the tractor so we went to Hunter’s Skybox at OSU and watched the OSU women’s basketball team dismantle a team from Kansas. The governor of Oklahoma has a suite two doors down and there was unlimited free food along with all the ice cream you could eat. The suite had a commanding view of both the football field and the indoor arena.

When we walked in the coach shook Hunter’s hand and then he shook my hand like I might also be somebody important. Then the TV and radio guys chatted up Hunter including me in the conversation. It was weird: nobody ever cares about what I have to say but my proximity to Hunter earned a listen. Everyone knew and loved Hunter and they loved me too. Nobody called him The Snake. It’s like there are two Hunters, one that lives in a world unlike any I’ve seen. I’ll remember that other, respectable Hunter when he’s tipped over in a mud hole cussing his two stroke.

The Tractor was a beauty with tires so new they still had rubber bar codes visible. Kubota’s have earned a good name in the heavy equipment arena and this L2850 sported a diesel engine that fired right up.

Underneath the driven front end you’ll find a portal-type axle to give the tractor plenty of ground clearance. Everything is leaking a bit but oil is cheap and Tinfiny can use a little dust control. The steering felt tight and Woody, the guy I bought the tractor from takes good care of his stuff.

When I worked construction in Miami it was rare to see a dashboard unbroken. Vandalism was a constant problem. Lights, tires and hoses were routinely damaged by bored kids. The L580 dash was clean and everything works except the tach needle fell off.

At the rear of the Kubota has a two-speed PTO drive that I will be using as soon as CT buys me a backhoe attachment. Amazon has some cool 3-point hoes costing around $3600. You don’t want to do a lot of side digging with a 3-point hoe because the hitch wasn’t meant for big side loads but as long as you are crabbing in a straight line they will work well.

The transmission has high and low range with low range, first gear being super slow. Top end of the tractor in high range-high gear is around 12 miles per hour. With zero suspension 12 MPH is plenty over Tinfiny’s rough grounds.

This lever engages the front wheels. This is pretty important because the front end loader combined with nothing attached to the hitch means the big rear wheels have little traction.

The Kubota’s grille was bent a bit but Woody had a new grille that he hadn’t gotten around to installing. The rest of the tractor is pretty straight. The side lights need new lenses and the back lights could use some love but all in all I’m thrilled with the tractor. How could I not be? Every boy loves a tractor.

Double Vision

Water Canyon Road, west of Socorro, New Mexico is paved all the way to the Water Canyon Campground. The Campground is beautiful, wooded and self-serve: You put your fees into a pipe and pitch your tent. There are clean pit toilets and yodeling coyotes along with bear-proof trash cans. I’d like to hang out here but we are heading to The Magdalena Ridge Observatory.

Water Canyon Road continues on for another 13 miles of unpaved road. It’s not a terrible road: a regular car could do it if you didn’t mind cutting a few low-profile tires and maybe bashing the undercarriage. The sign says 4-wheel drive only and I guess that’s the best way to go. The drop-offs are wonderful and steep, the views towards the valley are eye-twisting.

Even if the scenery was terrible Water Canyon would be worth the drive because the road ends on top of Mt. Baldy and one of the newest, gigantic telescopes under construction. When completed, the Magdalena Ridge Interferometer will have ten 1.4-meter optical telescopes interconnected to provide the resolution equal to a 340-meter diameter mirror (at max zoom). That’s over one thousand feet and that’s a big mirror, my brothers; for comparison the Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4-meters or 8 feet. Nine of the 1.4-meter telescopes will be movable allowing the mirror to reduce in equivalent size to 7.8 meters for those cool, wide-angle shots. One mirror remains in the center.

It’ll be a clunky system. There are no tracks to smoothly zoom in and out. A crane will lift the telescopes and relocate them on pads so changing focal length will be a several day operation. Clunky or not, it will be a huge telescope limited only by the Earth’s atmosphere and the small amount of light gathering surface relative to the size of the array.

The ten telescopes will send an image through pipes to the control room. A vacuum will be maintained inside the pipes to reduce distortion and all ten feeds will be reassembled inside the control room to produce what should be some spectacular space photography. Think of the whole operation as a Very Large Array except in the visible wavelengths.

This pipe will be joined by 9 more. Inside each of the ten pipes in this section will be a shuttle to adjust the information beam’s timing. This adjustment is needed because the light source will always strike the individual telescopes at slightly different times due to their distance from the source. From here they shoot into the control room and the open air.

At the moment the Interferometer has only one mirror. Any high-rollers reading ExNotes who can contribute 11 million dollars to finish the other 9 telescopes would find little resistance to naming the whole damn place after their recently deceased cat. Or themselves.

Like Popeil’s Ginsu knife deal, that’s not all! A short distance away on the same mountaintop is the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, a 2.4-meter, fast reacting telescope presently engaged by the government for tracking Earth orbiting objects. I imagine the idea is to identify and locate the other guy’s space stuff for future elimination in times of war. They can also track missile launches and aircraft as the gimbal is ten times faster than a garden variety telescope.

The mirror at the MRO is an ex-Hubble part of which there were three built; one is inside Hubble floating around space, the other is at The National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Tours of the Magdalena Ridge facility are infrequent, but don’t let that stop you from taking the ride up to the top. Check online for times and dates.

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 2

The first thing I wanted to check on Zed was whether the oil was contaminated or if the wet sump Kawasaki engine was full of rainwater from sitting outside. This was not such an easy job as the previous owner had used a chainsaw to tighten the drain bolt. The head of the bolt was mangled into a tapered affair that resisted all vise-grip attempts to get a purchase. Finally I managed to grip the o-ring flange area and got the sad thing out of the oil pan.

Luckily for me the oil came out black, pure and dirty. I priced a drain bolt and while it was a reasonable 15 bucks for a new one I decided that there was plenty of good meat remaining on the old bolt. Using 7 dollars worth of cutting blades on my 4-inch grinder I cut a 14mm hex head into the wreckage and then smoothed the saw cuts with a 9-dollar flap wheel. After I had the bolt looking respectable I ran down to Home Depot (using 1 gallon of gas @ $2.67) and bought some $6.99 silver spray paint. The paint really made the bolt look sweet and I had the satisfaction of saving money to boot!

I have no idea what originally stopped the Zed from running but by the look of the wiring harness it was electrical. The harness is melted in several places and severed in several others. It’s like someone thought they could cut the bike back to health. Cutting is a sign of deeper psychological problems and the fact that the ignition system was in a cardboard box showed how desperate things had become.

Silicone sealant slathered on the weather cracked rubber intake manifolds was less likely to stop the bike. I have found 4 new manifolds on ebay for $50 and they are on the way. Removing the carbs and air box runners was a straightforward operation.

Until this screw broke off, it’s always worse when a screw breaks on the way out. You’ll never have as good a connection as you did when the part was one piece. I am soaking it with PB Blaster, there’s no rush. At least I can get a straight shot at the piece stuck in the head.

I removed the sparkplugs for a quick, finger-in-the-plug-hole compression test and Zed has compression on all four cylinders. The actual PSI number is not too important at this time. I was more worried about a bad valve or holed piston. The sparkplugs were fluffy-sooty and so is the piston (what I can see of it through the plug hole). The bike was running rich or maybe as the ignition died combustion became less of a sure thing.

I’ve got enough apart to have confidence Zed’s engine will run. Hopefully the gearbox will be ok and the stator will charge the battery. In Part 3 we will clean, clean, clean!

Long Way Back

Highway 41. Falling safes and ACME dynamite country. Beep beep!

Highway 41 runs from the Gran Quivira ruins to Highway 380. Forty miles of easy dirt, (unless it rains), the road really doesn’t go anywhere I need it to go but I still take the route if I’m going north/south to Santa Fe and have time to kill. I have lots of time to kill.

The consequences of not keeping your rig in shape?

There are old ranches in New Mexico. This dry land requires thousands of acres to support cattle or whatever hybrid, cactus-eating animals they raise out here. Access to these ranches is via roads like 41. The road cuts through warning signs and fence lines working its way past lonely muster stations that no longer thunder with the sounds of hooves and bellowing cattle. Time continues to function out here, hour by hour degrading nails and planks, erasing the best efforts of past generations. It’s a bygone landscape that appeals to a kid raised on a steady diet of Road Runner and Wiley Coyote cartoons.

Highway 41. The red pin is Gran Quivira.

I’d like to think I could have made a stand out here, been a solitary man roping and fence-mending in the bitter wind of a New Mexico winter, surviving by my wits and taming this vast, high desert. I would have mail ordered rockets and catapults from ACME, the cartoon version of Amazon. I’d build windmills and log cabins. I’d eat snakes and shoot quarters out of mid-air with a six-gun that I took out of a dead man’s holster. Then I’d write a Rustic’s poem about the dead man titled, “His Noted Life Was Not In Vain.” I’d have all the trappings of America’s western lore and I would have shouldered it in stride. A life without comfort or ease would be met with a steely-eyed stoicism that concealed deep emotions surging through my fully realized cowboy-self.

A time gone by.
Bring it on, and I’ll still be standing!

Highway 41 is remote, the kind of road that makes you worry about tires or if you have enough water. There’s no cell phone reception and you’ll want your rig in top shape to travel out here. I keep my rig in just-above-collapse shape. Clapped out with three broken engine mounts appeals to my cowboy-self. After climbing a small ridge, 41 becomes increasingly populated by ghosts. Bent and weathered power poles spread their arms, holding nothing. I should have brought more water and a jar of peanut butter.

If you have the time, and the back road leads somewhere you don’t really need to go, I recommend taking Highway 41. There’s adventure in every movement. Joy in discovering a structure that still stands despite it all. America’s private history is waiting to be discovered, starting with the insignificant bits first. It’s on us to record the passing of the Old West. We can be witnesses for unheralded battlefields where stoic cowboys fell to Time and Nature.

Joe Gresh’s motorcycles…

A 1975 Z900 Kawi, a future Joe Gresh project that sort of came with Tinfiny Ranch…

One of the coolest parts of visiting Tinfiny Ranch was seeing Joe Gresh’s motorcycles.  He sure has interesting toys and great project work lined up.  My favorites are his 360 Yamaha and the Z900 Kawi.  Joe tells the story better than I can, so here you go…

New Mexico!

Photo ops abound in New Mexico. They have at least four different license plate themes. It’s cool.

Wow, we are enjoying our travels here in the Land of Enchantment.   Every where we’ve been, the roads have been awesome and the photo ops have been amazing.

Yesterday we were up near the Colorado border in the little town of Aztec, New Mexico, and we came across a National Park Service Native American ruins site.  I never heard of Aztec, I certainly never heard of the ruins there, and the roads were amazing.  We stopped for a few photos, and then it was on to Colorado.

A kiva, a large multipurpose room. It was cool.
A storm on the horizon…
As we viewed the ruins, thunder boomed. It added to the mood. It was a great stop. Sometimes the unplanned ones are the best.
The view through an ancient Native American door.

Mesa Verde is coming up next, but that’s a topic for another blog.

More cool stuff…it seems my friend Dan the K is planning a trip to the northwest territories on his 250cc RX3, I invited myself along, and Dan told me that’s great.   It looks like Gresh may ride with us for at least part of the run, too.   All adventure motorcycle tours are great; I believe the ones on 250cc bikes are even more so.   We’ll include you in the planning for this ride, and you’ll be able to read all about it on the ExhaustNotes.us blog.

Stay tuned!